c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Inspired by stories of his mother’s recent challenges at the Southern Baptist Convention’s oldest seminary, a California filmmaker has produced a documentary on the denomination and its views on women pastors.”Battle for the Minds,”a documentary that will have a Canadian premiere at a prominent film festival this fall, will give outsiders an inside look at the conservative evolution of the nation’s largest Protestant body.

The 73-minute film highlights Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., as it evolved from an institution run by moderates to a prime example of the conservative resurgence in the 15.6 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. It features numerous interviews with people on both sides of the controversy-including Dixie Petrey, the filmmaker’s mother and a 1995 graduate of Southern Seminary.

The film focuses on the debate over women’s roles in ministry as an example of the larger ideological struggle between moderate and conservative Southern Baptists. While moderates continue to support the Baptist ideals of religious freedom, including the right to make personal choices about biblical interpretation, conservative leaders have stressed that only those who believe in inerrancy-that the Bible is without error and should be interpreted literally-should hold leadership roles.”The mission was to explore this issue, explore what’s going on in the Southern Baptist world and give both sides an ability to debate where debate had really been stifled,”said Steven Lipscomb, the lawyer-turned filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles.

Lipscomb, 34, said his mother was the third generation of his family to attend the seminary.”I kept hearing stories that shocked me while she was in the seminary,”he said. He cited an instance when Petrey, who was student body president, was not allowed to speak at a seminary meeting because leaders feared she would discuss the controversial issue of women in ministry.

In an interview, Petrey said she told her son of other instances where she felt ostracized and how she often comforted other students-even one woman in tears in a restroom-who feared they might not be able to serve as ministers in the way they had intended.”I saw woman after woman and man after man (seminary students) that became so distressed with what was the silencing of voices that I would talk to Steve about what I was seeing,”she recalled.

A preliminary version of”Battle for the Minds”will be shown to the press on June 11 during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in New Orleans, and the completed film will have a Canadian premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the third largest in North America, in October.

Conservative leaders such as Southern Baptist Convention President Jim Henry, Paige Patterson, one of the architects of the resurgence, and R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Seminary, are featured. Also interviewed in the film are Molly Marshall, a former professor at the seminary who resigned under pressure from the administration; Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist and expert on Southern Baptists; and several retired and former Southern Seminary professors.

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In the film, Patterson details how he and others met in an Atlanta airport hotel to determine how a conservative resurgence could begin. Since the election in 1979 of a conservative president, conservatives have gradually taken control of the denomination’s various boards, agencies and seminaries.

The 1984 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention demonstrated that control when delegates passed a resolution denouncing women’s ordination because”man was first in creation and woman was first in the Edenic fall.” In the film, Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., is among those who say opposition to women pastors is biblically based.”The Bible is crystal clear that in the church of God … women are not to have the position of ruling and teaching over men,”he said.

Marshall, now a visiting theology professor at the more moderate Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Kan., criticizes that stand in the film.

She said conservative leaders have used”one or two selective texts”and ignored the”larger themes of the New Testament”in declaring their position against women pastors.

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Those who have seen the film say it allows people on both sides of the controversy to explain their positions.”I thought it was a very careful portrayal of what’s gone on in the Southern Baptist Convention with regards to women,”said Amy Mears, a 1995 graduate of Southern Seminary, the first woman to graduate with a doctorate in preaching.

Mears, of Evans, Ga., said she was particularly struck by the words of the conservative leaders of the denomination.”There they were, right on film, telling us what they thought,”she said.”Seeing them look earnestly into the camera and express their opinion was somehow way worse than our trying to figure what must be going on in their minds.” Mears, a Southern Baptist minister now serving as a hospital chaplain and pastor of a small Methodist church, said she hopes the film will enlighten people outside the denomination to the fact”that for God’s sake, there’s women preaching and pastoring, much to the chagrin of the Southern Baptist leadership.” The film includes footage of women in pulpits, including Petrey, who served as a pastor of a Kent, Ind., Southern Baptist church while she attended the seminary.

Southern Baptist women continue to be ordained. But most accept positions as chaplains or associate ministers in areas such as music or education and do not find positions as pastors.

More than 1,300 Southern Baptist women have been so far been ordained and more than 50 have served as pastors of Southern Baptist churches, said Kathy Manis Findley, president of Baptist Women in Ministry. As of March, 22 women were serving as pastors, she said.

The disagreements about the role of women have occurred in other denominations as well. In the film, Marshall refers to the Catholics’ debate about women in the priesthood and a controversial”Re-Imagining”conference in 1993, where Presbyterian and other mainline participants were labeled”too feminist.” Critics of the resurgence say in the film that the takeover clashes with basic Baptist ideals about autonomy and makes power a higher priority than religious liberty.”Along the way, it’s been step by step, every agency has fallen to fundamentalist control as soon as there was a simple majority of fundamentalists on the board of trustees,”said R. Gene Puckett, editor of the Biblical Recorder, a Southern Baptist newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.”What is an ideal democratic process worked against the health and well-being of Southern Baptists.” The film highlights the April 1995 Southern Seminary trustee meeting at which trustees adopted a policy that enumerated issues that would be used to evaluate prospective faculty, including opposition to women serving as pastors.

Seminary President Mohler, who has not seen the film, voiced his pride in the transformation of the seminary, which was headed by a moderate president before he arrived in 1993.”I am very proud publicly to state that this institution is moving in an unembarrassed and explicit direction that is fully conservative, biblical, Baptist and evangelical,”he said in an interview.”The issues of concern to this documentary are now quite dated and draw attention to a specific moment which is now long in the past. The issues remain but the tension within the institution has decreased remarkably.” Petrey is bothered by Mohler’s characterization of the mood at Southern Seminary, especially since numerous faculty and students who have disagreed with its transformation have moved elsewhere-including to other denominations.”Women do continue to respond to God’s call and women become Methodist and United Church of Christ or leave the ministry completely,”Petrey said.”That’s not OK to me because my church family is the Southern Baptist family.”

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