Testimony
By Joy Heaton
Pastor of Antioch Baptist Church
Enfield, North Carolina

Delivered at the First Annual Mainstream Baptist Network Convocation Charlotte, North Carolina, February 15, 2002

Thank you for raising me. Yes, you helped to raise me.

In the early 1960s the Southern Baptist Convention was the sycamore tree that helped me, like Zacchaeus, to see over the crowd and into the face of Jesus Christ.

My parents believed that the best gift they could give me was a firm foundation of freedom in Christ as a Baptist.

It was a Southern Baptist pastor who held my little, eight-year-old hand in 1970 and lowered me into baptismal waters as I followed Jesus into newness of life.

I was nurtured in a vibrant, Southern Baptist youth group during what could have been turbulent teenage years. Instead I became a young woman committed to her personal relationship with Jesus and shared my faith enthusiastically in high school.

The inscription underneath my senior yearbook picture says, “He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today! He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way. He lives! He lives! Salvation to impart! You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!” (words by A.H. Ackley)

As a seventeen-year-old raised by loving Southern Baptist parents, teachers, pastors and friends, I truly understood the truth of that beloved hymn. I still do!

For more than thirty years I have studied the Bible on a daily basis and developed a very meaningful prayer life. I was ordained as a deacon at First Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I served as a 7th–8th grade Sunday School teacher, Habitat for Humanity volunteer coordinator, finance committee chair and church clerk.

During all of my life as a Southern Baptist layperson, I never expected that God would call me to be a pastor. I was a CPA for eleven years. But when Jesus called my name, I responded by leaving my corporate accounting position in 1996 and enrolling in a Baptist divinity school here in North Carolina at Campbell University.

In 1998, while still a divinity student at the age of 36, I was called by Antioch Baptist Church in Enfield, NC, to be their pastor. I have served this wonderful, 160-yearold church passionately and faithfully for four years. I continue now to serve Antioch while pursuing the PhD.

Why am I giving my testimony today?

The Southern Baptist Convention that raised me has now disowned me. The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message now states in Article VI that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” What does this mean for me?

I must stand on the firm foundation of freedom in Christ that I learned as a child, and I will not let anyone other than the Holy Spirit interpret Scripture for me. I have a personal relationship with Jesus—and I will continue to listen to Jesus, who has been walking with me and talking with me for more than thirty years. I do not understand those voices that call out to me and tell me to stop preaching. I listen instead to the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit, who calls me to go and preach the gospel!

Despite what some may say, I am not a feminist theologian. I would like to be perceived as a Christ-centered, Spirit-gifted pastor. Jesus is the author and perfecter of my Baptist faith. Christ—and Christ alone—is my Baptist message. I need no other Baptist faith and message!

My mission as a minister is not to promote feminism. My mission is to proclaim Christ. I am just as offended by matriarchical statements as I am patriarchical proclamations. “In Christ there is no male or female.” (Galatians 3:28) Let’s get past our obsessions with gender issues and focus on Christ!

When Eileen Collins, the first American woman to command a space shuttle, was asked about being a woman commander, she replied, “What’s important is that we fly the mission. Whether you’re commanding as a man or woman really doesn’t matter when it comes to getting the mission done.” (USA TODAY, July 16, 1999, p. 7A)

My mission as a pastor is to “go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” (Mark 16:15) That is my primary task, and I am focused on that mission.

The Holy Spirit has gifted me to be a pastor. The Southern Baptist Convention cannot give the gift and cannot take it away. It is a gift from God alone—a deeply personal and holy calling. The only two persons who know if I am called to be a pastor are Jesus and me.

If I have been preaching and baptizing in error, then I will stand before God someday— by myself—and give an accounting for why I preached the gospel and took the hands of adults and children and lowered them into baptismal waters. I am willing to accept responsibility for my actions as a proclaimer of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

My response to the strict interpreters of the Bible—a Bible I dearly love—who say that women cannot be pastors “as qualified by Scripture” is this: If one person accepts Jesus Christ as Savior after hearing the Holy Spirit preaching through me, then I would rather break someone’s biblical interpretation about what women can do and lead someone to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Jesus called me to preach the gospel, and that is what I am doing. Even if the Southern Baptist Convention tells me to stop, I will take my stand on the firm foundation of freedom as a Baptist.

This freedom is not free. Thanks to many of you who paid a costly price so that today I can be the pastor God has gifted me to be. Now at the age of 40, I truly understand the words of Colossians 2:6, which remind me of my Baptist upbringing: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”

Thank you for raising me as a Baptist.

September 2002