0.17 4.2 local church  (Page 17/19)

With exposure to classes and experience in teaching, women's Bible knowledge was both emphasized and improved during the period of this study. They did not normally address themselves to subjects of a deep theological or doctrinal nature (only a select group of ministers did), but they strove to acquire a face-value grasp of the Bible, particularly the New Testament. Josephine Jenkins Truett, wife of Texas's most celebrated Baptist minister, Mrs. Truett was also the daughter of a well-known Baptist layman and Baylor trustee, Judge W. H. Jenkins, and sister of the missionary to China, Annie Jenkins Sallee. She was active in Woman's Missionary Union and was particularly supportive of its educational goals. wrote the weekly Sunday school column carried in the Baptist Standard in the early 1900s, but she did so anonymously. Her authorship was acknowledged following her retirement in 1902. See BS , April 3, 1902, p. 4. Her lessons were simple verse-by-verse explanations of a Bible passage—the adult-Bible-study format common to Sunday school literature—but they were well-written and judged suitably instructive even for male readers. Mrs. Truett and other women demonstrated that they had the biblical knowledge to participate in the denomination on equal footing with men, just as they had the managerial skills, but they chose to limit themselves in order to maintain the ideal of sexual hierarchy whose rationale they were inadvertently destroying.

Those men who felt certain that women would continue to maintain some degree of subjection or who were unthreatened by their achieving equality celebrated these educational accomplishments as the solution to the social upheaval in women's role. With the loss of the demand for women's physical labor in industrial society, women might have been reduced to mere sexual objects,

human parasites,

the mightiest task that ever loomed on the horizon of time. . .the evangelism of the world.

weakened domestic and self-sacrificing traditions of women

a dangerous thing."

"self-sacrificing traditions

a full, well-rounded expression of Christianity.

During the nineteenth century the role of the clergy in Southern Baptist churches evolved to one of greater power, authority, and status, from the simple frontier farmer-minister to the ministerial professional. At a time when the status of the clergy was declining among the older, more established Protestant denominations, Baptist preachers were just forming seminaries, winning financial support, and working full-time for a single congregation. Southern Baptists as a group were moving from a scattered, sectarian form of government to an organized church-type structure; the denomination, as well as its professionals, was still on an incline. Historian Kenneth K. Bailey affirmed that clergymen retained exalted status in the South through the 1920s and until the present in some regions. Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1964), p. 163. Until well into the twentieth century, when other professional classes developed, ministers stood out as men of prominence, education, and intelligence in many rural Texas communities. Baptist ministers, although they hold no official rank within the movement, ironically had access to nearly unlimited power. A Baptist pastor with dramatic talent and personality could gain higher prestige within his group than is accorded official priests in other denominations. Paul M. Harrison, Authority and Power in the Free Church Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 217.