Baptist Roots (but not deep ones)

Little Baptist me

Ben and I married in 1975, when he was 23 and I was just a few days past my 20^th birthday. We’d both been raised Baptist—not the super-conservative independent Baptists, nor even the very conservative Southern Baptists, but American Baptist, the most mainline protestant Baptist (but still pretty conservative, for all that). Only two generations before us, Baptists weren’t allowed to play with cards or dice, to go to movies, to dance, to drink alcohol. That was gradually loosening up by the time we married, but both of us would still have considered ourselves conservative, evangelical Christians at that time.

            I’ll say right off, though, that even as a very young woman, I had a bit of a rebellious streak, and I wasn’t as Baptist as my upbringing. In college, I became involved with a church that was part of the hippie-ish charismatic movement that was blooming in the 70s. The church was different and exciting, but there were definite cult-like aspects to it (especially in hindsight). They were very complementarian in their views of the roles of men and women (and especially of husbands and wives), and their magnetic leader was quite compelling in his teachings on wifely submission and on other similar matters. Their teachings caused some contention between Ben and me (we were dating, and then engaged) because Ben was uncomfortable with their very “out there” manifestations of some of the showier spiritual gifts. When the leader and the elders told me to break it off with Ben, the choice wasn’t difficult at all. Buh-bye, holy rollers.

            I wasn’t particularly in line with the political positions of most typical conservatives, either. I supported civil rights, although at that time, I only thought of equal rights as something that African-Americans were lacking—other marginalized groups weren’t really on my radar. I considered myself a pacifist. And Ben’s and my marriage was always far more egalitarian than complementarian; I suppose, if asked, I’d have said I was a ‘women’s libber.’ I tended to vote Democrat. But I was very young, and also still influenced by 20 years of being Baptist and 3-4 years in the near-cult in college. There were a lot of changes to come.

            After we married and moved to the town where we started our careers, we looked for an American Baptist church. There was one in a nearby town that we visited a time or two, but we didn’t really feel at home there. We did feel at home at a tiny Free Methodist Church in our own town, and in 1977 we started attending there.

            We stayed there for 41 years.

            Free Methodism is in many ways a lovely denomination. They got the ‘Free’ in their name in the pre-Civil war days, when there was a split with the United Methodist Church over the matters of abolition and pew-purchasing. They have a history of having women in ministry, and their stances on many social matters—including modern-day slavery—are relatively progressive. We might have stayed at our little church for many more years.

            But.