By Melody Maxwell

“It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done,” confessed Nancy Draper. “It was a horrific experience,” recalled Jasmine Saunders. “I was shaking like a leaf,” remembered Miriam Uhrstrom.

What was the experience that these women found so terrible? Going before the Atlantic Baptist examining council in hopes of being approved for ordination.

In Canadian Baptist life, ordination involves setting apart ministers to serve. Among the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada, working toward ordination involves several steps, including a public oral examination with an examining council, headed by the president of Acadia Divinity College. This council consists of leaders from throughout the denomination, who ask the candidate questions about their theology and practice of ministry.

While traditionally this has been a stressful experience for both male and female candidates for ordination, women have faced additional pressures related to the examining council. The nearly one hundred women my team interviewed for our project, Called to Serve, discussed these pressures and their experiences with the examining council, which occurred between 1980 and the present. 

In addition to the stress of a public examination that determined the course of their career, female candidates for ordination faced a male-dominated environment. “There was [only] one woman on the council when I went through,” recalled Ardythe Ashe (ordained in 1988). “It was pretty well all male,” stated June Keddy (2003).

Multiple interviewees in the 1980s and 1990s mentioned that some members of the examining council voted against them simply because they were women. “We all went in knowing that there would be three votes against us at the outset,” Barbara Fuller (1995) mentioned of the women being examined that year. Learning that some men would vote against her “took away my confidence going in,” Gail Whalen-Dunn (1997) recounted.

By 2001, according to Liz Johnson’s recollection, “they had made the statement that you could not vote against a woman because she was a woman.” Instead, examiners who opposed ordaining women abstained from voting on female candidates. Still, a few women who were ordained in later year recalled that some men did vote against them.

Interviewees recalled that some examiners also questioned women about the appropriateness of women serving in ministry. Judith Tod (1989) stated that “one of the questions was about ‘you had to be the husband of one wife,’ and how did I feel about that passage?” (1 Tim 3:2). Heather McGregor (1994) remembered being told she sought ordination because “you just want to lord it over us.” These comments must have been jarring for the candidates, to say the least.

Anna Robbins (1995) recounted being asked, “Whose call comes first, yours or Peter’s [your husband’s]?” And Angela Wade recalled that as late as 2017, “I had a man open the Bible to Corinthians and just start reading the passage where it says, ‘Women are to be silent in the church, and what do you have to say about that?’” However, Wade’s experience seemed to be more unusual than typical in the twenty-first century.

Women who were ordained within the last twenty-five years or so generally reported more positive experiences with the examining council, although many still found it “quite intimidating,” as Kayla Colford (2018) put it. As early as 1994, Heather McGregor provided what she called a “long list of suggestions” to the convention’s leadership in order to help them improve the experience for candidates, especially for women. Gradually things began to change. “I never felt like they were looking down on me because I was a woman,” said Penny Klepic (2000). Margo MacDougall even called the examining council a “joy” (1997); Jennifer Sutton stated that it was “fun” (2016). “It was total support,” stated Lois McLean (2007).

Multiple interviewees mentioned the positive influence of Harry Gardner, executive minister of CBAC and later president of ADC and chief examiner, on the process. “He was just so pastoral and so supportive,” Louise Hannem (2012) recalled. In 2019, Anna Robbins became the first female president of ADC and thus the first female chief examiner. Tammy Giffen (2020) recalled, “Anna was leading it, so I don’t think anyone would’ve been brave enough to say anything [about women in ministry] with Anna there.”

While the examining council process is still not perfect, from the recollections of women ordained by Atlantic Baptists, it has improved for women (and likely for men) over the past forty-five years. I am grateful for the pioneering women who overcame difficulties with the council and for those now in denominational leadership who are ensuring more equitable treatment of all candidates.

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Melody Maxwell serves as Hannah Maria Norris Professor of World Christian History and Women in Ministry at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. She also directs the Acadia Centre for Baptist and Anabaptist Studies and the International Conference on Baptist Studies.

**The views of this Blog represent those of the author, and not necessarily the CBHS.**