This is What a Preacher Looks Like
New Book from Smyth and Helwys Publishers
Edited by Pamela R. Durso
It has been 16 years since Costly Obedience was published by Judson Press. It was the first published collection of sermons by Southern Baptist women. Now comes a long overdue next incarnation of sermons by Baptist women across a much wider swath of Baptist life. I’m excited to share this good news. The book is important for lots of reasons. It includes sermons by more than 30 women on a wide variety of topics and texts. It lifts voices and delivers messages that need to be heard beyond the local congregations and events where they were first offered.
You can meet the preachers and read a little about them here, and you can order the book here.
And here’s a little snippet of my contribution to the volume here. I preached the full sermon last summer at a Baptist Peace Fellowship breakfast in Houston, Texas.
“Wisdom at the Crossroads”
Proverbs 8:1-11, 20
Last week I was at a meeting in Atlanta. I was trying to use my Google maps application on my smart phone to get to lunch. Actually I was trying to get my friend to use it so I could drive. But he wasn’t having much luck and we took one wrong turn and then another. As I whipped a second U-turn, I think I heard another friend chanting softly from the back seat “bat out of hell, bat out of hell.” She was losing confidence in my ability to drive us safely five blocks to lunch. I finally pulled into a parking lot and took the phone-map into my own hands. I reoriented myself and handed it back, then drove like a bat out of hell. My front seat friend called the restaurant to say, “We’ll be little late, but we’re on our way.” (I think he was gripping the seat.)
Let me take you back with me a dozen or so years to an afternoon when I took a different wrong turn and had to go the long way around the block to find the intersection where Wisdom lives.
The call came late in the day on a Friday. I was the only minister still working in the office that afternoon. The other office staff had Friday afternoons off and the pastoral staff rotated Fridays, so that none of the three of us missed out on having a weekend all the time. The phone rang and it was a church member looking for the pastor. . . .
To see what happens, you’ll have to buy the book. And I think you’ll find that it is a purchase worth making. I don’t say this mainly about my own sermon, although I hope my foibles and learning about becoming a pastor might offer some shared wisdom about the work of ministry. I do say that it is worth your purchase because it holds  powerful, thoughtful, diverse and provocative words of life preached by three dozen women. And you can join us in June to celebrate this milestone for Baptist Women in Ministry (click on “events”).
