Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM) is a donor-supported organization founded in 1983 and based in Atlanta, Georgia. It seeks to be proactive in advocacy for women, support of women in ministry, and education about women in ministry. Primary functions of BWIM include networking, connecting, and advocating.
Some of its programs for achieving these objectives include:

Résumé services

Distributing folios to colleges and seminaries

Providing internships and mentoring

Making available speakers for churches and groups

Offering scholarships and continuing education stipends<ref> http://www.bwim.info/index.php/html/main/mission.html</ref>

History of detriments

BWIM traces the positive response of women to Christian ministry back to New Testament times. Baptist women have faced horrifying human barriers, including martyrdom, to serving in ministry.
<ref>http://www.bwim.info/index.php/html/main/aboutus.html.</ref> Although martyrdom by being burned at the stake and other cruel and inhumane forms of capital punishment is no longer the threat for Baptist women, affirmation and opportunity is a growing threat.<ref> http://homecomers.org/mirror/martyrs143.htm </ref> Doors for the ministries of women continue to close, and both lay and clergywomen are still devalued by many churches, especially Southern Baptist but also others.

As early as 1882, Northern Baptists (now ABC-USA) began ordaining women. In the 1970s, the numbers of ordained women began to
increase after the American Baptist Convention in 1965 adopted a resolution affirming the equality of women and advocating the
ordination of women.<ref name="BWIMpdf">http://www.bwim.info/index.php/docs/main/event=dl/fileID=1/State of Women_05.pdf Eileen R. Campbell-Reed and Pamela R. Durso. Assessing the state of Women in Baptist Life, 2005.</ref> The world's largest Protestant and largest Baptist denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), ordained Addie Davie in 1964, making her the first Southern Baptist woman ordained to the ministry. Following her ordination, Davis could not find a Baptist church in the South to pastor, so she moved to Vermont and then to Rhode Island to pastor Baptist churches in those states.

By the 1970’s hundreds of women were enrolled in ministerial degree programs at SBC seminaries. Between 1964 and 1997, there were 1,225 ordinations
of Southern Baptist women. By the early 1990’s more than 50 served as pastors in SBC churches, and others served as professors at Southern Baptist universities and seminaries. While gifted and called women in most Baptist denominational traditions have experienced some limited success in finding churches to pastor or co-pastor, hundreds of other Baptist women have left their denominations in order to fulfill their call to ministry.<ref name="Main">http://www.mainstreambaptists.org/mbn/subjugating_women.htm</ref> This expanding role of women was strongly opposed by the group of conservative/fundamentalists systematically taking over the SBC from moderate Southern Baptists beginning in 1967. They diligently and methodically worked to erase the gains made by women and place them under the authority of men. The clearest examples of the SBC’s subjugation of women are seen in their treatment of the WMU, ordained women and wives.<ref name="Main"/>

The Women's Missionary Union (WMU) historically has been an independent auxiliary of the SBC, not part of the SBC’s legal structure. In 1993, the takeover leadership declared that the WMU would lose key positions on SBC policy-making bodies if it did not allow the SBC to appoint the WMU’s board of directors instead of their being elected by the women in the various state WMU organizations. The women stood firm and refused to hand over their organization to the fundamentalists. In 1998 another key leader of the takeover leadership stated that there were two “possible outcomes” of attempts to marginalize WMU’s influence in SBC life:

First, the SBC could revoke its relationship with the WMU and start a similar new organization under SBC control.

Second, the SBC could prepare it own materials for missionary education and women’s ministry.

The second strategy is being implemented gradually as other SBC agencies have started producing competing women’s ministry materials. To this day the WMU continues to be an independent auxiliary of the SBC. At present, the WMU is in a state of decline. The new leaders of the SBC work to hasten its demise. As the WMU declines there will emerge in the SBC a new women’s ministry that will unquestioningly submit to male authority.

The most recent impediment to Southern Baptist ordained women came via the revision of the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M) adopted in 2000. For the first time in history, a Southern Baptist confession of faith made it impossible for a woman to respond to what she perceived as God’s call to pastoral ministry and revoked the freedom of autonomous Baptist churches to call or ordain a woman as pastor.
This statement has been used by churches to preclude women from ordination in that denomination to other ministry offices, including that of deacon. BFM2000 further denigrates women by referring to the family as "his family" when writing about a husband. It continues:

References and notes

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Resources and links

Home page for Baptist Women in Ministry organization

Woman's Missionary Union (SBC)