Last week I was in the Balkans, visiting a Baptist church and participating as part of their celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The pastor of the church had invited my colleague and I to address the question of what role the Anabaptists had in the Reformation.
We were staying with Dragan* and his wife Nada* in their apartment in the city. They are a charismatic couple who have dedicated their lives to Christian ministry and serving the church. They have been with this church in the city for at least ten years and they are catalysts for growth and change both within this church and more widely as influential leaders in the Balkan area.
One evening as we were talking, laughing and enjoying another delicious meal made by Nada, I was struck by how unlikely my sitting at their table would have been to me ten years ago. When I was studying in Prague at IBTS, I worked part-time for the European Baptist Federation (an organisation which connects, resources and supports the Baptist Unions, networks and affiliated churches of Europe and the Middle East). The EBF Conference is an annual event which brings together leaders from across this European and Middle Eastern Baptist family to spend time together, reflect theologically on issues of the day and make decisions for the future. While I was working for the EBF part of my time was spent helping to organise these conferences. I really loved these events – it was a formative part of my training for ministry: (sidenote: I wonder how frequent it is that what is not on the curriculum is the most important part of training for ministry!) to meet and worship with Christians from challenging and diverse situations; to hear prayers in many different languages, to sing (and sometimes to drink beer) with friends from Lithuania, Ukraine, Jordan, Egypt and France.
However, as a young woman training for ministry, there was a little posse of leaders that I always felt wary of: the leaders from countries or Unions that would not support women in ministry. At IBTS, I knew that some of the students with whom I was friends disagreed with women preaching and being ordained, so I had encountered disapproval before. But I didn’t want to run the risk of spontaneously breaking into a sermon near them just to irritate them; or feel cowed by their patriarchal oppression, so I left them to their conservative clique! While I am not sure whether Dragan would have been part of this group or not, at the time I had the impression that he was and therefore gave him a wide berth.
While I can look back now and acknowledge that it was not for me to judge these leaders, I understand why I reacted to them in the way that I did. The journey for me towards training for ministry and ordination had not been without challenges. Over the 4 years that I was at university in Edinburgh, I had been part of a number of churches in which women were not permitted to preach or lead when the church gathered. When I was leaving our church in Edinburgh to move to Prague to embark on my Masters and test a call to ministry, the pastor told me to tell the church that we were moving to Prague to do mission work. He said that we might get some financial support in that way, but not if I told them I was going to study and hopefully be ordained. I have had to justify my theological convictions about women in ministry to a variety of different people in my life – including Christian leaders who had mentored and supported me for many years. In some ways, I should have been used to explaining myself, but I had become hardened and bitter towards those who rejected the possibility of God’s calling me as a woman to ordination.
Sitting at this pastor’s table 10 years later eating and joking after a day teaching and preaching, I couldn’t help but smile. Me? A woman? In the Balkans? Preaching?! That is pretty hilarious. (I’m sure my Balkan friends from IBTS will love this story…) While enjoying the humour of the moment, I felt deeply aware of the need for repentance and humility. Repentance for judging a group of people (which may or may not have actually included Dragan) who were on their own journey with God in thinking these things through. Humility to recognise that God’s spirit is at work in us at God’s pace – my impatience for someone to ‘get it’ does not change God’s timing or agenda. Nada shared that she and Dragan both had to wrestle with the question of women in ministry before they came to a place, individually, of seeing that God calls both women and men to the tasks and vocation of ministry. No amount of shouting and arguing might have convinced them beforehand – it was God’s work to do.
Although he would have been unaware of my resentment towards those conservative leaders years before, I never would have imagined that a leader that I had judged and perhaps feared would one day so warmly welcome me into his family’s home and his church community.
We now had the chance to begin a friendship based on mutuality, understanding and a shared love for God, God’s church and God’s world. I also feel so deeply thankful for the redemption that God has worked. This is the God that we love and that we follow. God who brings reconciliation and new life, who creates relationships and possibilities where there were none. Dragan and Nada blessed me with their welcome, their generosity and their faithfulness. I feel honoured to be able to call them friends.
*names changed
stumbling hopefully in the right direction 
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