Pastor: How to Respond When People Leave Church Over Female Leadership
Jeanine Blount, co-senior pastor of Crestwood Vineyard Church in Oklahoma City says when she and her husband started co-leading at their church, some people weren’t comfortable with that. In fact, those people who disagreed with having a female in pastoral leadership ended up leaving their church.
“We started having some conversations with people saying, like, ‘Oh, we thought we were OK with this until, Jeanine, you were preaching so much,'” Blount says. “So when it came to realizing … ‘No, we’re really co-pastoring—I’m going to be preaching at least 50% of the time’ … as time went on, we found people thought that they were going to be OK with it. And when they saw it actually played out, [there were] some really deep-seated views of Scripture that made them really question, and some of them were able to make that turn with us and stick with us, and some of them didn’t. And that was OK.
“But it did make for some hard conversation. We were always very encouraging that you need to do what you sense the Holy Spirit leading you to do. You need to do what the conviction of the Lord is in your life. And we would never go against that unless it was very clearly anti-biblical. [We would] go home, cry and say, ‘That was really sad that we lost those people, and over this,’ and ‘How can we do it better next time?'”
Because Blount is juggling preaching, raising six kids and has a husband who travels frequently, she has to plan for regular solitude in her life, she says on the Charisma News podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network.
To listen to the entire episode for more discussion on female pastors, click here.
