Celebrating Lynn Green’s election

Today, the Revd Lynn Green has been elected as General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. (Report here.)

On one level, this news is distant from me. It happens that I do not know Lynn – we have met, more or less in passing, but I certainly cannot claim any close relationship with her. And it is eight years or more since our family moved to Scotland, and so I transferred my ministerial accreditation from BUGB to the Baptist Union of Scotland.

That said, BUGB is the denomination into which I was baptised, which tested and affirmed my call to ministry, which ordained me, and in which I began my ministerial service. The two General Secretaries before Lynn are personal friends, as are several other national and regional leaders. I owe BUGB more than I can say, and retain many relationships with individuals, churches, and translocal structures within the denomination; I still feel as if I belong to some extent – I do not know if BUGB would still want to own me as one of theirs, but I would want to be so owned; for me, there are deep ties of history, loyalty, and friendship here.

So today, knowing from friends that something exciting – I did not know what – was in the offing, I repeatedly checked my Twitter feed between sessions of our church awayday. I saw that Lynn had been proposed, and then that she had been elected; I saw the rejoicing from brothers and sisters ‘down south’ at the election; I shared in the rejoicing; I saw at least one friend, an Anglican priest, express a wish that she were a Baptist today; I began to reflect.

The General Secretary of BUGB is the leading Baptist office in the UK. This is, so far as we have one, the equivalent of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, or the See of Westminster. Lynn is the first woman to be called to the role. I saw numbers of friends down south tweeting ‘proud to be a Baptist today’ – and, as I say, at least one Anglican friend wishing to be a Baptist. What did all this mean?

Of course, the calling of the first female General Secretary is a moment of history; this will be recorded and remembered as the moment when a decisive change became visible. And many – perhaps on my timeline 75-80% – of the comments were celebrating this moment in history. They did not know Lynn; they had no doubt that the selection committee had made a wise choice; but the celebration was for the crossing of a Rubicon: now there is no office left in (British) Baptist life that is not open to women and men indifferently.

The other 20-25% of the people I heard celebrated because they knew Lynn and had no doubt that this was a transparently excellent appointment, to be rejoiced in because Lynn is Lynn, not because Lynn is female.

It seems to me that both reactions are valid, and both are important to understand why today should be a day of rejoicing for British Baptists. The second first: Lynn was called because, simply, she was the best candidate for the post. Nothing I saw even began to0 suggest any element of ‘tokenism,’ or even of a desire to right a lasting injustice, appropriate though such a desire might have been. I was not privy to the internal discussions, but I feel completely convinced that I have heard enough today to assert with utter confidence that Lynn was called because she was the best candidate for the post.

The first reaction: as I read the reaction – and the reports of voting percentages – this was not a moment where the view of the denomination changed; rather, this was the visible working out of a change in view that had already happened. Almost nobody in BUGB is worried about the highest office being occupied by a woman now. Many of us knew, or suspected, or hoped, that that was the case; the Assembly’s calling of Lynn, however, was a public and visible confirmation of what we knew, or suspected, or hoped – as such it is worthy of great celebration, not as a moment of change, but as a moment when a change that happened before became transparently visible.

I have read dozens of tweets announcing ‘Today, I am proud to be a Baptist’. Yes. Today, I am proud to be a Baptist. Not just proud, but hopeful. Lynn’s calling is profoundly important because she is the first woman to be called to this position, and that will, I pray, give hope and renewed courage to so many women whose gifts and callings are transparently clear but who have been so far rejected by churches who, we can now say, are completely out of step with the denomination. Hopeful for my own denomination, the Baptist Union of Scotland, where the calling of a female General Director seems almost unimaginable. May the insight into the Scriptures of our brothers and sisters down south, and in so many other places, convict us of the errors and injustices of some of our communal assumptions!

Hopeful – and proud. BUGB are my people, or so I continue to feel in my heart (BUS are my people too, these days). Yes; today, I am proud to be a Baptist – not because we have got everything right, but because today, my brothers and sisters – I had no part – got one thing right; one thing that matters enough to be a cause of rejoicing, and, yes, pride.