Beeson Podcast, Episode #533 Kristen Padilla Jan. 26, 2021 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. A few weeks ago Kristen interviewed me and now it’s my turn to interview her, and ask her to sit in the guest chair. For the past several weeks we’ve been having conversations with colleagues at Beeson on the podcast about several exciting new developments underway at the school. I gave a bird’s eye view of these developments in the first podcast of the year. Then we interviewed our new colleague Stephen Johnson about the Thriving Pastors Initiative at Beeson. Then Dr. Tom Fuller, our Associate Dean, about all kinds of academic updates. If you missed any of these previous episodes, I encourage you to go back and listen. We want to end this series of conversations with our very own beloved Kristen Padilla sharing about work she is doing as it relates to our female students and women in ministry more broadly. Particularly through a brand new center at Beeson called the Center for Women in Ministry. One quick reminder before we start today’s show. Our spring 2021 Preview Day is coming up soon. It’s on February 5th. This will be an in person preview day, which is wonderful during this COVID season. It will allow prospective students to hear from a whole host of our people, including some faculty, staff, students, and you may even have to put up with me for a little while. Everyone who attends Preview Day will have his or her application fee waived. So, there’s good reason to sign up now. Registration is open online at www.BeesonDivinity.com/previewday. Well, everybody who’s listened to this podcast more than once or twice knows today’s guest. Kristen Padilla, who is the Manager of Marketing and Communications here at Beeson Divinity School. She’s been here a long time. She’s an alumna of Beeson. She’s the spouse of our New Testament professor, Oswaldo Padilla. She’s a central feature of our life together here at Beeson. So, she’s no stranger, but her new initiative in developing a center for women in ministry may be news to some of you, our listeners, because she’s just starting to launch this initiative these days, and that’s the main reason we have her on the show. But, Kristen, before we get into the details of this new exciting venture of yours, would you tell our listeners more than you usually get to tell them on the podcast about your background? How did you come to faith in Christ? What’s your spiritual story like before you arrived at Beeson? >>Kristen Padilla: Well thanks, Doug, for having me on the show. I was born and raised in Texas. My dad is a Southern Baptist pastor. He served as pastor of smaller churches, usually in rural areas. So, I was emerged in the church at a very young age. Actually, I was born when he was a youth pastor before he started seminary many years ago at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. So, my earliest memories are actually from those seminary days in Fort Worth and at the church that my parents attended. So, I grew up in the church, hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. I came to faith in Jesus Christ at a Billy Graham Crusade in Little Rock, Arkansas, actually. I was very young. I was almost seven. I remember the evangelist, Billy Graham, asking folks to come down if they wanted to follow Jesus Christ. And so I got out of my chair and started walking down the stadium steps and my dad pulled me to the side and just had a special moment of prayer and then was baptized on my birthday at the age of seven. So, I’ve had a very sensitive spirit to things of the Lord and a deep love for the Church very early on. We can get into just my own call to ministry, but a lot of that was shaped by my upbringing in Texas. I ended up going to Ouachita Baptist University where Dr. Westmoreland was my president at the time. He is now the president here at Samford University. I then came to Beeson Divinity School to do an MDiv and I just never left. I’m back on staff and feel very grateful to be able to invest in the ministry of Beeson and to be a part of the student’s lives here in the school. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, Kristen, we are grateful to you, as you know. I try to tell you that a lot. We are grateful to the Lord for bringing you here. As our listeners probably know, Beeson Divinity School serves some students and churches and denominations that have female pastors and some students and churches and denominations that don’t have female pastors. You grew up in the Southern Baptist Convention that has lots of ways for women to get involved in ministry, but doesn’t have female pastors. And yet you have felt a tug, a call to ministry yourself. What was that like for a good Baptist preacher’s daughter to start thinking about seminary and thinking about what God might have in store for you as a minister of the gospel? >>Kristen Padilla: Yeah, so in 2018 I wrote a book. I published a book for women called to ministry. I share in my introduction that at a very young age, probably eight or nine if I were to guess, I cried real tears to my parents one day, “Why didn’t God make me a boy so I could be a preacher?” And it was not a cry of feeling like I was born in the wrong body, as some of these conversations go today. It was more of a cry, as I look back and reflect on it, of recognizing the sense that God was working in my life and that I wanted to serve the Lord in the way that I saw my dad serving the Lord. But at the same time not seeing any women in full time ministry jobs or vocations. So, as I look back on those years of growing up I see that there is a lot of tension internally as I continued to grow in my faith. I just wanted to serve the Lord. That desire, what I would call a Call when I was in high school, only grew and intensified, but I was trying to reconcile that with what I saw in my own context. I also write about in the introduction that the only women I knew who had been in ministry, and if you’re Southern Baptist you’ll know exactly who I’m about to say but Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon. These are two missionary women who the Southern Baptists recognized at Christmas and at Easter with an offering in their name. But they were dead. So, they were not a live example of a woman in ministry. It also presented ministry option only through the context of missions, which at that time, too, I had a certain understanding of what missions would look like. I would say it was difficult working out what God was doing in my life in a context in which I didn’t see women in full time ministry roles. I also wasn’t sure what I could do or couldn’t do. There was a bit of a crisis there. When I finally just ... So, what we would call in Baptist terminology ... surrendered to the call of ministry in high school, when I felt like the call was so strong on my life that I just couldn’t say “no” anymore and it really came to a point of just trusting the Lord that if this is what he was leading me to do then he would see it through. When that moment came and I just came before the Church my church body was very encouraging and affirming of the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. But they couldn’t make sense of it either. They would say, “I guess this means you’re going to marry a preacher.” Or, “I guess this means you’ll be the next Beth Moore.” So, they too were trying to find, “How is this going to work out tangibly for Kristen?” All along the way my parents have been very supportive and very encouraging. It does make a difference in the lives of women when they have mentors or especially parents who are supportive and encouraging. I would not have gone to seminary had it not been for their encouragement. So, my passion, my desire to help women who are pursuing a call to ministry was really born out of my own experience. >>Doug Sweeney: I wanted to ask you a next question about how you got to seminary? I wonder, given your experience growing up as a child, was the decision to attend seminary an obvious one? An easy one? Was it a decision you had to kind of struggle through before you made it? What was it like? How did you actually get here to Beeson Divinity School? >>Kristen Padilla: Well, as I said, I didn’t have a female mentor or a role model. My role model was my dad. My dad went to seminary in order to pursue ministry. So, that was the path for me. But it was in college that I started to doubt that path. Are women really supposed to go to seminary? Am I qualified? Those kinds of questions really arose. I did have a female professor in the Christian Ministry Department in which I was in who was very formative in my life, who spoke into my life and said, “Kristen, just because God has called you to ministry does not mean that you have to marry a pastor.” So, if it had not, again, been for the encouragement of my parents and mentors in my life I would not have ended up at seminary. But at the end of the day there were, I would say, a couple of factors. One, again, I just felt God leading me. It became more and more clear as I got closer to my senior year and started checking out places. With Beeson I was interning the summer before my senior year and I asked the pastor of this big church, First Baptist Church San Antonio, “Where should I go to seminary?” And he mentioned Beeson Divinity School. I had not heard of it before then. Then when I got back and met with our Dean he mentioned Beeson Divinity School. A few weeks later someone else Beeson. So, it became quite clear I needed to check out Beeson Divinity School. I would say a second factor that influenced my decision to get theological training was that I saw a great need for women teaching scripture to be theologically trained. I saw the effects in the Church of women teaching and leading and writing bible studies who are not theologically trained. I just had this sense that the call to teach and expound on God’s Word is a high calling. And one that deserves your very best preparation. Whether that’s a man or a woman. So, because I had such a high view of a call to a ministry of the Word, I felt like that high calling needed the right preparation. So, that’s how God was working in my life that eventually led me to Beeson. >>Doug Sweeney: You were saying that and the seminary dean in me was saying, “Amen! Preach it, Sister!” (laughter) Way to go with a message about theological education. All right, so I want to ask you what your experience was like as a woman in seminary, but I kind of want to make the question bigger than that. Some of our listeners know, the rest of them will know by the end of the show, you’re not only just a regular seminary student, but you’re somebody who now is an administrative leader at a seminary, you lead a spiritual mentor group for female students at seminary, you’ve written a book about women who have a sense of call to ministry, and you have lots of conversations with other women who are interested in being involved in ministry. Can I ask you a two-fold question? What was your experience like as a female at a seminary, and a seminary that has both people who agree that women should be pastors and people who don’t agree that women should be pastors? And then maybe on top of that, a broader question about what you know more generally about the experience of women like you in seminaries like Beeson? >>Kristen Padilla: That’s a great question. I will say at the outset that my experience, I recognize, is not the experience of every female student in seminary or even who has gone to Beeson. But I had a great experience, a very positive experience. When I was looking at seminaries it was actually my dad who said, “I want you to be at a place where you’re not constantly having to answer the question, ‘Why are you here? Where you’re not having to waste energy defending studying scripture so that you can actually study scripture.’” Beeson was such a place. I really give credit to the founding dean, Dr. Timothy George, for creating a school that has the ethos that Beeson does, where it’s very charitable, generally speaking, very charitable, a generous orthodoxy, and that kind of ethos needs to exist if you’re truly going to have an interdenominational seminary that’s going to thrive and do well. So, that was one of the beautiful things about being a student at Beeson, because it wasn’t just women and men and different views on what women could or shouldn’t do, it was Baptist and Presbyterians and different views on baptism, et cetera. So, learning what united us, that was actually what was stronger than the things that divided us. So, I was blessed with great male colleagues. To be honest, I think that shaped my experience at Beeson. I was studying with men who were encouraging and who were respectful and who were kind and who were generous. So, again, I know that is not the experience of every female student. It is hard for female students in seminaries, generally speaking, because they’re often very outnumbered in the classroom, so that can be intimidating. It can also sometimes, especially if you’re the only female student, make you feel like, “I don’t know that I should speak at all in this context.” So, that I would say is one challenge. I would say a second challenge is just finding other women who you’re in school with who you can share some of these struggles with who will understand some of the challenges that you have being a female in a very male dominated space. But, again, I’m grateful to Beeson, I’m grateful to Dr. Timothy George, and to you, Doug. I mean, you continue that vision in having a place where we are humble learners and where we practice and live out love and charity toward one another. That makes a difference, I think, for females who are pursuing a call to ministry. >>Doug Sweeney: All right, so it’s probably time to start talking about your vision for a center that would be based here at Beeson Divinity School for women in ministry. I’ve got a few questions for you about this. Maybe we can take them in turn. But initially, can you just tell us how it is the Lord put this on your heart? And just generally speaking, what your vision is for this new initiative? >>Kristen Padilla: Yeah, I’m very excited about it. So, the vision for this new center really arose when I was working on my book that was written for women discerning a call to ministry. Again, a lot of the impetus for that book was my own experience. So, after seminary I really struggled to find a space and a place to serve, to work out my call to serve the Lord. We can maybe later talk about reasons why that is a challenge for a lot of women coming out of seminary. But that was my experience. And then that caused a whole lot of questions. Did I misunderstand God’s call? Did all the studies and preparation I did amount to nothing? Is what I’m sensing the Lord’s work in my life? Did it really comport with scripture? So, I was wrestling more so after seminary with a lot of these questions. Then I realized in talking to other women who I was in school with, women who were still in school, they shared a lot of the same experiences. I realized that there weren’t a lot of resources to help women thrive in ministry. So, that was the impetus of my book. When I was working on my book we ... really, on the proposal of the book ... Oswaldo and I were living in Cambridge, England. This is fall 2014. He was on sabbatical. Our son was three at the time. This particular November day Phillip was at home with Oswaldo and I was walking across Jesus Green and if you know Cambridge you can picture it. Which gave me a lot of time to think and pray. It was on my walk home that God just put a vision for a center or a hub that would have concentrated efforts to help and encourage women along their journey, along their ministry journey to be faithful in gospel ministry for the long haul, to thrive in ministry, to be placed in ministry. I remember when it kind of just came to me. I was overwhelmed by the idea. I was not working at Beeson at the time. So, I didn’t have a way in my head to see how God was going to make that happen. I remember praying to the Lord, “God, if this is really from you, if this is something of you, then you’re going to have to see it through, because I can’t see any humanly way possible that I could do something like this.” So, the Lord did not let that idea leave me and sure enough he open the door for me to be back at Beeson and as time has gone on and as I have had conversations with many others, including you, about this idea the Lord has really been opening doors and we feel like the time is right to be able to do something for women in ministry. >>Doug Sweeney: Great. I agree. Second question about the center itself. Whom do you want to serve at the center? And what I’m thinking about is some of our listeners probably are wondering, “So, is this just to serve women who are in denominations that have female pastors and they want to be pastors?” Is it broader than that? Are you ever going to do anything that includes men as well? Can you just sort of help us get a feel for the people you want to serve in and through the ministries of the center? >>Kristen Padilla: Yes. So, the center, we hope ... this is the vision for the center ... is that it will exist to encourage and equip women called to Christian ministry. We see the center as an outworking of Beeson’s mission to prepare God called men and women for gospel ministry. So, we want to begin with our own female students, providing resources and events and mentoring and all kinds of other opportunities to help them thrive while they are studying and preparing for ministry. Secondly, we want to help our female alums who are in various positions, maybe looking for a job, out of a job, in ministry, and perhaps maybe the only female on staff, or the only female in their area. And because we are an interdenominational school, which accepts women from these various denominations and various roles in Christian ministry we want to serve them all. We want to walk alongside women who are called to serve as chaplains, to serve as ministers to women or children as pastors. So, as a center, like Beeson, our aim is not to advocate for a certain position on women in ministry, it’s not to have a statement about women’s ordination, rather we exist to walk alongside women in whatever denomination they are in and whatever theological context they are in within the evangelical protestant constituents that we serve, and to see how we can help them thrive in ministry. Then the second part of the mission statement, which you mentioned about men – we want the center to be a resource for pastors, for churches, and in particular male leaders. I’ve been very encouraged by a lot of conversations I’ve had with our male alums, with other men who are not otherwise connected to Beeson, who recognize a need to create spaces for women to serve in ministry. They see that there are women in their churches who have a call to ministry. So, they’re asking really good questions about how can we do better at encouraging them and equipping them. So, we want the center to be a place that they can turn to where we can provide some really valuable resources as well. >>Doug Sweeney: Fantastic. The third question in this little series about what you want to do in the center is a question about what your hopes are in the next few years. What would be some of the kinds of things you might actually do that would be open to some of the listeners to this podcast right now, even? You’ve mentioned current students and alums. We have ongoing connections to them and it’s sometimes easier for them than it is for other kinds of people to figure out how to get involved at Beeson. But for podcast listeners and churches in town, or maybe friends at Samford University who aren’t already deeply involved in the life of the divinity school – are there things you’re going to be doing that might benefit them that they might want to know about? I’m glad you asked that, because I did leave off some other constituents that we do want to serve eventually. We’re going to be starting off small. And then growing and expanding over the years. So, eventually we want to be serving female students at Samford, undergrad students who are pursuing ministry. Then we also want to be a resource and provide aid to our other women we are serving in ministry who are otherwise not connected to Beeson. So, that is a maybe short term and long term goals of the center that we are serving those constituents as well. In the near future we are working with Dr. Tom Fuller, who we interviewed last week, and the Reverend Stephen Johnson. They are working, as they mentioned, on the alumni conference, which we hope that we can hold this summer. So, we are working to hold a pre conference for our female alumni. So, that’s one kind of near term event that we’re working on. Going forward we hope to have peer groups. We hope to have a lot of other events, big and small. I’m working with Dr. Stefana Dan Laing who is on our faculty. She’s a great colleague and she oversees our women’s theological colloquium. We hope to have a library that is going to support our female students. We are working to have, eventually, some resources on the website that any of our listeners will be able to benefit from. Then eventually we would like to be able to host women who need to take a sabbatical or who want to do some research. So, there’s a lot of things that we’re dreaming about, that we’re praying about. Again, we’re starting off small. We have a wonderful advisory board that may be a little bit large as advisory boards go, but we want to reflect the wide variety of constituents that we are seeking to serve. We are praying, we are seeking the Lord’s guidance. I’m just really excited about what lies ahead as we seek to serve women in ministry. >>Doug Sweeney: It sounds like there’s some stuff on the web that’s coming that people should keep tuning in and see if they can find out more about your work on the web. In the near term if people want to find out more, what can they do? >>Kristen Padilla: In the near term they can reach out to me. My email is kpadilla@samford.edu. We have a female student at Beeson who is working with me, assisting me with some of the work behind the scenes to get ready for what we’re going to eventually have on the website. But I would love to hear from you if this is an area that really excites you and you want to give to it I would love to talk to you about those opportunities as well. >>Doug Sweeney: Wonderful. I bet there’s lots of listeners who are excited about this and will want to pray for you and the work of the center. How can they be praying for this? >>Kristen Padilla: Pray for the leadership, that we will have discernment and wisdom. Pray for our female students currently at Beeson and our female alums. As I have shared the vision of the center to them they are so excited. They are ready to have a place where they can have encouragement, have more resources to help them. Pray for them. Pray for us as we raise funds to support the work of the center. Just, again, pray for God’s blessing on it that the center, again, what we want to do is we want the center to work in conjunction with Beeson to fulfill its mission, to prepare God-called women to gospel ministry. We covet your prayers. >>Doug Sweeney: Kristen, regular listeners to the podcast know that we usually end interviews with our guests with you, Kristen Padilla, asking other people, our regular guests, what they’ve been learning recently from the Lord. So, now it’s my turn to ask you, as the guest on the podcast, Kristen Padilla, what has God been teaching you in recent weeks and recent months? >>Kristen Padilla: Well, this spring you had invited me to preach in chapel and I was supposed to preach out of Amos 8 and then COVID cancelled our chapel plans, but that sermon assignment really launched me into reading and studying the minor prophets, really from the spring summer into the fall, which has been a helpful practice, I guess, or theological exercise to read through the prophets. And it’s been helpful especially during a year with a lot of ... and I know it’s an overused word ... but unprecedented (laughs) types of events. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the prophets. One of the lessons, or one of the things that God has been continually bringing to my mind and reminding me about is that all these things that happen in our world are opportunities to seek him. I think of the many times in Amos when he said, “This happened yet you did not seek me.” “I did this yet you did not seek me.” And then he says again, “Seek me and live.” And so this desire of the Lord for us to seek him. I think in Revelation when he says, “I stand at the door and knock.” He is wanting us to turn to him. And Amos who is addressing kind of the two-fold sins of the people. One, this false worship that had a bunch of syncretism in it. And that worship affected the way that they treated one another. So, the two greatest commandments, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” et cetera, and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” They were failing in those two commands and so the Lord was reminding them of that. Yet still pleading with them to see him. I often think in the Christian life is the rhythm of confession, repentance, and receiving or granting of forgiveness to one another. So, I’m just reminded that confession is good, repentance is good, the Lord wants us to seek him, the Lord looks on the humble and hates the proud. All these things that God just desires a relationship with us. It’s kind of a lot. But it’s been really good and helpful to be in the prophets. So, I guess I need to thank you for giving me that assignment. It’s really launched me into a study that I was not preparing for otherwise. >>Doug Sweeney: What a wonderful way to end our conversation with Kristen Padilla about an exciting new initiative here at Beeson, an emergent center for women in ministry which Kristen will direct. Listeners, you have been listening to my co-host on the podcast, Kristen Padilla, the Manager of Marketing and Communication and the new Director of the Center for Women in Ministry at Beeson Divinity School. She is currently working on a book with Dr. Timothy George, my predecessor, our founding dean, on Women of the Reformation for Zondervan Academic, and is contributing study notes on Jonah and Amos for the new CSB Study Bible for Women by Lifeway. A very busy woman and a very fruitful minister of the gospel. Thank you, Kristen, for being with us. Audience members, please keep Kristen and this new initiative in your prayers. We are keeping you in our prayers. We are grateful to you. And we say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.