Posted on 07/09/2007 9:01:04 AM PDT by Between the Lines
Starting this fall Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary will offer a program in Christian homemaking, the seminary's president said Tuesday. "We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family," seminary President Paige Patterson said in his prepared report to the Southern Baptist Convention this week in San Antonio, Texas.
According to the seminary Web site, the bachelor-of-arts in humanities degree, with a concentration in homemaking, will be offered through the seminary's undergraduate college program.
"The College at Southwestern endeavors to prepare women to model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in Scripture," a description of the program reads. "This is accomplished through instruction in homemaking skills, developing insights into home and family while continuing to equip women to understand and engage the culture of today."
Course work includes three hours of "general homemaking," three hours on "the value of a child," seven hours of "design and apparel"--including a four-hour "clothing construction with lab"--seven hours of nutrition and meal preparation and a three-hour course on the "Biblical Model for the Home and Family."
Responding to a question at the SBC annual meeting about the program, Patterson said many wives of future preachers have said, "We need to know in a day when homemaking is no longer honored whether or not it would be possible for us to have a course of study that would lead to a degree in homemaking."
"It is homemaking for the sake of the church and the ministry and homemaking for the sake of our society," Patterson said. "If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed."
The seminary's trustees were told about the new program last fall. It wasn't mentioned in news stories or the seminary's press release, but a Baptist blogger critical of Patterson's administration reported he "nearly shot Diet Coke out of my nose" when he heard the recommendation.
Trying to imagine how such a degree falls under the umbrella of the institutional mission of a theological seminary, blogger Benjamin Cole dismissed the idea as "quite silly."
"A seminary degree in cookie-baking is about as useful as an M.Div. in automotive repair, if you ask me," Cole said. After the fall trustee meeting, Cole proceeded to parody what he nicknamed the "Mrs. Degree" in 10 blogs between Oct. 30 and Nov. 21.
The new undergraduate degree is in addition to an existing 13-hour program of seminary studies for student wives and women's ministries concentrations in both the master-of-divinity and master-of-arts-in-Christian-education seminary degrees.
Dorothy Patterson, wife of the seminary president and professor of theology in women's studies, is the only woman faculty member currently teaching in Southwestern's School of Theology.
Another, former Old Testament languages professor Sheri Klouda, sued the seminary in March, claiming she was dismissed from her job simply because she is a woman. The chairman of the seminary's board of trustees was quoted as saying Klouda's unanimous election by trustees five years earlier, under leadership of Patterson's predecessor, was a "momentary lax of parameters."
Located in Fort Worth, Texas, Southwestern isn't the only Southern Baptist seminary encouraging ministers' wives to serve in traditional roles. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., offers a 13-hour certificate of ministry studies through its Seminary Wives Institute that includes "essentials" like "God's plan for marriage," child-rearing and shopping on a budget.
"At Southern Seminary, we recognize the need for God-called ministers' wives to be prepared for ministry," says a program description. "We believe that a minister's wife needs to be educated and equipped as she and her husband prepare for service in the churches and beyond."
An accompanying Women's Ministry Institute at Southern Seminary prepares women to minister to other women in the local church. Both programs are offered through Southern Seminary's Boyce College and headed up by Mary Mohler, wife of Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler.
Mary Mohler and Dorothy Patterson were the only two women serving on a seven-member committee that drafted a family amendment added to the Baptist Faith & Message in 1998. That article proscribed the proper role for a wife as "to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."
The family article made headlines nationwide. The New York Times quoted Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics as commenting: ''They hope to make June Cleaver the biblical model for motherhood, despite numerous biblical references to women who worked outside the home.''
Two years later Southern Baptists updated the Baptist Faith & Message again to specify, "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture."
Southwestern Seminary's online catalogue says the seminary introduces women "to the marketplace of ideas, including both complementarian and egalitarian positions" so they are "thoroughly equipped to give an articulate and well-reasoned evangelical response to the feministic ideology of the age."
In addition to its programs for women, Southern Seminary in Louisville also houses The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The Council exists to counter "feminist egalitarianism"--the view that men and women are equal in the church and home--with "the noble Biblical vision of sexual complementarity," which holds that men and women are of equal worth, but God ordained for males to be the head of both the home and the church.
Last year Southern Seminary named the Council's executive director, Randy Stinson, as dean of its School of Leadership and Church Ministry.
Though I never learned to sew my son did. He also learned how to crochet. He did not grow up to be a sissy in the least. He now owns his own gun shop and shooting range. My girls (and son) all know how to fix a flat, change the oil, jump-start a car, and diagnose problems from the Chilton’s book and do the repairs themselves if they feel that they can.
After several years of neglecting to clean a thing and me having to pull double duty at home and take off from my work to get kids around my diplomatic urges went south with her effort.
When I offer to quit and stay home ( I make more ) she balks that we couldn’t afford that.
I am just venting, another day just like the last.
If they ever get as far as enrolling, women get scared out of C.S. courses by constant references to having to stay fresh. More so than many professions, computer science changes. If I go home for, say, ten years with kids (I plan for it to be much longer, actually, since I’ll be homeschooling), my degree when I come back is pretty much useless. Women who want two kids and a career see the possibilities of getting back in as slim.
Me, I think I can contract and keep my resume fresh enough. And I think my husband will be able to provide for us. But if he gets hit by a bus I’ll be able to keep the house and feed the kids, and women with a homemaking degree... had better hope the husband has a lot of life insurance.
Sounds like there are bigger problems at home than just her career - and they are not unilaterally hers.
Women have been working outside the home since time immemorial (see, for example, Prov. 31, where among the accomplishments for which the virtuous woman is extolled is her industry selling things in the marketplace). It's only a relatively recent English-Western phenomenon that women could stay at home while their husbands went to work in an industrial or commercial setting. In earlier eras, both spouses had to contribute to the family's income.
You have to pull double-duty at home including cleaning and taking the kids around. Whoop-dee-doo. That's part of being a father - you deserve no special accolades for playing your role.
I have been a stay at home mother for 18 years. My youngest is five. If I could be a stay at home mother of young childen forever I would. But that’s not possible. I don’t want to be old and without a purpose in my life and that’s what I will be if I wait until my littlest one is in her late teens. I am going for an accelerated nursing program next year. For me it’s not boredom, it’s time running out and having to answer to God.
What was your wife supposed to be doing while the children were in school all day? That wasn’t a rhetorical question. If you’re both making good money, why not hire a cleaning service?
Suppose you had promised to support your family in a certain lifestyle, and then found out you had made a mistake in your career and were miserable? Would it be breach of promise to ask your wife to accept a lower income and standard of living so you could pursue a better career or calling?
I do think it’s a good idea for the mother (or father) to be home with small children, but until their late teens?
Mrs VS
I agree that getting a collage degree in homemaking sounds a little over the top. But what the article doesn't mention, what all is included in this degree on top of homemaking.
Discipleship
Baptist Beliefs
Embracing Femininity
Intro. to Greek
Intro. to Biblical Interpret
SBC
Biblical Counseling-Wives
Public Speaking
Worldviews
Biblical Parenting
Ministry of Hospitality
They also offer a degree in women's ministries.
A pastor's wife may not be a paying job, but it is a full time job requiring skills.
There are bigger issues at work and say what you want they are not mine.
I have violated my own tenet, venting here. I do not have the time nor the drive to go any further on this topic.
I’ll close in saying that women can work if they want, but do not make promises regarding family building you cannot keep because you are bored.
So who watches your 5 year old when you are not home and school is out?
I do not have the luxury of family to leach off of nor do I want some kid farm raising my impressionable 7 and 10 year old and they are 4 year s away from being able to stay alone, legally and physically.
She wants me to hire the cleaning service while she gets to forgo that expense with her leftover money, even though she is the one who has caused it to arise.
Come away, my lover, and be like a gazelle or like a young stag on the spice-laden mountains.
My niece is a medical doctor and her husband is a Baptist minister. I often wonder how that works.
My husband never wanted me to work and I went along with him. I tried to go to work at different phases in our lives and he always had an excuse for why I shouldn’t. I think we could use the money but money has never been at the top of his list in importance so I’ve never held a full time job in my life. We own a business and I do all of the financial stuff, I do volunteer work and spend a lot of time with my family. It has worked out well for us but people always think I should work.
Her big sister will watch her when school is out. Big sister is ten years older and responsible. My mother is willing to pitch in occasionally. Call that leaching if you will; I call it family helping out, mutual support.
When one of the children is sick is where we run into trouble. Yes, it will be my husband using personal days for the intense eleven months the program will take, because he will have the flexibility and I won’t. Fortunately the littlest one has a pretty strong constitution, and my husband is on board with this - it is a mutual goal.
I am sorry you and your wife are experiencing so much conflict in your life together - how did you come to a situation where there is “his” money and “her” money, so that even that is an issue?
Mrs VS
Some overtly careless spending on someone’s part when we were joint and financial advise from my banker who said it will fix some problems we were having with stuff not getting paid in lieu of other things. So I split off and made a bills account and saving account ( both mine with her not on signature, but as survivor ) and an account for her that I put a percentage of my monthly pay into.
The financial woes were helped by this fix, but feelings got hurt over the trust issue, which kind of started all of this anyway.
You're getting a hard time on this thread but I support you and your efforts. This is great. Many of the men I meet want to work their wives like slaves in order to fulfill their financial dreams or treat the wife like a breadwinner who then has to come home and do a second full time job. There aren't many men like you left. That's a sad commentary on our society.
People don’t go to religious schools to become civil engineers or CPAs. Women who choose this type of school do expect to follow a fairly intense commitment to their religion that may include marrying a pastor, raising children within a Christian family, teaching classes, and lifelong community service. This concentration sounds completely supportive of those goals to me. Not everyone is interested being on the clock.
:)
As a SAHM who has worked outside the home when there was a need, I have got to wonder, why is it your wife’s resposibililty to clean the house? Since you both work? I can totally understand that my husband doesn’t expect to help with housework, but that’s my job. And he was expectecd to help when we both worked.
Since she apparently made the decision to work outside the home unilaterally, why don’t you quit unilaterally? I think you are absolutely correct in your opinion that children are better off home with a parent, so why not do so?
As far as I can see, this is merely a particular concentration in a fairly acceptable humanities degree within a religious context. What’s the fuss here?
The big issue is a "pastor's wife" incurring significant expense (and likely debt) for what should be learned in the context of the family and local church. Given the cost of her hubby's seminary degree and her degree, the couple probably be in debt for many years. School debt is getting to be a much larger problem every year.
Back in the dark-ages when my wife and I finished graduate school, we had "his," "hers," and "our" educational loans adding up to about $10k. We paid about $100/mo for ten years - $100/month we would have loved to have had for monthly expenses. Given that some of these programs are $20-$30K per year, it would be easy for a couple to come out with more than $100K in debt. That would be very difficult to pay back.
You are working. The business would not be anywhere near as profitable without your efforts and more importantly society benefits from well adjusted children becoming adults.
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