Did you know that Rev. Druecillar Fordham was the first woman to pastor a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church and was the first Black woman to be ordained as a minister among churches in the Southern Baptist Convention?
Our current staff did not know this essential piece of our community’s history until just the past couple of months.
During research she conducted for her soon-to-be-released book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry (Brazos Press, 2025), and accompanying podcast, All the Buried Women, Beth Allison Barr found a few small mentions of the New York pastor’s place in our history and began drawing attention to her legacy. In these brief articles, we get a small glimpse into Rev. Fordham’s trailblazing ministry.
The October 26, 1972 issue of The Baptist Record chronicles Rev. Fordham’s position as first woman to pastor a Southern Baptist Convention affiliated church when the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association accepted the church she pastored, Christ Temple Baptist Church in New York, NY, into full membership. Rev. Fordham had been pastoring the church, which was also affiliated with the Progressive National Baptist Convention, since its founding in 1953.
In an interview found in the May 1972 issue of Home Missions Magazine (p. 42-43), published by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, Rev. Fordham described her commitment to her calling no matter the resistance she faced.
Recalling opposition to her ordination in 1942 from pastors in the National Baptist Conventions, she said that the (male) pastors refused to accept her as equal and would quote scripture to validate their rejection. Rev. Fordham stated that she also had scripture to quote, such as Galatians 3:28, in response. She said, “If that didn’t silence them, it at least gave us a stalemate.”
But rather than having her ministry sidetracked by adversaries and antagonism, she replied, “I never fear anything. I just go ahead and do it. People will say what they want to say; they have a right to—but it doesn’t matter. We’re living in the now age.”
Rev. Fordham learned about the Southern Baptist Convention through her prominent position in a local ministry which the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association helped form. The superintendent of the association at the time, Kenneth Lyle, described Rev. Fordham as, “a very gentle person who is deeply concerned about Harlem and reaching people for Christ.”
The article ends with the following two sentences. “It is as a Christian, and a pastor—not as a woman—that she is being accepted by Southern Baptists of New York. Perhaps it is too early Io tell if she will be so accepted by the entire Southern Baptist Convention.”
BWIM was an organization formed by white women in 1983 to support women who felt called to ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention. By 1995, BWIM had severed ties to the Southern Baptist Convention and began reaching out to support Baptist women who were connected to other denominations. Today, women affiliated with six nation-wide Baptist denominational groups (Alliance of Baptists, American Baptist Churches USA, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, National Baptist Convention USA, Progressive National Baptist Convention, and Southern Baptist Convention) participate in BWIM’s programs and are among BWIM’s donors.
However, BWIM still has work to do as we repent of the ways our organization has privileged white women, and at times been blind to experiences of compounding oppression faced by Black women, and all women of global majority, among Baptists which deeply affects their ability to thrive in ministry.
Discovering, remembering, and lifting up the legacy of pioneering female Baptist pastors such as Rev. Druecillar Fordham is one way, among many, we can move forward in our journey to becoming an inclusive organization. But there are still so many more stories we need to learn and tell. We regret that the remembrance of our foremothers has been incomplete and commit to building an expanded vision.