Fifty-five years ago, on August 9, 1964, Addie Davis became the first ordained woman minister in Southern Baptist circles. On that Sunday, Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, set her apart for the gospel ministry. In years since that historic ordination, thousands of Baptist women called and gifted by God have been ordained, some of whom do not even know Addie’s name even though they walk on the trail that she blazed. And even those who know her name don’t know her story. To celebrate this fifty-fifth anniversary, read a bit of her story, which will be shared on this blog today and tomorrow.
Addie was born in Covington, Virginia, on June 29, 1917, to a family of committed Baptists. Neither of her parents received much formal education. Her father had to leave school at the age of fourteen to help support his family after his own father’s death. He worked hard and finally had enough money to open the furniture store in Covington. His lack of educational opportunity fostered in him the determination that all three of his children would go to college. In 1938, Addie finally had her chance. At the age of twenty-one, she enrolled at Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina, and majored in psychology and minored in speech.
Upon graduation in 1942, Addie found a ministry position and began service as education director at the 500-member First Baptist Church in Elkin, North Carolina, a town just west of Winston-Salem. Addie served the church for four years. She left Elkin in 1946 to take the position of dean of women at Alderson-Broadus College, a Baptist school in Philippi, West Virginia. There Addie recognized her need for theological education and to strengthen her commitment to pursue her calling. She applied to and was accepted by both Duke Divinity School and Yale Divinity School, but as she prepared to make this transition, a need in her family took precedence.
Addie’s father had died in 1944, and following his death, Addie’s mother took over management of the furniture store. By the end of the 1940s, her mother needed help with the store, and thus, instead of heading off to divinity school, Addie returned home to Covington. For over ten years, she worked alongside her mother, selling furniture. But Addie never gave up on her call to ministry. During that decade at home, Lone Star Baptist Church, a rural congregation sixteen miles outside of Covington, called Addie to serve as their interim pastor. She served for six months and had opportunities to preach and gain invaluable pastoral experience.
In 1960, Addie’s mother retired, leaving her forty-three-year-old daughter free to pursue theological education. By this time, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, had begun allowing women to study for a bachelor of divinity degree (equivalent to a current Master of Divinity degree), and Addie was among the first women to attend and graduate from that seminary. Her graduation program in 1963 lists the names of six women, including Addie’s, among the 144 graduates that May.
In the summer of 1961, Addie took a class titled “Preaching to Human Need,” in which she had to prepare six sermon outlines and one full-length sermon. Although Addie had preached previously, she was still a novice at preparing and writing sermons in the seminary classroom setting, and she received “Bs” on her outlines. But she improved over the course of the brief summer semester, and on her full-sermon, “Am I My Brother’s Keeper” based on Genesis 4:9-16, Addie received an “A-”. Her professor wrote comments such as “excellent outline,” “worthy material,” and “well handled.”
In that sermon, Addie courageously took on the greatest social justice issues of the day. She addressed racism, unethical business practices, and poverty, asking: “Will the color of skin continue to build a wall to divide us? Can we not build bridges of understanding? We do this as individuals occasionally. Most of us know Negros whom we regard highly and who are dear to us; but as a people, we have not bridged the gap of prejudice and misconception. This we need to begin to do, and we must start with ourselves.”
In the spring of 1963, Addie enrolled in a History of Christianity course, and for her class project, she completed a paper titled “Illustrative Attitudes of the Contemporary Church toward the Ordination of Women.” In her introduction, she wrote, “Many people wonder why the question of the ordination of women should arise at all since, obviously, they themselves have not considered it, and see no particulate reason why it should be considered. It seems unbelievable to ‘traditional’ thinkers that some denominations have admitted women to the ministry for a number of years, and do not feel that this is a man’s prerogative alone.”
Addie then gave attention to the biblical interpretations most often cited by those opposing or defending women’s roles in the church, provided information on the varied polity structures of denominations, and focused on the cultural influence on beliefs about ordination.
In researching the paper, Addie read a wide cross-section of books on the subject. While a good number of these resources offered negative views on the ordination of women ministers, Addie also found encouragement from some, including Charles E. Raven’s 1929 book, Women in Ministry. She quoted his book in her paper: “If the Church is what it claims to be, the embodiment of the Spirit of Christ, then since His Spirit is manifestly operative through the ministry of women, that ministry must have its accredited place in the organism: otherwise the Church is not truly or completely the expression and instrument of the will of God.”
In her paper, Addie also included statistical information regarding denominations associated with the World Council of Churches and their official stance with regard to women’s ordination. She briefly reviewed the beliefs of Anglicans, Baptists (both American and Southern), Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Swedish Lutherans. Her research of Southern Baptist annuals and records concluded with these words, “It is, therefore, evident that a local church could call for the ordination of women. According to the records available, no woman has yet been ordained in the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Her research and her inclusion of this information indicate that Addie clearly had awareness that should she seek ordination from a Southern Baptist church, she would be making history. Her research on women’s ordination also indicates that she was educating herself, carefully and intentionally preparing herself for what was to come.
During her seminary years, Addie was a member of Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham. There she met Warren Carr, pastor of Watts Street. As she neared graduation, Addie knew that she needed to be licensed to preach. In early 1963, she talked with Carr about the possibility of the church’s granting her a license. Both Carr and Watts Street “had achieved something of a reputation for their civil rights activism.”
Most likely, the willingness of this church to take radical stands on racial issues made Addie comfortable in asking them to consider another radical stand—to endorse a woman preacher. Indeed, Carr and members of Watts Street, like many progressive Baptists in the 1960s, had begun to see that “it as illogical to take stands on behalf of black liberation and refuse to do so on behalf of the freedom of women to choose the ways to direct their service to the same God whose teachings mandated freedom for oppressed blacks.”
Looking back on the process of being licensed by Watts Street, Addie said: “I felt that I had a friend in Warren Carr, and I approached him about whether or not he thought his church might back me in granting a license to preach with the idea of being ordained later. He said it sort of threw him at first, but being the kind of man he is, he said yes. And he laid the groundwork very patiently and quietly in the church among the people, and I am sure in the association among fellow pastors. As a result of that, I was granted a license to preach on March 13, 1963.
The church presented Addie with her ministerial license that same evening following the vote. The Certificate of License she received was the standard fill-in-blank form sold by the Southern Baptist’s Broadman Press, and it read:
“This is to certify Addie Davis who has given evidence that God has called him into THE GOSPEL MINISTRY was Licensed to preach the Gospel as he may have opportunity, and to exercise his gifts in the work of the Ministry by Watts Street Baptist Church of Durham, North Carolina on the thirteenth day of March, 1963.”
Obviously, Baptists, even progressive Baptists, had no concept that a woman would even be licensed to preach, and they had certainly had no certificates available that would have been appropriate to present to women ministers.
More of Addie’s story will be shared on the BWIM blog on Thursday!
Pam Durso is executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, Atlanta, Georgia.
This blog is based on the article “Remembering Addie,” in The World is Waiting for You: Celebrating the 50th Ordination Anniversary of Addie Davis, eds. Pamela R. Durso and LeAnn Gunter Johns (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 2014), 2-26.