Every Friday, Baptist Women in Ministry features a fabulous minister on our blog. Today we are pleased to share this interview with Rhody Mastin. Rhody IS what a minister looks like.
Rhody, tell us about your ministry journey and the places and ways you have served and are serving.
Currently I am serving as one of the pastors at a small church in Durham, North Carolina called Emmaus Way. I primarily work with kids and families. I write the curriculum for children ages two to twelve, and I teach the elementary and middle school students. The children comprise about one-third of our congregation, so I work with our other pastors and parents to find ways to better integrate children into the life of the community.
Before this position, I served as an interim youth pastor and ministerial intern at a few different Baptist churches in North Carolina while I was finishing my Master of Divinity degree at Duke. During that time, I was also becoming a birth doula. Becoming a pastor and becoming a doula started as parallel experiences, but they quickly wove themselves together, informing each other. I don’t take many doula clients anymore, but learning how to care for mothers and families in vulnerable birthing spaces made me a better pastor. It helped me to say things about ministry that ministry couldn’t say for itself.
My home church congregation in Virginia, Fredericksburg Baptist Church, ordained me just over a year ago. They are the congregation that nurtured the calling I felt to preach as a young teenager and gave me my first pulpit. They took me very seriously and lived out the vows they made to me when I was dedicated, loving me into greater and greater understandings of love.
What have been your greatest sources of joy in ministry?
The kids I currently work with at Emmaus Way are perfect and brilliant. The two hours we spend discovering God together—naming God together—are the best two hours of the week. Last summer, we were learning about different metaphors and images for God in the Bible, and I kept a running document on my computer of their insights called “The Lovely Things.” One child helped me to understand the paradoxical nature of God self-identifying as light: God’s light helps us see, but light is also blinding, as Saul knew. I write the curriculum, so I think I know the subject matter pretty well, but then they supply lovely, lovely things.
I’ve also been a doula for a couple of families in our congregation. Being present for the birth of the children you’ll one day pastor is a deeply moving experience. There aren’t words. I’ll attend one more of these births at the end of the month.
What have been the greatest challenges you have encountered in ministry?
Of course, there’s overt sexism, but that’s not very interesting. I’ve been called a rib (cf. Genesis 2). I’ve been called a Devil Feminist. I’ve been told I lack warmth, or at least the stereotypical performance of it. The insults have been great fodder for essays.
But more than that, I’ve felt friction in the stigma that still seems to exist if you’re a woman choosing to be a children’s minister. I’ve had mentors ask when I plan to “move up” or assume that I’ll eventually transition into a senior pastor position. I think these are well-intended comments, but the implication is that children’s ministry is a stopgap. Frankly, this doesn’t make theological sense, particularly in Baptist settings. In most Baptist congregations, those coming forward to profess their faith and be baptized will be children. Our central sacramental practice often occurs in childhood, and yet children’s ministers are more likely to be part-time than their fellow auxiliary ministers. The discrepancy between our tradition’s praxis and structural support and validation of that praxis chafes me.
What advice would you give to a young girl who is discerning a call to ministry?
My home church’s pastor gave me this advice when I was first discerning my call to ministry: all the paths of the Lord are hesed. Nearly ten years ago, my pastor said in a sermon, “Down in our bones . . . a reverberating sound: hesed, hesed, hesed, hesed.” God’s love, faithfulness, and loyalty are carried inside me, and I imagine them as thrombin in my blood—the enzyme that keeps blood sticky. It holds me together, gives me some shape. It’s unconscious and nonnegotiable.
His advice meant that you can never go where God is not already going. God’s claim on your life is something you act out, not something acted out upon you. There are so many good and worthy things to do under the umbrella of your calling. God can work with whatever you decide. There are so many things to love.
Tape that to your bathroom mirror is what I’d tell someone discerning her call to ministry. Read it every day.