Church Fires Teacher for Being Female:
The minister of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible says a woman can perform any job - outside of the church.
The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on Aug. 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.
The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."
The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city's day-to-day operations is a woman.
"I believe that a woman can perform any job and fulfill any responsibility that she desires to" outside of the church, LaBouf wrote Saturday.
Mayor Jeffrey Graham, however, was bothered by the reasons given Lambert's dismissal.
"If what's said in that letter reflects the councilman's views, those are disturbing remarks in this day and age," Graham said. "Maybe they wouldn't have been disturbing 500 years ago, but they are now."
Lambert has publicly criticized the decision, but the church did not publicly address the matter until Saturday, a day after its board met.
In a statement, the board said other issues were behind Lambert's dismissal, but it did not say what they were.
Do I really need to comment on this?
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Nah, you don't really have to comment. I mean, what more can one say?
However, I'm wondering why "other issues" were involved when the letter seems rather clear to me. I smell the scent of people making something up to cover their butts.
In the particular form it's found in the article, the story looked rather suspicious to me. The story is true, but the reporter garbled it quite a bit. On further investigation, the first paragraph is false; most of the Sunday School teachers at First Baptist are women, and none of them except Lambert were fired. And the Diaconate Board that fired her has a (slight) majority of women on it, all of whom remain there. (Baptist churches are typically governed by diaconate boards. First Baptist's situation -- most Sunday School teachers are women, deaconesses with a say, although sometimes limited, in how the church is run -- is typical of Baptist churches in the United States. That's one of the reasons the story sounded suspicious.)
That qualification granted, though, there's still enough stupidity in the story. The inability to teach men was apparently cited in the letter as a ground for the dismissal, and it seems for no reason but to avoid stating the real reason (on legal review, the board decided not to enumerate all the reasons for fear of libel). This seems to me to be even more stupid than the cited reason; which is saying something, since the cited reason makes no sense. As DragonScholar says, it all seems very much to be people making something up to cover their butts. The primary reason for the dismissal actually appears to be that Lambert had been writing letters to the local newspaper criticizing changes that had been made in the church to attract younger members (e.g., she criticized the removal of crosses and pictures of Jesus from the sanctuary, the use of Power Point presentations during sermons, and the like).
There's lots more about the outcry that this has produced in the local community here, for anyone who is interested.
I thought something smelt of cover-up. Though this isn't exactly what I expected - my guess was going to be intra-church criticism or scandal.
And anyone who is against overuse of Power Point has my support. I can't even imagine "click on Clippy the Apostle for more information."