By: Reverend Dr. J. Alfred Smith Sr.
Let the Work and the Healing of the Nation Continue and Begin…Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow…
At last Baptists in the Bay Area have broken the glass ceiling that has prevented women from serving as Senior Pastors.
Baptists have joined the ranks of Shiloh Christian Fellowship, Patten Christian Cathedral, Center of Hope Community Church, and Oakland East Bay Church of Religious Science, all of whom blessed the East Bay with women pastors in the late Dr. Violet Kitely, Dr. Bebbe Patten, retired Bishop Ernestine Cleveland Reems, and most active, the Reverend Elouise Oliver.
Each of these pastors distinguished themselves as compassionate servants, eloquent speakers, talented teachers, spiritual trailblazers, peacemakers, and examples of unselfishness and bold justice advocacy, whose churches continue to impact the city and the nation with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Allen Temple Baptist Church, under the leadership of my son, Dr. J. Alfred Smith Jr., who along with myself, has now joined the ranks of these distinguished churches with a woman pastors, in the person of The Reverend Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson, confirmed today as Senior Pastor.
There is a remarkable history: Dr. J. Alfred Smith, Jr. planted the True Faith Community Baptist Church in Antioch, California, with gifted and highly respected Reverend Vickia Brinkley as pastor. This church is growing, and Pastor Brinkley is supported by her husband, Rick Brinkley, who also serves as Director of Human Resources for the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, a consortium of mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic Seminaries, including Centers for Jewish and Islamic Studies.
For a number of years, ordained and seminary-trained women have provided excellent service on the paid and volunteer pastoral staffs led by both my son J. Alfred Smith Jr. and by me.
Yet, these capable women found it almost impossible to find positions at other traditional Baptist Churches, either because the churches had a theology that believed Jesus called only men to Christian ministry, or because of the male domination of churches – even where women outnumber the men, and where many pastors never retire, but remain in their pastoral posts until they die.
But at Allen temple, upon the retirement of both Smiths, an opportunity opened for new leadership with vision for the challenges for the Twenty-First Century. “New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth,” said James Russell Lowell.
An excellent search committee approved by the membership was selected to conduct a nationwide search for a senior pastor. The Committee discovered excellent candidates and were prepared to share their findings with the church.
At the same time there was a growing grass roots opinion in the membership lead by strong women and non-patriarchal men who were concerned that Jesus affirmed the equality of the sexes, who realized that the search community should give first consideration to their first
woman assistant pastor, who was in great demand nationally as a preacher in multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-cultural settings, who had won the hearts of her audiences with her charismatic preaching style that reached the Ph.D.’s and the “no D’s.”
Her character was impeccable. She attracted the non-church attending society. She loved the marginalized and disadvantaged having taught them at McClymonds High School in West Oakland. Her love for the elderly is evident in the gentle way she cares for her mother who suffers with dementia.
The Holy Spirit moved Allen Temple members to see the gifts of their own member who had grown up with many of them, but they felt conflicted because the search committee had worked long and hard in a national study of the best pastoral candidates. This committee that was chosen by the members represented a cross-section of the most respected and revered members of the congregation.
Late in the search process there was a deep restless quest from the usually silent segment of the membership for input into the search process. These persons, in my opinion, were moved to not sit silently but to be proactive as members of a Baptist democracy. They were concerned about gender justice and fairness for women not only in the work place and secular institutions, but also where they worship.
These members had heard justice issues raised for generations from a prophetic pulpit. They read Luke 4:18 and Isaiah 58. They are not rigid fundamentalists
The justice-minded members realized that an affirmative action program for women should exist in their own church starting with their own home-grown candidate reared by a single mother who supported her graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, which had few Black graduates.
Assistant Pastor Jacqueline A. Thompson earned her Master of Divinity at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was a teaching assistant to the renowned New Testament scholar Cain Hope Felder. She earned the Doctor of Ministry degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. Her post-doctoral work was conducted in Israel with Jewish and Arab scholars.
After passionate discussion and fervent prayer at a special called meeting, the membership by a large majority vote on February 20, 2019, instructed the pastoral search committee to present their own daughter and assistant pastor as the first candidate in the pastoral search process.
The examination process took place April 4-6, 2019, and on Sunday, April 7, 2019, after the church voted for her to be the Senior Pastor, I thanked God, most merciful and most benevolent, for allowing me to live long enough to have helped in a small way to prepare a biological son and a spiritual daughter to serve as Senior Pastors of 100-year-old Allen Temple Baptist Church of Oakland, California.
What a way to celebrate this 100th year of our church anniversary.
In 1976, Rev. Dr. Ella Pearson Mitchell, Rev. Dr. Malvina Stephens, and Josephine Kulhman were the first women ordained in Allen Temple.
May Rev. Dr. Thompson be blessed with good health and many years to serve as the Senior Pastor of a strong Allen Temple Baptist Church, pregnant with positive possibilities, and may she be warmly welcomed with open arms by the clergy groups in the City of Oakland.
May this time of rapid social transition and gentrification be a golden opportunity to welcome into all of our faith-based communities the newcomers, who realize that they cannot live by bread alone but by food for their souls – and may they become those who will not displace us but become members with us in the beloved community of non-violence, educational opportunity, and economic justice.
May we work with Pastor Thompson in the ministry of love, respect, and forgiveness; and may we preserve our rich cultural heritage that has enriched our lives and transmit it to others; and may we be there for Pastor Jackie as we expect her to be there for us.
May we embrace each across the lines of color, class, gender, wealth, religion, and homophobia, realizing that no lives matter unless black and brown lives matter.
May we join Pastor Jackie in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge for our youth that will draw out their latent talents and may we become better stewards of the earth, curtailing practices that poison the air and the water and green life.
May we pray for Pastor Thompson and the tireless clergy of Oakland as they lead us in the obvious ethical task of healing, remaking, and repairing this city and may God grant us the courage, unity, and energy to struggle and resist the local and global issues of white supremacy, the criminal injustice system and exclusive health care for the rich, societal blindness to homelessness and poverty, and bold indifference to the inequitable distribution of wealth.
May we become students of economic justice that resists the building of walls at borders, that preaches rugged individualism for the poor and socialism for the rich who pay little or no taxes.
May we who know little about the “sweet bye and bye,” but much about the “nasty and now,” preach about life after birth on an earth that is abundant and full for all human beings, especially for those of us who have been denied our humanity and dignity.
May the aging clergy in our Baptist ranks embrace a collaborative relationship with Rev. Dr. Jackie Thompson, who is gifted in intergenerational relationships with the large number of young adults who have no ties to the church; who have cut the umbilical-chord that tied them to the survival institutions that saved their elders.
Any technocratic culture without spiritual grounding is like a plant uprooted from the soil and its life-giving nutrients.
