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Baptist Leader Suggests Youth Ministers Be Men
While official teaching of the Southern Baptist Convention is that women ought not lead churches as senior pastors, at least one seminary president says his preference would be that youth ministries also be male-led.

Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, offered 17 “iconoclastic principles of youth ministry” Tuesday in Baptist Press, a follow-up to a similar column on church planting.

Among them: “Call a man as your minister to youth or your pastor in charge of youth ministry. If possible, have an associate who is a woman. If money is in short supply, have the youth minister find a woman who will volunteer to serve in this capacity.”

Patterson said it is “imperative that the youth minister be both a minister and a man’s man whom the young men will respect.”

Also vital, he said, is “that the associate be a woman who is godly, pure of heart and a model of what biblical womanhood is all about.”...

...While Southern Baptist seminaries continue to enroll large numbers of women, nowadays they typically steer them toward traditional roles, such as pastor’s wives or to minister to other women. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was the first Southern Baptist school to offer formal, specialized theological education in the area of women’s ministry....

...Other recommendations by Patterson, whose article appeared also in Southwestern News magazine, include:

“Make men out of the boys and women out of the girls. You may protest here that this goal is the natural end. Unfortunately, our society today is bent on trying to feminize boys and create as many masculine traits as possible in girls. This distortion leads not only to serious misinformation about gender but also to other disasters. Teaching boys the responsibilities that men must assume and teaching girls that true beauty before God is the ‘attitude of a gentle and quiet spirit’ will immeasurably bless their lives, their homes and their churches.”

Patterson said youth ministers should lead young people to ask about and follow God’s will for their lives.

“If the youth minister and the pastor of the church are positive examples of godly men, the young people will respond quickly, and many of them affirmatively, to the possibility that God may want some of them to serve as pastors, missionaries or other Christian vocational leaders,” he wrote. ...