By Aaron Weaver
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — “Women’s stories are sacred work,” theologian and Vanderbilt Divinity School dean Yolanda Pierce declared Thursday at the Baptist Women in Ministry dinner during the 2026 CBF General Assembly.
Yolanda Pierce
“I’m here tonight to tell you why women’s stories are sacred work,” Pierce said. She described those stories as important, necessary and holy, providing essential source material for theological reflection.
The dinner gathered Cooperative Baptists to celebrate progress for women in ministry, acknowledge continuing challenges and encourage further work toward gender equality throughout Baptist life.
Pierce is dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School and a University Distinguished Professor of Religion and Literature and of African American and Diaspora Studies. Raised by her grandparents in a preacher’s household and a holiness Pentecostal tradition in Brooklyn, Pierce said years of Sunday school, Bible study and worship made the people and genealogies of Scripture vivid to her. But as an adult, she began to question why she knew so much more about biblical bloodlines than her own family’s history.
“How can it be that the bloodline, the genealogy of the people I had never met, but had been encouraged to read about and memorize in Scripture, how could it be that that bloodline, that genealogy was more well known to me and more important than my own family’s history and geography?” Pierce asked.
Meredith Stone
Pierce said women’s experiences of survival, endurance and remembrance provide essential sources for theological reflection, even when those stories are complicated or marked by shame.
“This work of women’s stories is about building an archive,” she said.
That archive should include not only the pastors whose portraits hang in churches, Pierce said, but also the women whose often-unrecognized labor sustained congregations. She pointed to women who cleaned sanctuaries, encouraged families to invest in church property, prepared meals, raised money and helped send young people to college.
“Where are their pictures?” she asked.
“There is actually no spontaneous memory,” Pierce said. “You have to deliberately create it. You have to maintain those pictures and then those stories. You have to tell why they are important.”
Pierce described the recovery of those stories as prophetic retrieval, reaching into the past for memories that can shape the future. She recalled women in her own family who practiced folk medicine, anointed others with oil, prepared food and extended healing through loving hands.
“Nothing fancy, nothing special, just ordinary things revealing the power of an extraordinary God,” she said.
“These ordinary women had an extraordinary faith.”
Pierce invited attendees to consider the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, neighbors and unnamed women whose ordinary acts revealed their faith in extraordinary ways. Some women from earlier generations could not have imagined serving as pastors, she said, but “they had pastoral gifts.” Others could not have imagined women preaching from pulpits, “but they were preachers.”
Women’s testimony also stands at the center of the Christian story, Pierce said. Before the resurrection account was written or received by the wider community, Mary carried its message.
“For a brief moment, the entire gospel was contained in the memory of one woman,” Pierce said.
“For those who suggest that women dare not preach the gospel, there is no gospel unless the woman at the well, the women at the tomb and the women at the cross have told the truth,” she said. “That is the dangerous story that we have to keep telling.”
Pierce closed by giving attendees an assignment: construct a spiritual genealogy by naming the women whose prayers, care and witness shaped their lives.
“Name the grandmother who may have knelt with you at the end of your bed and taught you how to pray,”she said. “Name the church mother who may have slipped $5 in your hand and told you to go buy some candy. Name the person who prayed for you when you were at your lowest.”
“Remember, that’s our commandment as Christians to remember,” Pierce said.
Learn more about Baptist Women in Ministry at www.bwim.info.
The 2026 CBF General Assembly continues through Friday, June 19. Watch livestreams of plenary and worship sessions, along with ongoing news coverage at www.cbf.net/general-assembly-26
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