Filling Stadiums, Not Pulpits

RALEIGH, N.C.--Blessed with her father's steely blue eyes and arresting stage aura, Anne Graham Lotz stirs thousands of women to sway in prayer as her revival tour "preaches and teaches" its way through the heartland.

Once a Sunday school teacher in Raleigh, the Rev. Billy Graham's daughter has become a symbol of a women's revival movement. But bowing to the beliefs of the more than 15-million strong Southern Baptist Convention, she's careful to refer to herself as a "Bible expositor," as opposed to a preacher.

Still, the popularity of Lotz, and a handful of female evangelical leaders like her, is putting church dictums to the test, as tens of thousands of women from Nashville to Minneapolis flock to their revival tours.

Amid this surge of feminine power, the Southern Baptist Convention--the largest Protestant denomination in America--is poised to formally bar women from the pulpit when it holds its annual meeting, beginning Tuesday in Orlando.

"These female evangelists are coming into their own in a group that's been traditionally ambivalent about women leaders," says Mickey Maudlin, a writer at Christianity Today magazine. "This trend has been evolving for years, but it's now taking that next step."

The popularity of Lotz, who has launched a world revival tour that is filling 25,000-seat arenas, has emerged as one of the biggest challenges to the prohibition of women preachers.

Though she maintains she has no interest in being ordained as a minister, the idea of a powerful woman preaching the Bible has in the past spurred men to literally turn their backs on her. And it irked many male evangelicals that she was named last year by The New York Times as one of five possible candidates to take over her father's mantle.

Lotz is the best known of a growing number of female evangelists across the U.S. Texas evangelist Beth Moore, whose women's Bible studies course focuses on "magic, romantic, and majestic" Bible interpretation, is also touring extensively.

And Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Kay Arthur encourages practitioners of her nondenominational approach to interpret the Bible for themselves.

Vital in Baptist churches for decades, women's ministries have in many places gone from small midweek meetings to Bible studies that draw thousands. In the past decade, for example, attendance at Lotz's home missionary in Raleigh has gone from 300 to 3,000.

"There's a large and growing contingent of very significant and vital ministries by and for women," says Danny Akin, a dean at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Ky. "We're very understanding of teaching ministries of an Anne Graham Lotz or a Beth Moore, and, at the same time, when it comes to leadership positions in local churches and in the home, we see that God still calls men to that."

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