Shirley Taylor has announced her retirement after 45 years as a secretary in Conroe. The last 17 years she has been the secretary at First Christian Church. Taylor says that it never occurred to her that she would still be working at age 80.
“I loved working,” she said, “and there just never seemed the right time to actually retire.”
Shirley Taylor and her husband Don, a Conroe letter carrier, moved to Conroe in 1972 with their two small sons, Stan and Curtis Taylor. At this time, she and Don had been married for 15 years and their sons were 11 and 8 years old. She was a stay-at-home mom and it surprised herself and her family when she decided to go to work in an office. As she tells it, “We were on vacation visiting famous Civil War battlefields. One stop was Sharpsburg, Maryland, to see Burnside’s Bridge which played a key role in the Battle of Antietam. I stayed in the camper truck while Don and our two boys crossed the bridge and were out of my sight. Before leaving for vacation, I had received a letter from my mother telling me that since her sister’s husband had died, the sister was having a hard time making ends meet. She was much younger than her husband and had no skills. I began to wonder. How would I take care of my boys if something happened to Don? I hadn’t worked in an office since we were married and had no modern day skills. Nevertheless, when Don and the boys got back inside the truck, the first words I said to Don was that I was going to get a job and go to work. And I did.”
Taylor was 35 years old when she began working as an office manager for an oilwell logging company in Conroe, which closed its office during the economic downturn of 1982. From there she worked as office manager for an industrial paint manufacturer in Cut and Shoot for a few years, and after that, for a secretarial office service which led her to her job as executive secretary to the owner of an air handler manufacturing company. Leaving that company, she began her 31-year career of working for churches and pastors from 1992 to 2023. She worked for almost 15 years for Baptist General Convention of Texas as a ministry assistant with an office in the Tryon-Evergreen Baptist Association in Conroe.
Taylor said she had been retired for six months when she saw an advertisement in The Courier about a church that needed a secretary. It was a Saturday and she was eating a sandwich and reading the paper. “I was not looking for a job, but I had a habit of reading the help wanted ads because it kept me informed of businesses and what was going on in Conroe because of the rapid growth.” The help wanted ad that caught her attention was for a church that needed a secretary. Taylor says that she dialed the phone number to see which church it was, and to her surprise, it was First Christian Church in Conroe. Her husband Don had been a member of that church for six years and had sung in the church choir. She called the church on Monday and was hired immediately. Thus began her 17 years at First Christian Church.
“It is as if my 15 years as a denominational ministry assistant had prepared me for this job. I had always been very heavily involved in my Baptist church, everything that a woman was allowed to do in a Baptist church. I joked that if the church doors were not open, I opened them.” It was during Taylor’s last few years at Baptist General Convention of Texas that her husband began telling her that Baptists were not fair to women because they had restrictions on what leadership positions a woman could hold in churches. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 spelled it out clearly – women could not be a senior pastor in a church. And no local church had a woman deacon.
That had never bothered Taylor before because for her 52 years as an active Baptist, she had not been denied any position in church that she wanted. “I wasn’t called to preach or be a deacon,” she said. But God was calling her to a different ministry. She was sitting in their Baptist church when she felt the call very strongly to “get up and go.” When church was over she told her husband Don that they needed to start visiting other Baptist churches. They did and that began her ministry in working for women’s equality in the church and in the home. Don was her greatest supporter in this ministry until his death in 2017, after 55 years of marriage.
Not only did her husband support her, First Christian Church also supported her whole-heartedly in her advocacy of women’s equality. First Christian Church has a policy that the church secretary cannot be a member of their congregation and Taylor continued her involvement with another denomination until recently.
Taylor began calling herself the Street Evangelist for women’s equality, and as such has given hundreds of her books to those she meets and strikes up a conversation with. She has written four books advocating for women’s equality in the church and home: Dethroning Male Headship: 2nd Edition (First Edition revised); Women Equal – No Buts: Powered by the same Source; Raising the Hood: A Christian Look at Manhood and Womanhood. Her most recent book is The Power of a Book: The Street Evangelist which tells her conversations with people in Conroe, salespersons, waitresses, shoppers, and almost everyone she meets, whether near Conroe or as far away as Ireland and on cruises.
She has written nine books in all, two of which were written in her position as secretary of First Christian Church: Outside the Pastor’s Door: Reflections of a Church Secretary, and her book on how First Christian came through the pandemic, titled Pandemic: An Inside Look at Our Church and COVID-19.
After working 17 years during what should have been her retirement years, what does Taylor see in store for when she is no longer working? “My traveling days are likely over. My husband and I traveled to all but one of the states, and visited both Hawaii and Alaska twice. We travelled to 32 different countries, including Israel and China, and visited several of those countries twice. After Don’s death, I traveled to Finland one year and then to see the tulips in Amsterdam the next year. Last year, I visited family in Michigan and attended a Christians for Biblical Equality conference in Georgia, but beyond that, I have no travel plans.”
Her work for full equality for women in the church and in their own homes will continue. Shirley Taylor tweets @bwebaptist and blogs at
www.bwebaptistwomenforequality.wordpress.com. Her website is
www.shirleytaylor.net.
In recognition and appreciation for her years of service, First Christian Church is hosting a reception for her after church on July 30.
