Paige Heard is serving as a Regimental Army Chaplain at historic West Point Military Academy. Every Sunday Chaplain Heard can be heard preaching the gospel at 10:30 a.m. during the Protestant worship service at the beautiful West Point Military Academy Cadet Chapel.
Major Heard is a life-long Southern Baptist, a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and New Orleans Seminary, and she has faithfully served Christ as a Southern Baptist endorsed United States Army Chaplain since 1996. Paige is a conservative Christian. She believes the Bible is the infallible, inerrant, and sufficient Word of God. Yet, she is now only one of five female Southern Baptist chaplains left in the United States Army. In 2004 the trustees of the North American Misson Board voted to stop endorsing female chaplains. Major Heard had been endorsed prior to the 2004 prohibition and was ‘grandfathered’ in.
Paige told me via phone that her heart “aches for the Southern Baptist Convention and the stance our convention has recently taken on women in missions and ministry.” On the one hand Southern Baptist churches are training girls in G.A’s (Girls in Action) and Acteens that they are to listen to the voice and calling of God and serve Him. Yet, when those same girls fulfill the call of God on their lives, the very Convention who trained them then turns their collective back on them. Paige said that she is thoroughly Baptist in conviction and as conservative as a Christian can be regarding the fundamentals of the faith and views on the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. She believes that conservative, gifted females are being pushed out of the Southern Baptist Convention into more liberal denominations because of the narrow views on women in ministry that are being pushed by some Southern Baptists.