HOUSTON—There is nothing typical about the speakers headlining the 2013 Southern Baptist Convention’s annual Pastors’ Conference, including the conference president, Gregg Matte. He believes the diversity on the program will  undergird the singularity of the message presented.

Since 1935 Southern Baptist Convention pastors have gathered to encourage and edify one another in the days prior to the denomination’s annual meeting. This year’s conference—“Launch: Taking our hearts, homes, and ministries to a higher place”—will feature pastors from the East and West coasts, international churches and laymen who can add “texture” to the program, Matte said.

Understanding that the local church is the heart of the SBC and the epicenter for outreach to a community, the conference will equip pastors in developing a crucial balance between their leadership roles at church and home while reminding them of the interconnected nature of the denomination.

Matte admitted that his own path to leadership at Houston’s First Baptist Church was not typical. With a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Texas A&M and a master of divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Matte founded Breakaway Ministries at his alma mater. The weekly Bible study quickly grew from 12 to 4,000 students—the largest of its kind in the nation. From there he was called to lead the Houston mega-church following the retirement of long-time pastor John Bisagno.

“There’s 50 reasons why I am not the right guy and 49 why I am,” he said of his role as pastor since 2004.

It is through the varying pathways to leadership and the myriad backgrounds that Matte wants to showcase the unity of the Pastors’ Conference theme—the requisite skills of sound preaching, church leadership and family priorities.

Matte said, “If we lead well, preach the Word well, we’re going to have a great ministry.”

But, he added, if a pastor forsakes his family while building up his church, “then we’ve lost it.”

Technology allows people to stay plugged in to work and home simultaneously. But there must be a clear demarcation between the two. Matte, who coaches his son’s baseball team, said the church is for work and the home is for family. The 24-hour tension between the two demands established boundaries and priorities.

Scheduled to speak on that issue are Bryant and Anne Wright. He is pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church, Marietta, Ga., and founder of Right from the Heart Ministries.

Recognizing that the local church impacts people from cradle to grave, Matte said he is committed to equipping the local church because it is the God-ordained fountainhead from which other ministries flow. And, he added, the Southern Baptists’ strong stance on the Word of God and the great theological foundation steels his commitment to the denomination.

God “wired” him to be a teacher and leader and equipping pastors in those roles is the essence of the Pastors’ Conference. Speaking on the nuts and bolts of effective preaching and leadership are pastors who have navigated the rough seas of change and have solid ministries to show for it. Rodney Woo, pastor of International Baptist Church, Singapore, led a dying suburban church back to life. The predominantly Anglo church sat in a neighborhood that no longer looked like its members. Matte said God has brought the world to America and pastors struggle in reaching people of different ethnicities. But Woo’s leadership brought new life to Wilcrest Baptist Church near Houston. Today the thriving congregation is home to a mix of Hispanic, African, African American, Caribbean and Anglo members.

Shepherding a church through change—successfully—is the mark of a good leader, Matte said.

He sought to bring leaders from different ethnicities, ages and stages of life who will speak on the themes of leadership, solid and effective preaching and the balance between the pastorate and family. Matte said the addition of non-pastors like Gary Rosberg, co-founder of America’s Family Coach, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will add texture and creativity to the program, addressing the issues from a different frame of reference.

Eric Geiger, vice president of the Church Resources Division at LifeWay Christian Resources will speak on what churches are doing “in a macro sense.” The author of “Simple Church” and other speakers will connect pastors and their families with resources uniquely available through affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention.

“That’s what’s important to young [pastors],” Matte said.

If pastors can see the hallmarks of the denomination are theology and ministry, then they see the significance of denominational affiliation, Matte said. But, if it’s just tradition and “tipping your cap to an organization,” that’s not going to do it. The denomination was created to be a blessing to the local church but young pastors misunderstand that, he said. They switch it around in their mind—that the local church is just feeding the SBC.

Matte is convinced pastors who have not yet felt compelled to take part in the SBC Pastors’ Conference—especially young pastors—will find they’ve been missing out. The conference will help connect them to a pathway they can utilize throughout their lives and through all of their ministries.

“It gives us a connection with a pathway,” Matte said.

This week Pastor Saeed Abedini celebrated his 33^rd birthday from a prison cell deep in Iran, reportedly clinging to the promised hope from Romans 8 that persecution and death cannot separate a believer from God’s love.

Abedini, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen and Muslim-turned-Jesus follower, has been repeatedly beaten, tortured and just last month denied medical care, reportedly for internal injuries, for refusing to deny Christ. Arrested last September on one of his trips back to Iran, he’s faced death threats from authorities and recently from fellow prisoners, all while enduring separation from his wife and two sons in Idaho.

He’s not the first to suffer persecution of biblical proportions. According to the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, citing the International Journal of Missionary Research, 171,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2005 alone. How many do you know by name? I can’t name one.

Meanwhile, it seems persecution of the “soft” kind, as one website termed it, is on the rise domestically. Regularly, I get emails, fund-raising letters (often written in hyperbolic terms) and read news stories of a public school student or government employee denied his constitutional rights because some bumbling bureaucrat read a memo and got overzealous.

In most of these cases, someone forgot to tell them that the First Amendment also has something called the Free Exercise Clause.

We saw this type of politically correct overreaction in the Plano school district in the previous decade with confiscated candy cane pens and Christmas pencils, among other absurdities. There are a thousand other examples from coast to coast of such governmental clumsiness in the name of religious and ideological pluralism.

We are watching our own military to see what becomes of apparent tension over how “evangelism” is somehow distinguished from “proselytizing,” who can do either, when they can do it, how they can do it, etc.

When it comes to handling the religious aspects of the First Amendment, our government entities are the proverbial bull in the china closet, leaving a mess with the slightest provocation.

It’s maddening, head scratching. But is it persecution?

And if so, should I feel guilty for citing the candy cane pen case in the same breath as Pastor Saeed or the 171,000 aforementioned martyrs or the Sudanese Christians who were threatened of being “buried alive” by government interrogators?

Guilt is not needed here. Perspective is, though. Call it harassment. Call it pre-persecution or persecution light. It’s not always directed at Christians with malice, though it’s almost always Christians who are in the crosshairs.

Being perceived as the favored religion in a politically correct, hypersensitive climate has its drawbacks. More often than not, stupidity is the reason for First Amendment encroachments. But malice exists. And if history is an indicator, it could get more blatant.

A teacher asked to remove a Bible from her desk or a federal ruling that disallows religious symbolism at a war memorial is not exactly the same thing as what Saeed is going through.

On the other hand, the beneficiaries of American liberty live abroad as well. Human rights groups, missionary enterprises, and government diplomats exercise positive pressure around the world because human dignity and freedom of conscience are valued in America. We are still an exceptional influence, for now.

If we lose that distinctive, the world suffers. We are only a force for good abroad if we are a force for good at home also. This is the payoff when Christian lawyers go at it with government judges over constitutional encroachments of religious expression. The so-called first freedom undergirds all the others. Everyone, not just religious folks, benefits from this.

One definition of Christian persecution, from a missionary watchdog group called Release International, defines it as such: “A situation where Christians are repetitively, persistently and systematically inflicted with grave or serious suffering or harm and deprived of (or significantly threatened with deprival of) their basic human rights because of a difference that comes from being a Christian that the persecutor will not tolerate.”

Clearly, this definition has cases like Pastor Saeed’s in mind. And we’re not there just yet.

So let’s be measured in our talk about persecution, lest we find ourselves faced with public yawns when the fiery furnace really heats up. In the high-stakes contention for religious liberty, credibility is crucial.

I am many things—child of God, wife, mother, writer, and blogger. My role as a homemaker facilitates all of these priorities.

In fact, I come from a long line of homemakers. For generations, the women in my family have chosen to arrange their priorities around their families and their homes. It is a role of which I am very proud and grateful to those who preceded me for the sacrifice the homemaking priority required.

My great-grandmother’s introduction to homemaking began at the age of 9 when she willingly shouldered the responsibilities of caring for three siblings after the death of her mother. Standing as the true Proverbs 31 woman, my great-grandmother picked the cotton fields of Blossom, Texas, to buy a winter coat for her daughter. It was only after her daughter’s marriage that she took a dry cleaning job on Haskell Avenue in downtown Dallas.

My grandmother was a homemaker too. Before marrying, she worked in Dallas at the Murray Gin Company making bombs for World War II. When my mother entered college, my grandmother took a job outside the home, filling catalog orders for another Dallas-based company.

My mother graduated with a bachelor’s degree in library science at the height of the feminist movement in America. But when my oldest sister was born, Mom made the unpopular choice to quit her job as the general librarian at the Mesquite Public Library. At the time she earned more than my father, who was employed at a bank.

From our earliest memories, it is our mothers who teach us what ministry looks like—how to serve and orient our lives around others, and the painful sacrifices that are sometimes required.

Paul describes one ministry of motherhood in Titus 2:5 when he admonishes wives to be homemakers. Paul uses the Greek word oikourgos, which means “working at home” or “caring for the house.”

My own mother taught me what the ministry of working at home meant—cheerfully putting another’s interests before her own. Sadly, fewer mothers are passing along that generational vision to their daughters and those who do often pass down the logistics of home management without the keen eye for finding joy in everyday activities.

The late Edith Schaeffer believed homemaking was a hidden art—an art form that satisfied and fulfilled oneself and others. Facebook’s female Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg believes homemaking is drudgery. One woman saw the miraculous in the mundane, the other inequality in the minutia.

In her recent book “Lean-in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” Sandberg urges women to “lean-in” to their careers for the betterment of all women.

Like feminists before her, Sandberg believes homemaking lowers the “expectations of what women can achieve.” And by choosing to focus on their families, women are not “demonstrating courage to reach for more opportunities, sit at more tables, and believe more in themselves.”

Not surprisingly, modern homemakers are being relieved of their duty, the cost of which is revealed in the meaning of the word itself.

In the Byzantine text, Titus 2:5’s rendering of homemaker is oikouros from the root “keeping watch.” The Alexandrian/Western text uses the aforementioned form oikourgos (“home worker” or “caring for the house.”)

The main difference between these two words is the absence of a gamma (the letter g), a variance that Southeastern Seminary’s Maurice Robinson, senior professor of New Testament, said offers no real theological differences.

“…Even if some people might want to draw a fine line between ‘staying at home’ and ‘working at home’; I think both seem to indicate ‘managing the affairs of the home,’” said Robinson, a co-editor of the 2005 Byzantine Text, in an interview with the TEXAN.

Taken together, both oikouros and oikourgos demonstrate the importance of the homemaking task—one as an industrious worker, the other as a guardian. Neither nuance sounds inconsequential to me.

Last month, feminists around the world were sent aflutter when Susan Patton (a feminist pioneer at Princeton) advised female students at the historic institution to get married young.

Keli Goff, among other like-minded feminists, responded to Patton in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce.” It ran with the subtitle: “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a full-time mother, but you don’t need an elite degree to do it.” Goff points an angry finger at educated women who choose to stay at home, calling their degrees a “wasted opportunity.”

“That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree,” she writes.

If Goff had her way the “next frontier of the admissions should revolve around asking people to declare what they actually plan to do with their degrees.” Her suggested admissions policy would bar some women from higher education—an odd move considering women like Susan Patton fought hard for admission to Ivy League schools not too long ago.

My mother wasn’t educated at an Ivy League school, but she poured her education into mothering her daughters nonetheless.

Before the dawn of Pinterest, my mother created her own card catalog out of a shoebox. Inside were hundreds of hand-written index cards bearing a variety of children’s book titles, their Dewey decimal numbers, and book summaries—organized by book genre. The shoebox, which was pulled out every summer to formulate reading lists for my two sisters and me, became a running joke in our family. Today, however, it is a family heirloom.

That shoebox represents to me a mother who put her classical education to creative use by educating her children on worldviews, cultures, and great literature long before the classical model of education ever became popular.

For my mother it would have been absurd for her to set about “advancing the cause of women” without first advancing the cause of the women living under her own roof.

In fact, most feminists would be surprised to discover that my mother opted out of the professional life not once but twice in her lifetime. When I was in high school, my father was laid off after a company merger. Because of the commitment my parents made to honor God’s prescription for wives to “guard their homes,” my mother chose not to pursue full-time work.

When I think of this sacrifice, the implications of which were financially serious, I get a painful lump in my throat. At the risk of her reputation as a “sensible” woman, she chose to cling fiercely to God’s promise of provision for our family.

While researching this piece, I asked my mother if she encountered any pushback over her decision to stay at home while my father looked for a new job. Yes, she said, but only from people in the church.

It is a sad day indeed when our nation’s guardians are being pushed from their watch posts on a regular basis. But it’s a catastrophic event when the family of God tears down those remaining women who are brave enough to run counter to the world for the sake of their families. There are, after all, very few left.

I pray that our churches find intentional ways to build up all mothers who are making tough sacrifices for their children—whether it’s the stay-at-home mom who puts her career on hold or the single/divorced mother who sacrifices luxuries the modern world declares as must-haves.

My great-grandmother was one such woman. When she found herself divorced at the end of the Great Depression, she made ends meet by watching children after school as well as keeping house and cooking for a family friend. My pride in my homemaking heritage is derived in part from my great-grandmother’s heroic response to difficult circumstances, but it also stems from the gracious posture she took against those who looked down their noses at her during a time when divorce carried a terrible stigma—inside the church and out.

When I see my great-grandmother, I do not see a woman who viewed her life situation as drudgery from which she needed emancipation. I see a woman who resolutely set her face toward the future by giving her heart to fully minister to loved ones in the present.

Last week my great-grandmother would have been 114 years old. Since her death, she has passed her post of “home guardian” to many mothers in my family. And while I often struggle to keep in step with her sacrificial spirit, I am forever grateful for the trenches she dug in preparation for my service.