SBC's Vote to Abolish Women Pastors
Reflections on the urge to shove women out of the pulpit—or at least ban the churches they lead
“I’ve served for over 51 consecutive years on the staff of Southern Baptist churches, beginning at the age of 16… so, why now?” Pastor Linda Popham asked Southern Baptist messengers this week at the denomination’s annual meeting. Popham, who has served at Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky for over 40 years, was at the meeting to appeal a decision from the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) credentials committee this year that disfellowshipped Fern Creek and four other churches (three for women pastors, one for failure to address sexual abuse). One of the other churches disfellowshipped over female pastors was Saddleback Church, which was founded by famed evangelist Rick Warren.
Popham noted that, “We’re not here to convince any of you to allow your church to have women pastors. That’s not the issue here.” Fern Creek has its own differing points of view with other churches too. For instance, Popham doesn’t agree with extreme Calvinists. She didn’t agree with those who closed their churches during COVID, “but I don’t want to kick you out, because you are a part of the family and we at Fern Creek Baptist Church love you very much.” Soon, her mic was cut. Her time was out.
SBC messengers voted 9,700-806 in favor of Fern Creek’s continued ouster.
Soon after, Rick Warren had his turn to appeal his church’s disfellowship. In 2021, Saddleback had ordained three female pastors. Like Popham, Warren noted that Southern Baptists have always allowed differences of opinion about doctrine. Why should this issue cancel a church’s fellowship? “The 1,928 churches with women on pastoral staff have not sinned,” he said.
Warren was concerned that now Al Mohler, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s president, claims not only is the office of pastor limited to men, but women should be prohibited from teaching and being on church staff. Warren said he was able to contact over half the original drafting committee for the article added to the Baptist Faith & Message in 2000 defining the “office of pastor” to men. “Seven of them told me Al [Mohler] was wrong,” Warren continued, and that before the vote, Mohler, who helped draft the taskforce defining pastors as male, wrote in his hometown paper that the rule would not limit women from becoming assistant pastors.
Mohler, speaking in defense of kicking out the churches, denied the claim, saying “My position was… misrepresented,” but went on to say the words limiting pastoral roles to men were inserted because “30 years ago this issue threatened to tear this denomination apart.”
Southern Baptists voted to deny Saddleback’s appeal too, with 88 percent voting to uphold that church’s removal.
Southern Baptist messengers already voted to affirm that “God sovereignly granted to women their intrinsic worth,” expressing thanks for women who serve as missionaries, teachers and mentors. Then they immediately voted to encourage churches to uphold all the “biblical qualifications that the New Testament requires for all those who would hold either office of bishop/elder/pastor or deacon,” with an amendment underscoring one of those biblical qualifications: being a man.
Later, broadening definitions beyond key leadership roles just as Warren had foreshadowed, messengers approved an amendment to SBC’s constitution that churches can have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
This is in a denomination that in 2022 saw its greatest single year drop in membership in 100 years, on the heels of years of reports concerning sexual abuse coverup, an external investigation detailing some SBC leaders’ ongoing and willfully ignoring abuse claims from women and a smaller number of men, and finally, a Department of Justice investigation into all of it. It’s been years of crisis, after at least a generation of silencing the voices of abuse survivors—often women—in a denomination where sometimes quieter, often less valued day-to-day work is shouldered by women faithfully serving in nurseries, Sunday schools, camps, women’s ministry, and yes, in some pulpits.
As a faithful, United Methodist teen in the 1990s, there was a period in which I thought I was receiving a call to ministry. I spoke to my associate pastor, and she was encouraging but also suggested I give it some time, see how strong the call felt as I learned and grew into adulthood. But I felt a great pull inside me—God was such a solace to me and wouldn’t it be wonderful to share that and offer support to others in the model of my patient, fun pastor?
Feeling like I was letting out a burning secret, I confided in a friend that I thought I was being pulled toward ministry. We’d both started attending a Bible study at a nearby evangelical church. He gently, with pity on his face, let me know I must be mistaken. Only men could be called into the ministry. He was trying to spare me. He loved me as much as he was dear to me, and years later, he’s apologized many times for the wrong and hurtful ideas he accepted as a young man.
But at the time, this notion cut me open and doubt flooded in. Doubt in myself, doubt in a religion that could allow such cherry-picking of ideas. I wondered if this sense of calling had been an illusion, and with it, whatever I’d thought provoked it. I spent years at college studying the Bible and my questions multiplied until my faith was gone.
I don’t blame my friend. If my faith could be so injured with a few words and a lot of Bible reading, it was going to fracture eventually. We were also both products of the time, not of the evangelical movement, but sideswiped by it.
The same year we graduated from high school, 1998, was when SBC voted to adopt a declaration that women should “graciously submit” to their husbands. As part of a backlash against gender-inclusive Bible translations and feminism in broader culture, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood had been evangelizing complementarianism and women’s submission for over a decade.
We weren’t of that world, but its drive to define roles for women trickled out to us anyway.
Last year I was in attendance at SBC’s annual meeting in Anaheim, California, covering the church’s response to Guidepost Solution’s external investigation of SBC. So I happened to be in the room when Rick Warren approached an open mic and gave what felt like a swan song. He stood before SBC messengers with his church up for disfellowship and reminded the assembled pastors and believers that in its time, Saddleback had baptized 56,631 new believers, sent 26,869 members overseas for missions, seen 78,157 members sign Saddleback's covenant, planted thousands of churches and trained 1.1 million pastors. This was more than all Southern Baptist seminaries put together, he noted.
The message was that SBC had more to lose ousting Saddleback than Saddleback would lose exiting SBC.
I happened to need to shuttle my 11-year-old daughter between camp and an appointment this week as SBC messengers considered the place of women clergy. This meant, as footage streamed on my phone and I drove, my kid watched and was in charge of helping record when I called for it. She wound up listening in, a disgusted look on her face.
After SBC’s initial vote reasserting the prohibition on women in lead pastoral roles, she told me, “Well, they’re gonna lose business.”
I tweeted her words, and predictably, a since-deleted troll account demanded biblical justification for women’s pastoral leadership. I was busy moving kids around and before I could answer, pastor-turned-investigative reporter Joshua Pease replied with Romans 16, which details greetings to Phoebe, an early church deacon, Priscilla and Aquila, Paul’s “co-laborers in Christ Jesus.” Down the line are others, Mary, the early apostle Junia (long mis-gendered as Junias). Another man tweeted to educate our troll about the gender-neutral usage of Greek terms and the etymology of a term used for female deacons.
I popped back online later to discover my emotional labor had been done for me by generous men willing to share their patience and knowledge.
Still, I’ve seen a mix of hurt from women who dedicated their lives to the church and wound up being left to cope, alone, either with abuse their male pastors refused to confront or ostracized for daring to want to serve. I understand the sting, after years of dedication and love for the church, of being cast aside.
I’ve seen plenty defending SBC quoting I Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” It is a verse I’ve contemplated far too often. But then, in online Christian spaces, I’ve seen an outflow of contextualization, asking why we aren’t expected to follow the rest of the verses in that chapter—men forced to raise their hands to praise, prohibiting women from wearing jewelry? Why so much focus on silencing women?
I can’t help but see the influence of
, whose The Making of Biblical Womanhood lent a historian’s eye to the period in which portions of the Bible were written. She documented how in years around the apostle Paul’s time, Roman laws had been enacted limiting women’s wealth, precipitating protests by women, and then ensuing pushback exerting male authority over women. (All this reminds me of SBC’s buckling down about women in the ‘90s in response to feminist strides.)Barr, an American history professor at Baylor University, notes an ancient rhetorical device—quoting a faulty argument then refuting it—and hypothesizes that some of what so often gets quoted as Biblical directive in 1 Corinthians, for example, could really be restatement of an argument about to be refuted. “What if Paul was so concerned that Christians in Corinth were imposing their own [Roman] cultural restrictions on women that he called them on it?”
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