Formal ban on female pastors fails, but new Southern Baptist Convention president makes one thing crystal clear



Messengers met this week in Indianapolis for the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, electing Clint Pressley their new president. They also took up the controversial matter of female pastors.

While the Executive Committee recently affirmed Article VI of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which limits the office of pastor to men "as qualified by Scripture," a 2023 estimate put the number of female pastors in cooperating Southern Baptist churches at over 1,840.

The disfellowship of such churches continues apace the emergence of new female pastors, but some Southern Baptists sought to simplify matters with a vote at the annual meeting.

The effort did not ultimately go their way.

Arlington Baptist Church Pastor Mike Law's proposed constitutional amendment to the SBC Constitution, which would have formally prohibited the affirmation, appointment, or employment of a woman "as a pastor of any kind," failed in a close vote on Wednesday.

The amendment needed a 66.7% majority vote to pass — which messengers managed last year in New Orleans. In Indianapolis, it fell short, capturing only 61%.

'We are just as complementarian as we were before that vote ever came into play.'

After noting he supported the amendment, the newly elected president made abundantly clear the SBC's view on female pastors.

"The constitutional amendment, what is known as the Law Amendment, was there to provide some clarity," said Clint Pressley, reported the Baptist Press. "That's what it was given to us for, what it was voted on about. But it's not necessary [in order] for our convention of churches to maintain a real sense of complementarianism. We are just as complementarian as we were before that vote ever came into play."

Complementarianism maintains that men and women are equal in personhood, but that God created them for different roles.

"I was for the Law Amendment. I thought it provided really great clarity. I have brothers that are just as theologically robust as I would like to be myself, that were against it," continued Pressley. "Then we have maintained a real sense of God’s good design, not only in marriage, but how He's given us to live as men and women."

Pressley underscored that while messengers walk away with the amendment not passing, the SBC has "not abandoned biblical truth. At all. So, you can be confident as a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, as a member of a church within the Convention that holds to the BF&M that they are doctrinally robust."

Former SBC president J.D. Grear said of the decision, "We made the right call on this amendment, since passing it would have too rigidly enforced uniformity in ways that are out of character with our principles of cooperation. A friend of mine compared getting the right balance on this issue to putting together a piece of furniture. The IKEA instructions always warn you, 'Don't overtighten the screws.'"

Those unconvinced the Law amendment would have been redundant or ruinous — as Great previously suggested — were not the only ones miffed over the result.

Leftists outside the SBC suggested Southern Baptists need to do more than simply kill such an amendment: They must give in to the egalitarian creep.

'Even without a 66% vote, the Southern Baptist Church has attempted to devalue the very women who God has called to further the Gospel.'

The progressive organization Baptist Women in Ministry said in a statement, "Baptist Women in Ministry offers appreciation to all the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who voted against the Law amendment BECAUSE of their commitment to support and affirm women serving as pastors of all kinds in the SBC."

The group added, "Decades ago, the SBC codified its ideological position of disregarding God's call on women in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. Therefore, the amendment considered today was not constructed on its own merit since the basis for it was already decided. Instead, women in ministry were used as props for the display of extreme conservativism (sic) in order to advance the power of a faction within the SBC."

Molly Shoulta Tucker, the pronoun-providing pastor of the progressive Ridgewood Baptist Church, noted in the Courier Journal, "Even without a 66% vote, the Southern Baptist Church has attempted to devalue the very women who God has called to further the Gospel. Instead of believing women, or even offering a humble 'I don't know,' the Southern Baptist Church has said, 'We know. (And it's not you.)'"

Messengers signaled to Tucker and other progressives that despite the result, SBC is far from caving on the issue.

On Tuesday, messengers voted 6,759 to 563 to remove the First Baptist Church of Alexandria over its support for female pastors, reported the Associated Press.

The now-disfellowed church is home to a female pastor for children and women.

"We find no joy in making this recommendation, but have formed the opinion that the church's egalitarian beliefs regarding the office of pastor do not closely identify with the convention's adopted statement of faith," said Jonathan Sams, chair of the SBC's Credentials Committee.

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Former SBC president warns a Southern Baptist ban on women pastors will yield 'A LOT of collateral damage'



The Southern Baptist Convention is holding its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week. Messengers will vote on an enumerated sixth item to Article III, Paragraph 1 of the SBC Constitution effectively banning female pastors and "disfellowshipping" churches that have them.

While many Southern Baptists regard the amendment as biblically justified and a means to maximize unity among member churches, others have expressed concern about the possibility of alienating minority members.

Among those in the latter camp is former SBC President J.D. Greear, who warned Thursday that the proposed amendment "rewrites the rules of our cooperation and attempts to fix, with a sledge hammer, something that isn't really broken."

Background

According to the Baptist Press, a June 2023 report alleged with "99% confidence level and a 2% margin of error" that there are 1,844 female pastors serving in 1,225 SBC churches.

Volunteer investigators examined an allegedly randomized sample of 3,847 churches and found that there were 99 Southern Baptist churches with female pastors and a total of 149 female pastors. They then extrapolated that figure to the total number of cooperating Southern Baptist churches, now over 46,900.

Hoping to arrest this trend — having previously observed signs of it at five nearby churches — Pastor Mike Law of Arlington Baptist Church introduced a motion at the 2022 SBC Annual Meeting in Anaheim seeking that Article III, Paragraph 1 of the SBC Constitution be amended to state that churches would "not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind."

Law stressed in a letter to the Executive Committee that "ushering women into the pastoral office in Southern Baptist churches unsettles our Convention's unity."

Extra to his appeal to SBC unity, Law cited several biblical passages to justify precluding women from becoming pastors.

"Devaluing our doctrine will not lead to faithfulness or fruitfulness. Rather, if we learn anything from history, embracing empty doctrines will soon empty our Convention too," wrote Law. "Consider the exodus among the liberal and mainline denominations. They abided with women as pastors for a time, then they embraced the practice — thereby abandoning sound doctrine — and so began their rapid decline."

While the Executive Committee indicated it affirmed Article VI of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which limits the office of pastor to men "as qualified by Scripture," it suggested the amendment was redundant, reported the Baptist Press.

"Our beliefs are most appropriately stated in our adopted statement of faith rather than in our constitution and therefore opposes a suggested amendment to SBC Constitution, Article III, which would unnecessarily restate the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, Article VI," said the EC.

Nevertheless, the EC put the motion to messengers at last year's meeting in New Orleans.

After Texas Pastor Juan Sanchez of the High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin clarified that "we can say only men are to be pastors" but that women nevertheless "have a vital place in the life of the church," Law's motion received the necessary two-thirds vote by messengers, making the next step the securing of another two-thirds vote at the 2024 annual meeting.

If the so-called "Law Amendment" passes this week, then the convention will only deem a church to be in friendly cooperation and sympathetic with its purposes and work if, extra to its satisfaction of the pre-existing criteria, it has only male pastors and elders.

Reactions

Responses to the proposed Law Amendment have been mixed.

SBC Pastor Brett Maragni, founding pastor of Harvest Jacksonville, opposes the the Law Amendment, stressing that if it passes, "the SBC will, in effect, take on a new form as a denomination. And not for the better. We will officially abandon our historical identity and become a creedal people."

Rob Collingsworth, the director of strategic relationships for Criswell College, who served on the SBC Resolutions Committee in 2023, recently blasted the Law Amendment, claiming it inconsistently prioritizes title; it is exclusionary; and it signals a transformation of the SBC into an "enforcement mechanism for our churches" as opposed to its traditional role as a "guardrail for the work of our entities."

Dr. Heath Lambert, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, was initially uncertain about the amendment but changed his mind after taking into account the apparent lack of institutional clarity about who is eligible for the office of pastor; the populist revolt in the SBC against what is perceived to be an egalitarian creep; and the "biblical answer" to the question of whether women can serve as pastors.

The website for the Law Amendment warns that "once a denomination has female pastors, it's usually just a matter of time until they ordain homosexual pastors."

"The American Baptist Churches USA allowed female pastors in 1985 and then homosexual pastors in 1999," said the Law Amendment site. "The Episcopal Church USA went from having female pastors in 1976 to homosexual pastors in 1996. For the ELCA, it was 1988 to 2009. For the PCUSA, it was 1956 to 2011. And after the United Methodists allowed female pastors in 1956, they are now hemorrhaging over homosexual ordination, and it’s the conservatives who are leaving."

"If we cannot be clear and unashamed about what the Bible says a pastor is now, then there is little hope that we will stand firm on other teachings of God’s Word that are out of step with the standards of the world," added the site.

Greear weighs in

Last year, Greear noted that "some churches have chosen to appoint women as lead pastors, which appears to be a clear denial of complementarianism. For churches like this, perhaps we should recognize that they are not closely identified with us."

He noted, however, that in certain cases, at issue is not a violation of complementarianism but rather "nomenclature," as in the case of a church calling a Sunday school teacher a "children's pastor."

In addition his attempt to introduce some nuance, Greear downplayed the issue, suggesting that the "reality is that even the largest estimates of churches with female pastors on staff make for a very small — and, in fact, shrinking — fraction of our Convention."

With the vote imminent, Greear reiterated his sense last week that the "Law Amendment is unwise, unnecessary, and will have significant negative ramifications."

"The church I pastor practices and celebrates complementarianism — in this context this means that as we believe pastor, elder, and overseer are the same office, every person called 'pastor' in our church is, and always will be, a man," wrote Greear. "My objection is that it rewrites the rules of our cooperation and attempts to fix, with a sledge hammer, something that isn’t really broken."

According to Greear, Southern Baptist messengers already have the means to oust wayward churches that have female senior pastors from the convention, as they did with Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and a handful of other churches last year. The Christian Post reported that 88% of messengers voted to remove Saddleback Church and 92% voted to remove Fern Creek Baptish Church for similarly having a female pastor.

"It's become clear that this 'fix' will yield A LOT of collateral damage," wrote Greear. "There are churches who genuinely embrace complementarianism even as they differ in some of its applications. Several of our minority leaders (like the National African American Fellowship and California Southern Baptist Convention Executive Director Pete Ramirez) have told us as much. For Hispanics in particular, it really is an issue of nomenclature."

The Associated Press indicated that some Asian and Hispanic churches may be at risk of disfellowship, as they have women working in assistant pastor roles. Others refer to women as pastors although they are in fact operating in other faith-based capacities.

Besides suggesting that churches where women aren't effectively pastors but are nonetheless referred to as such could be ousted from the convention, Greear insinuated that this action will grease a slippery slope for further amendments.

"Who knows what that one will be? The multi-side model? Closed communion? Exroverted women teaching in a mixed Monday evening Bible study?" added Greear. "I’ve been crystal clear on complementarianism and will continue to be. I don’t have to jump through some hoop to prove it, and neither do you."

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