Southern Baptist effort to fully ban women pastors is narrowly rejected

Opponents of the amendment noted that there are only a few hundred SBC churches with women in any type of pastoral position — typically assistant pastors or pastors to women or children — out of 47,000 SBC churches, and that the issue should be handled on a case-by-case basis. They pointed to an overwhelming Tuesday vote that ruled an Alexandria, Va., church out of “cooperation” after the staff said they would be comfortable hiring a woman as lead pastor.

The 14 million-member convention, the country’s second-largest faith group, has been shifting to the right since a conservative insurgency in the 1980s. Until the 1960s, there were as many women in Southern Baptist seminaries as there were in liberal seminaries.

The Rev. Greg Perkins, a California pastor and president of the National African American Fellowship, a network of about 4,000 SBC churches, told The Washington Post earlier Wednesday that passage of the amendment would be a blow.

“This will be a time of prayer and then contemplation and then decision-making. … There are a lot who now will think very carefully about their continued engagement, and that breaks my heart,” Perkins said.

Perkins, whose church includes a female pastor of discipleship and family life, said he believes in the “biblical mandate” for men to be lead pastor of churches.

“I don’t want us to drift into this unbiblical space, but I don’t know if we’re best served by hanging our hat on this matter,” he said.

The Rev. Mike Law, the Arlington, Va., pastor who proposed the amendment, told representatives in the massive convention center Wednesday that the issue is about following scripture.

“Our culture may see this prohibition as harsh, but our God is all wise, and he wrote his word for the flourishing of men and woman,” he said. “Let’s be exceptionally clear — we gladly celebrate the myriad of women who serve the church in many ways, and we are so grateful. This is not about women in ministry. It’s about women in the pastoral office.”

Scheduled for later Wednesday at the annual SBC meeting was a vote on a measure opposing in vitro fertilization as “dehumanizing” and asking “the government to restrain” the practice, a sign of the broadening effort by conservative evangelicals and the antiabortion movement following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

The vote on “On the Ethical Realities of Reproductive Technologies and the Dignity of the Human Embryo” was one of a raft of resolutions, which are understood as statements of Southern Baptist belief; they are not rules that come with enforcement mandates.

Last year the representatives voted overwhelmingly to expel churches that had women in top leadership pastoral roles — including the Rev. Rick Warren’s massive Saddleback Church, one of the biggest in the SBC. Supporters say this year’s amendment is needed so it’s clear women can’t serve in lesser roles such as women’s ministry pastor or children’s pastor.

The Tuesday vote said the First Baptist Church of Alexandria was “not in friendly cooperation” with the SBC because it has a “pastor for women and children.”

First Baptist Pastor for Children and Women Kim Eskridge told The Post on Wednesday that her church was reported to the SBC by nearby pastor Law, of Arlington Baptist Church.

“My contention has always been that this is something we can agree to disagree on and keep the main thing the main thing, which is sharing the message with the Lord,” said Eskridge, whose church predates the existence of the SBC and has typical Sunday attendance of around 800.

J.D. Greear, a North Carolina pastor and former SBC president, told The Post on Tuesday that the debate is semantic and that efforts to add mandates and rules hampers cooperation among SBC churches and distracts from evangelizing.

“This is a ham-fisted sledgehammer of a solution for a problem that isn’t what people say it is,” said Greear. “This is what’s tragic — in a time when I feel we ought to be celebrating women as leaders and seeing better pathways for them, we just keep tightening this thing and spending all this energy on it. It’s discouraging. I’m looking around, and we’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

The vote on female pastors served as the coda of a period that began in the 1980s, when conservatives took charge of the convention and began to limit the formal roles of women.

In 1984, the SBC passed a resolution saying scripture teaches that “women are not in public worship to assume a role of authority over men.” In 1998, they amended its Faith and Message statement — the SBC’s statement of faith — to say a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership, as “the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

In 2000, it amended the Faith and Message statement to say “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”