Messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting will be able to vote on an amendment that would deem congregations with female pastors as no longer in fellowship with the nation’s largest association of Protestant churches.
The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee decided on Monday that the amendment, which proposes clarifying the denomination’s constitution such that any church with a female pastor is deemed outside of “friendly cooperation,” will receive a vote from messengers assembled in New Orleans for the nationwide meeting. The Executive Committee will meanwhile stand in “opposition” to the amendment, contending that the move would merely restate existing positions in the constitution and other denominational documents.
Mike Law, the author of the amendment and the pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Arlington, Virginia, exhorted his fellow messengers to vote for the amendment in order to “affirm what Scripture teaches” with respect to qualifications for pastoral ministry.
“This amendment announces that our belief will be the basis of our behavior and cooperation as a convention,” the minister remarked in a statement posted on social media. “We must believe what the Bible teaches, and put those beliefs into practice. I encourage my fellow messengers to adopt this amendment and reaffirm our commitment to God’s Word.”
The Baptist Faith and Message, the doctrinal statement to which Southern Baptist churches adhere, confesses that “while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” The Southern Baptist Convention, unlike formal denominations, is composed of independently governed churches which pool their resources for efforts such as education and missions.
Some opponents of the Law amendment claim that further clarifying the denomination’s historic stance against female pastors would lead to secondary doctrinal positions serving as standards for “friendly cooperation.” One recent estimate from American Reformer nevertheless concluded that some 1,200 of the 48,000 churches in the denomination have at least one woman working in a pastoral position.
“One would think that the Baptist Faith and Message was clear enough to rule out women serving as pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention, but that has not kept hundreds of churches from defying it,” Dusty Deevers, the pastor of Grace Community Church of Elgin, Oklahoma, said in comments to The Sentinel. “Clearly we have systemic problems, and the Law amendment will send us down a course of correction that requires enforcement.”
The forthcoming vote on the amendment occurs as Rick Warren, the founder and former senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, asserts that his congregation was improperly disfellowshipped earlier this year after installing several women into pastoral roles, as noted in a previous report from The Sentinel. Warren claimed last week that the debate over female ordination has produced a “climate of fear” and “exclusion” among Southern Baptists.
Proponents of restoring Saddleback to “friendly cooperation” status distributed flyers at the meeting which contended that “using the threat of disfellowship to control who our churches hire on staff as pastors is an unconstitutional attempt to exercise authority over churches, associations, and state conventions.”
Those who support the amendment and oppose the reinstatement of Saddleback, on the other hand, note that denominations which start to affirm female pastors soon thereafter continue a drift into further theological liberalism. “This issue has been a canary in the coalmine for many denominations,” Law previously said in an article about his amendment.
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