Southern Baptists Move to Purge Churches With Women Pastors
The October letter came as a shock to Linda Barnes Popham, a 30-year pastor of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, the first woman to lead her congregation. She was in the ministry even longer, since she started as a pianist at the age of 16.
But now, she read in the letter, Southern Baptist Convention officials had received a complaint that her church was led by a woman. The denomination was investigating, it said.
She answered at length, listing her qualifications and her church’s interpretation of the Bible that confirmed her eligibility to lead. Church deacons, including men, came to her aid.
Convention officials decided to evict her church anyway, along with four other congregations that have female pastors, including one of the most prominent in the country, Saddleback.
“I never thought this would happen,” Ms. Barnes Popham said of the move to evict her church as she prepared to appeal the eviction Tuesday afternoon in front of thousands of delegates at the annual SBC convention in New Orleans. “Why would you want to silence the voices of the faithful churches? Why?”
However the delegates vote on her call, the bigger message is clear: There is a movement in the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination often benchmarked against evangelical America, to purge women from its leadership.
The right wing of the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is now – like conservatives more broadly – cracking down on what it sees as a dangerous liberal drift. Most people in the denomination have long believed that the office of chief pastor should be reserved for men. But an ultra-conservative faction with a loud online presence goes further, insisting on ideological purity and arguing that female ministers herald acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.
Some ultra-conservatives are now pushing for investigations and evictions of churches whose practices differ, such as Fern Creek.
The long-contested battle for women’s place in the Church is escalating as American evangelicalism increasingly merges with Republican politics and a vocal ultra-conservative minority pushes for power.
The crackdown comes as the country is broadly reexamining women’s rights a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. For the Southern Baptists, it also comes as victims’ advocates continue to push for the denomination to take action after devastating reports of sexual abuse against women and children, and are met with resistance from some men in the organization.
As the convention kicked off Monday in New Orleans, Virginia pastor Mike Law pushed for his proposed amendment to the SBC constitution that would further limit women’s roles in leadership, stating that a church should be Southern Baptist only may be if she “confirms, appoints, or employs no woman as pastor of any kind.”
More than 2,000 male pastors and professors signed a letter in support of the proposed change before the convention began. Church officials decided on Monday to push the proposal forward to a full vote this week, even though they warned they opposed it, arguing it was unnecessary given the denomination’s existing theological positions. The amendment would have to be passed twice, in successive years, to take effect.
Some Southern Baptists see women leaders as “an early harbinger of a whole host of other changes,” said Joshua Abbotoy, whose church left the denomination last year over concerns about a liberal drift. Mr. Abbotoy is the managing director of New Founding, a conservative organization whose magazine is a analysis over the weekend estimated that more than 1,800 women pastors served in SBC churches.
As Mr Abbotoy sees it, the abandonment of belief in a number of different roles for men and women raises the question of whether “the human person distinguishes between two sexes at all”, and leads to broader questions about sexuality and gender.
Rick Warren, the founder of Saddleback and the author of one of the best-selling books of all time, has long been a hero of a tradition that prioritizes church growth and electric preaching. But his church was expelled from the denomination in February because he named a husband and wife as his successors.
Mr Warren, who is also appealing the removal of his church on Tuesday, has spent the last few weeks defending not only his congregation, but his understanding of Baptist identity and evangelicalism more broadly.
In a open letter addressed “to all Southern Baptists,” emphasized Mr. Warren the denomination’s history of rejecting the kind of formal creeds that bind many other traditions. “This is a vote to affirm the God-given freedom of every Baptist to interpret Scripture as a Baptist — by saying no to those who deny that freedom,” he wrote.
Historically, Southern Baptists have prioritized the autonomy of individual churches and have viewed their denomination as an association rather than a hierarchical organization.
Meredith Stone, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, is concerned that appeals to the church’s autonomy may not be enough to prevent a fundamentalist takeover of the denomination, as it did during the Reagan administration.
“This was the argument we made 40 years ago that was unsuccessful,” she said.
Ms. Stone sees a pattern in the denomination’s periodic cuts in women’s issues. Her organization was founded in 1983 to support women in church leadership; the following year, the convention passed one solution stating that women should not perform “pastoral functions”.
“It’s always something that benefits women and then right after that there’s a response from the convention,” she said.
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an influential voice in the denomination, sat on the committee that revised the Southern Baptist Statement of Faith in 2000, adding an explicit statement that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture.”
“Doctrinal clarity was needed,” said Dr. Mohler in an interview last week.
“It’s high on the list of contemporary concerns precisely because it’s one of the issues that are a sign of creeping liberalism,” he said, which he says is one reason why other Protestant denominations have seen their numbers drop suddenly.
Membership in Southern Baptist Convention churches has been declining for more than a decade, though it remains the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with over 13 million members.
Over a Tuesday morning breakfast, Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor who is running for president of the SBC, rallied support for Mr. Law’s proposed amendment. “Whether it is superfluous? Yes,’ he said. “But apparently it’s necessary.”
Hip voter guides lay on the breakfast tables, an indication that conservatives were treating the convention like a political campaign, urging delegates to vote against Saddleback and Fern Creek.
It is not exactly clear how many women minister in the denomination; estimates range from dozens to nearly 2,000 when a range of pastoral positions other than senior pastor are included.
At issue is the definition of “pastor” and whether a ban on female pastors should extend to titles such as “child pastor” or “woman pastor,” which have long been seen as appropriate roles for women because they lack teaching or authority over adult men.
While the denomination as a whole is predominantly white, black women are heavily represented as pastors among those churches that have female chief pastors.
In addition to Saddleback and Mrs. Barnes Popham’s church, three other churches were also evicted in February for having female pastors, but chose not to appeal the decision. Two of these are led by black women; Minnie R. McGee Washington, the pastor of St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist Church in Baltimore, said in a statement that she considered it “an honor and privilege to have been ‘expelled’ from SBC.”
The expelled churches will continue to function, but they will no longer be able to identify themselves as affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention or participate in its programs.
Mrs. Barnes Popham was puzzled. Her congregation was dynamic and active when many other SBC churches were stagnant. The Fern Creek Baptists baptize people. They share their space with a Congolese church and a Philippine congregation. They have started an elementary school and added showers for the homeless to their gymnasium, she said.
On Monday evening, after Mrs. Barnes Popham signed up as a guest at the convention to address the denomination, a man approached her and her supporters with a handout urging delegates to vote to remove churches with female pastors.
“I’m one of those women ministers,” she told him. “We could be great partners in the gospel.”
He disagreed. She went one way and he went the other way, he said.
She took his hand, addressed him by name, and asked, “What will you do when we enter the gates of heaven together?”