Southern Baptists Confirm Rejection of Women Pastors
Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans voted on Tuesday in support of a ban on women serving as pastors.. Photo: Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser/Associated Press By Francis X. Rocca June 14, 2023 10:57 am ET Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., overwhelmingly rebuffed one of their most prominent ministers to reaffirm a prohibition on women serving as pastors. Delegates to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting this week in New Orleans, voted to deny appeals by California’s Saddleback Church and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., to overturn their expulsions from the SBC. Both churches were “disfellowshipped” by the SBC’s executive committee in February because they had appointed women as pastors, a r
Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans voted on Tuesday in support of a ban on women serving as pastors..
Photo: Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser/Associated Press
Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., overwhelmingly rebuffed one of their most prominent ministers to reaffirm a prohibition on women serving as pastors.
Delegates to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting this week in New Orleans, voted to deny appeals by California’s Saddleback Church and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., to overturn their expulsions from the SBC. Both churches were “disfellowshipped” by the SBC’s executive committee in February because they had appointed women as pastors, a role that the denomination’s statement of faith states is reserved for men according to the teaching of the Bible. The vote counts were 9,437 to 1,212 against Saddleback and 9,700 to 806 against Fern Creek Baptist.
The votes, taken Tuesday with results announced the next morning, raises the possibility that other Baptist churches where women serve as pastors will eventually leave the SBC. Nearly 2,000 of the SBC’s 47,000 affiliated churches have female pastors on staff, according to the Rev. Rick Warren, founder and former leader of Saddleback.
Beth Allison Barr, a professor of history at Baylor University, said she thought it was likely that such churches would eventually form a new body of Baptists separate from the SBC.
Stacie Wood became a teaching pastor at Saddleback Church last year, and her husband, Andy Wood, was selected as lead pastor.
Photo: Allison Dinner/Associated Press
Saddleback was the second-largest congregation in the SBC, and has 14 campuses in California and four abroad. After Warren retired in 2022, the church selected Andy Wood as its lead pastor, and his wife, Stacie Wood, became a teaching pastor.
On Tuesday afternoon in New Orleans, Warren called on the approximately 12,000 delegates representing more than 13 million Southern Baptists to observe the SBC’s tradition of autonomy for individual churches by agreeing to disagree on the issue of women’s role in the church.
“Since Southern Baptists have always allowed disagreement on doctrines, including the essential doctrines of salvation, why should this one issue cancel our fellowship?” he said.
Earlier in the afternoon, the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham, who has served as a pastor at Fern Creek Baptist church since 1990, made a similar appeal to the delegates.
“We don’t all interpret every scripture the same way. We believe that the Bible allows women to serve in ways in which all of you do not agree. But we should still be able to partner together,” she said.
The Rev. Linda Barnes Popham argued to overturn her church’s expulsion from the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans on Tuesday.
Photo: Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser/Associated Press
The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offered separate rebuttals to Warren and Popham, drawing loud applause several times.
“We do not seek to invade the autonomy of any local church,” Mohler said. “The issue of a woman serving in the pastorate is an issue of fundamental biblical authority that does violate both the doctrine and the order of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
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The delegates were scheduled to vote on Wednesday on a proposal to enshrine the prohibition against women pastors in the SBC’s constitution. That amendment is opposed by the SBC’s executive committee on the grounds that the exclusively male nature of the role is already set forth in the statement of faith, adopted by the denomination in 2000.
In other business, delegates on Tuesday voted 7,531 to 3,458 to re-elect the Rev. Bart Barber as president of the SBC, in a race that was seen as a referendum on the body’s response to sex abuse. Barber’s opponent, the Rev. Mike Stone, had criticized plans to include those who have been credibly accused but not convicted of abuse in a database that churches will be able to use for vetting job candidates and volunteers.
On Wednesday, the SBC was scheduled to hear a report from the head of its anti-abuse task force and vote on whether to renew the task force’s mandate for another year.
Write to Francis X. Rocca at [email protected]
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