The letter in October got here as a shock to Linda Barnes Popham, who had been the pastor of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for 30 years, the primary lady to guide her congregation. She had served in ministry even longer, since she began as a pianist at age 16.
However now, she learn within the letter, officers of the Southern Baptist Conference had obtained a grievance about her church being led by a lady. The denomination was investigating, it mentioned.
She replied at size, itemizing her {qualifications} and her church’s interpretation of the Bible that affirmed her eligibility to guide. Church deacons, together with males, rallied to her protection.
Conference officers determined to expel her church anyway, alongside with four other congregations which have feminine pastors, together with one of the vital prominentin the nation, Saddleback.
“I by no means believed this may occur,” Ms. Barnes Popham mentioned of the transfer to expel her church, as she ready to attraction the expulsion Tuesday afternoon earlier than 1000’s of delegates on the annual S.B.C. conference in New Orleans. “Why would you need to silence the voices of the trustworthy church buildings? Why?”
Nonetheless the delegates vote on her attraction, the bigger message is obvious: there’s a motion within the Southern Baptist Conference, a denomination that’s typically a bellwether for evangelical America, to purge girls from its management.
The appropriate wing of the Southern Baptists, the biggest Protestant denomination in America, is now — like conservatives extra broadly — cracking down on what it sees as harmful liberal drift. Most individuals within the denomination have lengthy believed that the workplace of head pastor needs to be reserved for males. However an ultraconservative faction with a loud on-line presence goes additional, urgent for ideological purity and arguing that feminine pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.
Some ultraconservatives are actually pushing for investigations and expulsions of the church buildings whose practices differ, like Fern Creek.
The combat over the place of girls within the church, lengthy contentious, has been escalating as American evangelicalism more and more fuses with Republican politics and a vocal ultraconservative minority pushes for energy.
The crackdown comes at a second when the nation is broadly reexamining girls’s rights, a yr after the Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade. For the Southern Baptists, it additionally comes as victims’ advocates proceed to press the denomination to take motion following devastating experiences of sexual abuse of girls and kids, and are met with resistance from some males within the group. .
Because the conference acquired underway Monday in New Orleans, Mike Legislation, a Virginia pastor, pushed for his proposed modification to the S.B.C. structure that will additional limit the position of girls in management, by stating {that a} church might be Southern Baptist provided that it “doesn’t affirm, appoint, or make use of a lady as a pastor of any sort.”
Greater than 2,000 male pastors and professors signed a letter in help of the proposed modification earlier than the conference started. Church officers selected Monday to advance the proposal to a full ground vote this week, at the same time as they cautioned that they opposed it, arguing that it was pointless given the denomination’s current theological positions. The modification would should be handed twice, in consecutive years, to enter impact.
Some Southern Baptists view feminine leaders as “as an early harbinger of a raft of different modifications,” mentioned Joshua Abbotoy, whose church left the denomination final yr due to issues a couple of liberal drift. Mr. Abbotoy is the managing director of New Founding, a conservative group whose journal revealed an analysis over the weekend estimating that there have been greater than 1,800 feminine pastors serving in S.B.C. church buildings.
As Mr. Abbotoy sees it, letting go of the idea in some distinct roles for women and men calls into query whether or not “the human individual is differentiated between two genders” in any respect, and results in broader questions on sexuality and gender.
Rick Warren, Saddleback’s founding pastor and the writer of one of many best-selling books of all time, has lengthy been a hero inside a practice that prioritizes church progress and electrical preaching. However his church was ousted from the denomination in February as a result of he had named a husband and spouse as his successors.
Mr. Warren, who can be interesting his church’s elimination Tuesday, in latest weeks has mounted a protection not simply of his congregation however of his understanding of the Baptist identification and evangelicalism extra broadly.
In an open letter addressed “to all Southern Baptists,” Mr. Warren emphasised the denomination’s historical past of rejecting the sort of formal creeds that bind many different traditions. “This can be a vote to affirm the God-given freedom of each Baptist to interpret Scripture as a Baptist — by saying no to those that deny that freedom,” he wrote.
Traditionally, Southern Baptists have given precedence to the autonomy of particular person church buildings, and have seen their denomination as an affiliation relatively than a hierarchical group.
Meredith Stone, the manager director of Baptist Ladies in Ministry, worries that appeals to church autonomy will not be sufficient to stop a fundamentalist takeover of the denomination just like the one which occurred throughout the Reagan administration.
“This was the argument we have been making 40 years in the past that was unsuccessful,” she mentioned.
Ms. Stone sees a sample within the denomination’s periodic retrenchments over girls’s points. Her group was shaped in 1983 to help girls in church management; the following yr, the conference handed a resolution stating that ladies might not serve in “pastoral capabilities.”
“It’s at all times one thing the place girls will achieve after which proper after, there’s a response from the conference,” she mentioned.
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an influential voice within the denomination, was on the committee that revised the Southern Baptist assertion of religion in 2000, including an express assertion that “the workplace of pastor is restricted to males as certified by Scripture.”
“Doctrinal readability was wanted,” Dr. Mohler mentioned in an interview final week.
“It’s excessive on the checklist of latest issues exactly as a result of it’s one of many points that has been an indication of creeping liberalism,” he mentioned, which he factors to as a motive different Protestant denominations have seen their numbers drop precipitously.
Membership in Southern Baptist Conference church buildings has been declining for greater than a decade, although with greater than 13 million members, it stays the biggest Protestant denomination in america.
At a breakfast Tuesday morning, Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor operating for president of the S.B.C., drummed up help for Mr. Legislation’s proposed modification. “Is it redundant? Sure,” he mentioned. “However it’s apparently obligatory.”
On the tables on the breakfast have been snazzy voter guides, a sign that conservatives have been treating the conference like a political marketing campaign, urging delegates to vote in opposition to Saddleback and Fern Creek.
It isn’t clear precisely what number of girls are pastors within the denomination; estimates vary from dozens to just about 2,000 when a variety of pastoral positions aside from senior pastor are included.
At difficulty is the very definition of “pastor,” and whether or not a ban on feminine pastors ought to prolong to titles like “kids’s pastor” or “girls’s pastor,” which have lengthy been seen as acceptable roles for girls as a result of they don’t seem to be instructing or in authority over grownup males.
Whereas the denomination as a complete is overwhelmingly white, Black girls are closely represented as pastors among the many church buildings which have feminine head pastors.
Along with Saddleback and Ms. Barnes Popham’s church, three different church buildings have been additionally expelled in February for having feminine pastors however selected to not attraction the choice. Two of these are led by Black girls; Minnie R. McGee Washington, the pastor of St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist Church in Baltimore, mentioned in a press release that she counted it “an honor and a privilege to have been ‘ousted’ from S.B.C.”
The expelled church buildings will proceed to function, however they may not be capable of determine themselves as affiliated with the Southern Baptist Conference or take part in its applications.
None of it made any sense to Ms. Barnes Popham. Her congregation was dynamic and energetic when many different S.B.C. church buildings have been stagnant. The Fern Creek Baptists baptize folks. They share their house with a Congolese church and Filipino congregation. They’re beginning an elementary faculty, and added showers for the homeless of their gymnasium, she mentioned.
On Monday evening, after Ms. Barnes Popham registered for the conference as a visitor to have the ability to deal with the denomination,
a person approached her and her supporters with a handout urging delegates to vote to eject church buildings with feminine pastors.
“I’m a kind of girls pastors,” she advised him. “We might be nice companions within the gospel.”
He disagreed. She was going a technique, and he was going one other, he mentioned.
She took his hand, addressed him by title and requested, “What are you going to do once we enter the gates of heaven collectively?”
