During its two-day annual meeting that began on Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed the ouster of its largest congregation that ordained women and began a process to amend its constitution to ensure its church membership “does not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”
Saddleback Church in Southern California was kicked out of the SBC in February 2023 for ordaining three of its longtime female staff members as ministers in 2021. Saddleback founder and former pastor Rick Warren appealed the church’s ejection at the 2023 conference.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler rebutted Warren’s appeal, arguing that the issue of women’s ordination is a matter of “biblical commitment” and “biblical authority” that allows no room for compromise within the SBC. About 88% of messengers – Southern Baptists’ language for delegates – then voted to reaffirm the church’s expulsion.
The proposed amendment to exclude any church that hires a woman as a pastor must be voted on again at next year’s annual meeting. The SBC requires a majority vote at two consecutive annual meetings to amend its constitution.
These battles over women in ordained ministry in the SBC are not new.
As someone who grew up and was ordained Southern Baptist while I was a religion professor at a Christian college, I am not surprised to see what has happened in the SBC annual meeting this week. I’ve researched Southern Baptists for 25 years, and I’m aware that, since the SBC’s founding in 1845, Southern Baptists have had a complicated history with women, who have often been maligned and mistreated within the denomination.
The ‘woman question’
Historian Elizabeth Flowers explains that matters of women’s roles as preachers, teachers and deacons were frequent subjects of disagreement among Baptists from the denomination’s beginnings.
Women were not allowed to serve as messengers to the SBC until 1918.
When Southern Baptist women formed a national organization to support missionary work in 1888, they had to hold their first meeting in a Methodist church down the street from the Baptist church where the SBC was meeting. Until the 20th century, only men gave the missionary organization’s report to the SBC.
Indeed, women in the U.S. did not have the right to vote at that time. The SBC’s practices certainly reflected larger social norms around gender, but its reasoning was also theological. Those beliefs formed a basis for gender hierarchy that ultimately triumphed over more moderate egalitarianism in the late 20th century.
Southern Baptist controversy
In the 1970s, greater numbers of women entered the six Southern Baptist seminaries, many professing a calling to the pastorate, even though most churches still refused to ordain them.
I was a student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1980s. By that time, women were about a third of the student body, although very few women were professors.
That was also a time when fundamentalists launched their takeover of the SBC. In addition to the seminaries, the convention owns numerous publishing and missionary agencies worth billions of dollars.
