The Southern Baptist Convention is holding its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week, and messengers will vote on the sixth item listed in Article 3, Section 1.
SBC Constitution In effect, it banned women from being pastors.Expulsion“The churches that have them.”
While many Southern Baptists believe the amendment is biblically valid and a means to maximize unity among member churches, some have expressed concern about the possibility of alienating minority believers.
The latter camp includes former SBC president J.D. Greer,
Warned On Thursday, the committee criticized the proposed amendments as an attempt to “rewrite the rules of our cooperation and forcefully fix something that is not actually broken.”
background
according to Baptist Press, June 2023 Report With a “99% confidence level and 2% margin of error,” it claimed that there are 1,844 female pastors serving in 1,225 SBC churches.
Volunteer researchers surveyed a random sample of 3,847 churches and found that there were 99 Southern Baptist churches with female pastors, for a total of 149 female pastors. They then extrapolated that figure to the total number of cooperating Southern Baptist churches, which now totals more than 46,900.
Pastor Mike Rowe of Arlington Baptist Church has previously seen signs of this trend at five nearby churches and he wants to stop it.
A motion was filed At the 2022 SBC Annual Conference in Anaheim, they call for amending Article 3, Section 1 of the SBC Constitution to state that the church “will not approve, ordain, or employ women as pastors of any kind.”
The law is emphasized
letter “The admission of women into the Southern Baptist pastoral ministry would undermine the unity of our synod,” he told the executive committee.
In addition to appealing for unity among the Southern Vatican Society, Reverend Law cited several Bible verses to justify the ban on women becoming pastors.
“Slight neglect of doctrine does not produce faithfulness or fruitfulness. In fact, if history teaches us anything, it is that as soon as we embrace empty doctrine, our synods become empty as well,” Law wrote. “Consider the departures from liberal and mainline denominations. They accepted women pastors for a time, then embraced the practice, abandoned sound doctrine, and began to decline rapidly.”
The Executive Committee,
Baptist Faith and Message 2000He suggested the amendment limiting the pastoral office to men “who possess the biblical qualifications” was redundant. report Baptist Press.
“We oppose the proposed amendment to Article 3 of the SBC Constitution because our beliefs are best stated in our adopted Statement of Faith, not in the Constitution, which would unnecessarily repeat Article 6 of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” the EC said.
Nonetheless, the EC tabled the motion to its emissaries at a meeting in New Orleans last year.
Following the example of Pastor Juan Sanchez of High Point Baptist Church in Austin, Texas
Clarified Law’s argument that “it may be said that only men should be pastors” but that women “have an important place in the life of the church” meant that his motion received the necessary two-thirds vote from the emissaries, and the next step was to secure a female pastor. Another two-thirds vote At the 2024 Annual General Meeting.
If the so-called “legal amendment” is passed this week, the convention will consider churches to cooperate amicably and be in sympathy with the church’s aims and activities only if, in addition to meeting existing standards, their pastors and elders are exclusively male.
reaction
Reactions to the proposed legal changes have been mixed.
SBC Pastor Brett Malani, founding pastor of Harvest Jacksonville;
be against He emphasized that if the proposed law passes, “the SBC will, in effect, be re-incorporated as a denomination, and that’s not a good thing. We will formally abandon our historical identity and become a people with beliefs.”
Rob Collingsworth, director of strategic relationships at Criswell College, served on the 2023 SBC Resolutions Committee.
Recently blown up They argue that the bill consistently does not prioritize titles, is exclusionary, and signals the SBC’s transformation into “the executive body of our churches” as opposed to its traditional role as “the guardrail for the work of our associations.”
Dr. Heath Lambert, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, was initially unsure about the proposed amendment.
He had a change of heart The decision comes after taking into account a clear lack of institutional clarity about who is eligible to hold the priesthood, a popular revolt in Vatican South Africa against what is seen as an inroad in egalitarianism, and the “biblical answer” to the question of whether women can serve as pastors.
of
Website “When a denomination has a female pastor, it is usually only a matter of time before a gay pastor is ordained,” the proposed law warns.
“The American Baptist Church allowed women pastors in 1985, then gay pastors in 1999,” the legal reform website states. “The Episcopal Church allowed women pastors in 1976, then gay pastors in 1996. The Episcopal Church allowed women pastors from 1988 to 2009, and the PCUSA from 1956 to 2011. And the United Methodist Church allowed women pastors in 1956, but is now experiencing an exodus of members over the ordination of gay pastors, and it is conservatives who are leaving the church.”
“If we cannot clearly and unashamedly understand what the Bible says about pastors today, there is little hope for us to stand firm on other teachings of God’s Word that fall outside the world’s standards,” the site added.
Grier gives his opinion
Last year, Greer
I got it. “Some churches choose to ordain women as senior pastors, which seems like a clear rejection of complementarianism. We should recognize that these churches are probably not in our league.”
But he noted that in certain cases, such as when a church refers to a Sunday school teacher as a “children’s pastor,” the issue is not one of violation of complementarianism but rather “the name.”
Greer tried to be nuanced but downplayed the issue, suggesting that “the reality is that even the highest estimates of the number of churches with women pastors represent a tiny fraction of our synod and, in fact, is declining.”
As the vote looms, Greer
Repeated His view last week was that “legal change would be unwise, unnecessary and would have significant adverse effects.”
“The church where I pastor practices and celebrates complementarianism, and because we believe that pastors, elders, and overseers are the same office in this context, everyone who is called a ‘pastor’ in our church will always be male,” Greer wrote. “My objection is that it is an attempt to rewrite the rules of our cooperation and take a sledgehammer to fix something that isn’t actually broken.”
Greer said Southern Baptist preachers already have the tools to expel erring churches from the convention that have female senior pastors.
Like they did at Saddleback Church A church in Lake Forest, California, and several other churches last year removed their female pastors. The Christian Post reported that 88% of voters voted to remove Saddleback Church, which also has a female pastor, and 92% voted to remove Fern Creek Baptist Church, which also has a female pastor.
“It is clear that this ‘amendment’ will have a lot of collateral damage,” Greer writes. “Some churches have wholeheartedly embraced complementarianism, with some differences in how they apply it. Some minority leaders, such as the National Association of African-Americans and Pete Ramirez, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention of California, have said so. For Hispanics in particular, it’s really a matter of name.”
Associated Press
Shown Some Asian and Hispanic churches risk being expelled for having women serving as associate pastors, while other churches call women pastors but actually serve in other faith-based capacities.
Greer suggested that churches where women are called to be pastors when in fact they are not could be excluded from the synod, and implied that the move would pave the way for further reform.
“Who knows what it will be? Will it be a multifaceted model? Closed Communion? Will an extroverted woman teach a mixed Monday night Bible study?” Greer added. “I’ve been very clear about complementarianism and I always will. I don’t have to do anything difficult to prove it, and neither do you.”
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