{"id":25763,"date":"2026-06-24T03:13:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T21:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/how-women-pastors-became-public-enemy-no-1-in-the-sbc\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T03:13:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T21:43:45","slug":"how-women-pastors-became-public-enemy-no-1-in-the-sbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/how-women-pastors-became-public-enemy-no-1-in-the-sbc\/","title":{"rendered":"How women pastors became public enemy No. 1 in the SBC"},"content":{"rendered":"


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ORLANDO, Fla. (RNS) \u2014 In the first summer of this century, more than 11,000 Southern Baptists gathered in Florida to update<\/a> their convention\u2019s statement of faith<\/a> by limiting the office of pastor to men only.<\/p>\n

But that 2000 limit was not binding on local churches. Instead, it applied only to the denomination\u2019s seminaries and mission boards.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have the right, the authority or the power to limit anybody,\u201d the Rev. Adrian Rogers, a famed Baptist preacher who chaired<\/a> the committee that revamped the Baptist Faith and Message, told reporters at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would resist that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al Mohler, head of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would never presume to tell another church whom they may call as a pastor or tell another person whether or not they may serve as pastor,\u201d Mohler, who also had served on the committee, told Baptist Press, an official SBC publication<\/a>, in 2000. \u201cWe\u2019re not trying to force our beliefs on someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some churches left the SBC and joined groups such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which allows women to serve as pastors. A few churches were expelled by their local association \u2014 including Glendale Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, which was kicked out<\/a> not because its pastor was a woman, but because she was gay.<\/p>\n

But there was no national action to expel churches with women pastors.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Al Mohler addresses the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, June 9, 2026, in Orlando. (RNS photo\/Marty Jean-Louis)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

For more than two decades, Mohler\u2019s view was the status quo. While his seminary and other Baptist institutions taught that only men should be pastors, some churches believed the rule on male-only clergy applied just to the senior pastor. So they gave women in staff roles the title of pastor.<\/p>\n

Then Mohler changed his mind and decided all women pastors had to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How and why that happened reveals a larger trend among conservative evangelicals and MAGA advocates, in which women are seen as threats to both the church and the country. It also reflects the way social media has transformed every local debate into a national controversy \u2014 and the way well-intentioned reforms can have unintended consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n

During the recent SBC meeting in Orlando, Mohler claimed the Bible demanded that Southern Baptists make it clear women pastors were no longer welcome.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a great line that divides liberal and biblical evangelicalism, and you can see it on this very issue,\u201d Mohler told thousands<\/a> of local church representatives, known as messengers, gathered in a cavernous meeting hall at the Orange County Convention Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe trajectory of liberal denominations is clear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Thousands of messengers attend the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, June 9, 2026, in Orlando. (RNS photo\/Marty Jean-Louis)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Mohler\u2019s \u201cTruth and Unity Amendment,\u201d which would bar churches with women pastors \u2014 or churches that allow women to preach \u2014 was approved by three-quarters of the messengers at the SBC\u2019s annual meeting in mid-June. If approved again next year at the SBC\u2019s 2027 meeting in Indianapolis, the amendment would become part of the SBC\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n

In an interview with reporters after the vote on the amendment, Mohler said he was unaware until a few years ago that there were still churches in the SBC that had women pastors. He\u2019d assumed most had left during the SBC\u2019s long-running civil war, known as the conservative resurgence.<\/p>\n

Then, a social media post from Saddleback, a prominent megachurch, about ordaining<\/a> some women staffers as pastors\u00a0sparked an online controversy over the issue.<\/p>\n

Those posts led to repeated attempts to expel churches<\/a> like Saddleback, which was deemed not in \u201cfriendly cooperation\u201d with the SBC in 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media and the digital revolution, where all of a sudden someone in one part of the SBC can find out what\u2019s going on, or be presented with a social media feed, of something on the other side of the country, that\u2019s a game changer,\u201d Mohler told reporters.<\/p>\n

Mohler is partly right.<\/p>\n

Heidi Campbell, a professor of communication at Texas A&M University, said social media has made the internal workings of churches everybody\u2019s business \u2014 not just the members of that church. And more people can weigh in on what should be done about it, said Campbell, who studies how digital media affects religious groups. That explains some of what happened in the SBC.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Messengers, or delegates, vote during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, June 10, 2026, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. (RNS photo\/Bob Smietana)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt makes something that would have been just behind closed doors into a huge media event,\u201d Campbell said.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s unclear exactly how many SBC churches have women pastors. In 2000, when the male-only limit was added to the SBC statement of faith, less than \u201cone-tenth of one percent\u201d of the denomination\u2019s then 41,000 churches had a woman serving as senior pastor, according to a report<\/a> in SBC Life, an official denominational publication.<\/p>\n

Even in the Baptist denominations that allow female pastors, relatively few women serve as senior or co-pastors, ranging from<\/a> about 10% of churches in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to about 1% of Texas Baptist congregations and 4% of churches in the Baptist General Conference of Virginia.<\/p>\n

Mike Law, a Virginia pastor who has advocated for a ban on churches with women pastors, claimed in 2023<\/a> to have found 170 SBC churches where women hold the title of pastor. The SBC has more than 40,000 congregations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more to the story.<\/p>\n

The debate over whether any woman could hold the title of pastor, no matter what her responsibilities, came at a time when the SBC was trying to gain more control over local congregations.<\/p>\n

In 2019, the SBC set up a permanent credentials committee to help determine if churches were in \u201cfriendly cooperation\u201d with the denomination. That change made it easier for the SBC to vote out churches for issues like racism or sexual abuse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But soon, Southern Baptists who disapprove of women pastors began to report churches like Saddleback to the committee. In 2023, Saddleback, whose pastor, Rick Warren, had been an evangelical celebrity for decades, was one of several churches expelled for having women pastors on staff.<\/p>\n

The controversy over Saddleback also started during a time when Southern Baptists were reeling over a sex abuse scandal. The scandal threatened the power of male SBC leaders, said Meredith Stone, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey became the face of the enemy to many people,\u201d she said. \u201cSo, to get that off themselves, they needed to create a new enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the advocates for reforms to prevent sexual abuse were women. Those women and women pastors became a convenient target, said Stone. And a tool meant to deal with racism and abuse was used to paint women pastors as a threat to the denomination.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Meredith Stone. (Photo courtesy of Baptist Women in Ministry)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cIt is unfathomable to think that women who are simply sharing the love and grace of Jesus Christ are an equal kind of threat to the ministry of the Southern Baptist Convention as racism and the perpetuation of sexual abuse,\u201d said Stone.<\/p>\n

Stone also worries that social media is being used to harass women who serve as pastors, rather than just as a tool for debate. Critics of women pastors have posted videos and photos of women preaching, calling for the pastors and their churches to be removed from the SBC, or in some cases contacting the pastor and their churches.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just calling attention to things,\u201d she said. \u201cIt has enabled harassment, which is harmful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The controversy over women pastors is coming at a time when the SBC is rethinking how to engage the outside world post-COVID and during the age of President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Calvin University professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of \u201cLive, Laugh, Love,\u201d a forthcoming book about Christian women, said that during the Obama era, Southern Baptists had tried showing a friendlier face to the outside world, more concerned about loving their neighbor than winning at politics.<\/p>\n

Southern Baptist leaders also championed diversity and lifted up women as important to the church, even if they could not be pastors.<\/p>\n

That more winsome approach is now out of style. Churches or leaders who are less than enthusiastic MAGA supporters are now viewed with suspicion. Diversity is seen as a liberal plot. Outspoken women are accused of being more feminist than Christian.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Kristin Du Mez. (Photo \u00a9 Deborah K. Hoag)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Critics of sex abuse reforms, including Willy Rice, who was recently elected SBC president, began to claim that concerns about abuse in the SBC have been overblown and that feminists and activists had a political agenda to harm the SBC and its Nashville-based Executive Committee.<\/p>\n

Rice has ties to a faction of MAGA activists and pastors who believe the SBC has become too \u201cwoke\u201d or liberal in recent years and wants the denomination to become more aggressive in fighting the culture wars.<\/p>\n

That faction, which also opposes women pastors, is part of a larger conservative Christian movement that views women with suspicion, said Du Mez. Some in the movement say women should have no authority in the church. Others say women should not be allowed to vote.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you\u2019ll hear in these circles, not just in the SBC, but in the Christian right generally, and in the right more broadly, is that women are the problem here,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a sense that if women had less power, then our country and our church would be more on track and more faithful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, the push to expel churches with women pastors comes at a time when women, who have long served as the backbone of congregations of all kinds, are losing faith in religion. That\u2019s especially true of young women, according to national polling.<\/p>\n

Baylor historian Beth Allison Barr, author of \u201cThe Making of Biblical Womanhood,\u201d said she suspects that leaders in the SBC like Mohler fear their hold on power is slipping away, and so are doubling down on their theology to preserve their legacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole Southern Baptist world has staked its entire identity on this issue of male-only leadership with the conservative resurgence,\u201d she said. \u201cFor that to be questioned would undo everything that the conservative resurgence has been trying to accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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