- Southern Baptists are poised to ban churches with women pastors. Some are urging them to reconsider
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- From its towering white steeple and red-brick facade to its Sunday services filled with rousing gospel hymns and evangelistic sermons, First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, bears many of the classic hallmarks of a Southern Baptist church.
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- On a recent Sunday, its pastor for women and children, Kim Eskridge, urged members to invite friends and neighbors to an upcoming vacation Bible school — a perennial Baptist activity — to help “reach families in the community with the gospel.”
- But because that pastor is a woman, First Baptist’s days in the Southern Baptist Convention may be numbered.
- At the SBC’s annual meeting June 11-12 in Indianapolis, representatives will vote on whether to amend the denomination’s constitution to essentially ban churches with any women pastors — and not just in the top job. That measure received overwhelming approval in a preliminary vote last year.
- Leaders of First Baptist – which has given millions of dollars to Southern Baptist causes and has been involved with the convention since its 19th century founding — are bracing for a possible expulsion.
- “We are grieved at the direction the SBC has taken,” the church said in a statement.
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- And in a Baptist tradition that prizes local church autonomy, critics say the convention shouldn’t enshrine a constitutional rule based on one interpretation of its non-binding doctrinal statement.
- By some estimates, women are working in pastoral roles in hundreds of SBC-linked churches, a fraction of the nearly 47,000 across the denomination.
- But critics say the amendment would amount to a further narrowing in numbers and mindset for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, which has moved steadily rightward in recent decades.
- They also wonder if the SBC has better things to do.
- It has struggled to respond to sexual abuse cases in its churches. A former professor at a Southern Baptist seminary in Texas was indicted in May on a charge of falsifying a record about alleged sexual abuse by a student in order to obstruct a federal investigation into sexual misconduct in the convention.