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Southern Baptists & in vitro fertilization

Southern Baptists gathering June 11-12 for their annual meeting look to weigh in on a slew of hot-button topics like in vitro fertilization, abortion, the Israel-Hamas war and efforts to establish a state religion in the U.S.

Monday, those issues were highlighted in the preliminary drafts of resolutions that will be considered by Southern Baptist Convention delegates at the faith group's annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Resolutions are seen as the denomination's way of expressing opinions or concerns about a variety of topics.

Viewpoints on abortion and women in ministry were shared by Southern Baptist delegates, called messengers through the faith group's 2023 resolutions.

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders are encouraging Congressional candidates not to shy away from discussing abortion and in vitro fertilization during the election this fall.

The guidance comes as Democrats prepare to hammer Republicans over reproductive rights in the first presidential election cycle since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

It also comes after a court ruling in Alabama threatened IVF in the state and showcased new ways the viewpoint that life begins at conception can complicate public policy and politics around family planning.

“We believe it's important for our members to engage on this issue and not stick their heads in the sand, which I think some potential candidates had done in the past,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, at the group’s annual retreat in West Virginia this week.

Liquid nitrogen is used to keep robotic IVF and egg storage systems cold at the TMRW Life Sciences lab in Boulder, Colorado.

Democrats “are the radicals on this,” she said, arguing they want to repeal the law that bans the use of federal funds on abortion and that they support late-term abortion.

It reflects a common GOP approach to abortion messaging — polling shows that while more than 60% of Americans oppose abortion bans, only around 20% believe there shouldn’t be restrictions in the last trimester of pregnancy.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 98.9% of abortions took place before the 20th week of pregnancy.

And experts say no abortions take place “up to the moment of birth,” as Republicans often describe.

However, there is little consensus among Democrats as to whether there should be restrictions on abortion after viability.

Republican candidates encouraged to support access to IVF

Stefanik said the party has significantly boosted the number of female candidates running and those efforts have “strengthened our conference’s ability to communicate on these issues.”

Stefanik and National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., have been encouraging members to clearly state their position that they support access to IVF.

The NRCC is also providing messaging support for candidates to learn how to best communicate to voters on the issue.

The Alabama state Supreme Court ruled last month that embryos used in IVF are children and are entitled to legal protections under the state’s wrongful death law.

The decision kicked off a nationwide frenzy among fertility patients and healthcare providers over the potential implications of similar decisions in a post-Roe political landscape.

Republicans came out forcefully in favor of IVF following the ruling.

The National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee advised its candidates to actively broadcast their support.

But when asked to provide unanimous support for federal IVF protections, Republicans in the Senate said it should be left up to states to protect the procedure — a sentiment House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., echoed Thursday.

Recent polling indicates IVF is immensely popular with voters:

86% of people polled say IVF should be legal and 14% say it should be illegal, according to a CBS News and YouGov poll conducted two weeks ago.

Two-thirds of Americans support a federal law protecting abortion, including 86% of Democrats and 67% of independents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Some 57% of Republicans oppose federal abortion protections.

A court ruled embryos are children. These Christian couples agree but still wrestle with IVF choices

When faced with infertility, Christians who believe life begins at or around conception must wrestle with weighty questions: How do you build a family in a way that conforms with your beliefs? Is IVF an ethical option, especially if it creates more embryos than a couple can use?

Key points:

The dilemma reflects the age-old friction between faith and science at the heart of the recent IVF controversies, such as in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos have the legal status of children.

For many evangelicals and other Christians, IVF can be problematic, and some call for more regulation and education.

The process is “inherently unnatural,” said Jason Thacker, a Christian ethicist who directs a research institute at the Southern Baptist Convention.

“I’m both pro-family and pro-life,” he said. “But just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean we should.”

Even among Christians who see embryos as treasured lives, religious experts say there’s a wide spectrum of complicated views on IVF.

Kelly Pelsor, a mother from Indianapolis who turned to a fertility specialist after trying to have children naturally, doesn’t want to see it threatened anywhere.

Speaking of her daughter conceived via IVF, she says: “I truly believe she’s a miracle from God (…) She would not be here without IVF.”

Southern Baptists are poised to ban churches with women pastors

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.

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 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.

And it’s not alone.

By some estimates, the proposed ban could affect hundreds of congregations and have a disproportionate impact on predominantly Black churches.

The vote is partly the culmination of events set in motion two years ago.

That’s when a Virginia pastor contacted SBC officials to contend that First Baptist and four nearby churches were “out of step” with denominational doctrine that says only men can be pastors.

The SBC Credentials Committee launched a formal inquiry in April.

Southern Baptists disagree on which ministry jobs this doctrine refers to.

Some say it’s just the senior pastor, others that a pastor is anyone who preaches and exercises spiritual authority.

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.

SBC membership has dipped below 13 million, nearly a half-century low.

Baptismal rates are in long-term decline.

The amendment, if passed, wouldn’t prompt an immediate purge.

But it could keep the denomination’s leaders busy for years, investigating and ousting churches.

Many predominantly Black churches have men as lead pastors but assign pastor titles to women in other areas, such as worship and children’s ministries.

“To disfellowship like-minded churches … based on a local-church governance decision dishonors the spirit of cooperation and the guiding tenets of our denomination,” wrote Pastor Gregory Perkins, president of the SBC’s National African American Fellowship, to denominational officials.

The controversy complicates the already-choppy efforts by the mostly white denomination to diversify and overcome its legacy of slavery and segregation.

Amendment proponents say the convention needs to reinforce its doctrinal statement, the Baptist Faith and Message, which says the office of pastor is “limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

“If we won’t stand on this issue and be unapologetically biblical, then we won’t stand on anything,” said amendment proponent Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia.

Since Baptist churches are independent, the convention can’t tell them what to do or whom to appoint as a pastor.

But the convention can decide which churches are in and which are out.

And even without a formal amendment, its Executive Committee has begun telling churches with women pastors that they’re out.

That included one of its largest, Saddleback Church of California.

When Saddleback and a small Kentucky church appealed to the annual meeting in 2023, delegates overwhelmingly refused to take them back.

The amendment would give such enforcement actions more teeth.

Some churches with women pastors quit on their own in the past year.

They range from Elevation Church, a North Carolina megachurch, to First Baptist of Richmond, Virginia, which had close SBC ties from the convention’s founding.

Law contended the issue has been a “canary in the coalmine” for liberal denominations, several of which began ordaining women and later LGBTQ+ people.

“Southern Baptists are facing a decisive moment,” he said in a video on a pro-amendment website. “Here’s the trajectory of doing nothing: Soon Southern Baptist churches will start openly supporting homosexual clergy, same-sex marriage and eventually transgenderism.”

Others point out that Pentecostal and other denominations have had women pastors for generations and remain theologically conservative.

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Some SBC churches with women pastors are heavily involved with the convention, while others have minimal connections and identify more closely with historically Black or other progressive denominations.

Also, some SBC churches interpret the 2000 faith statement as only applying to senior pastors.

As long as a the church leader is male, women can serve other pastoral roles, they say.

Such churches may leave if SBC leaders interfere with congregations following “their conscience, biblical convictions, and values by recognizing women can receive a pastoral gift from God in partnership with male leadership,” said Dwight McKissic, a pastor from Arlington, Texas, on the social media platform X.

Other churches say women can be in any role, including senior pastor, and churches can agree to disagree if they embrace most of the SBC faith statement.

That category includes First Baptist of Alexandria.

Though its current senior pastor is male, it recognizes “God’s calling to ordain any qualified individual, male or female, for pastoral ministry,” the church said in a statement.

First Baptist leaders declined interview requests, but it has posted extensively about the issue on its website.

It said while it plans to send representatives to the SBC annual meeting, it was warned to expect a motion to deny them voting privileges.

“I do believe we need to be heard and represented,” Senior Pastor Robert Stephens told members in a video-recorded meeting.

The SBC’s top administrative body opposes the amendment. Investigating churches’ compliance would consume an unsustainable amount of time and energy over something that shouldn’t be a litmus test for fellowship, wrote Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, in a Baptist Press commentary.

Baptist Women in Ministry, which began within the SBC in the 1980s but now works in multiple Baptist denominations, has taken note.

The Rev. Meredith Stone, its executive director, said some women pastors within the SBC have reached out for support.

The group plans to release a documentary, “Midwives of a Movement,” about 20th century trailblazers for women in Baptist ministry, on the eve of the SBC meeting.

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“As they are saying women have less value to God than men in the church, we want to make sure that women know they do have equal value and that there are no limits to how they follow Christ in the work of the church,” Stone said.

AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

Trump, Pence to speak to Southern Baptists

Former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence will both address groups gathered in Indianapolis during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting next week.

Trump, who is seeking a second term, will virtually address attendees on Monday during a “Life and Liberty Forum” free event and luncheon presented by the conservative Danbury Institute,

according to Baptist News Global and the organization’s website. Then on Tuesday, former Vice President Mike Pence, who has often spoken about his deep faith, will speak at a lunch event sponsored by the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Southern Baptists' convention to address women pastors, sexual abuse

Thousands will gather in Indianapolis June 11-12 for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The meeting comes at a fraught time in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Messengers — as voting delegates are known — will vote on whether to establish a constitutional ban on churches with women pastors.

They’ll hear a report — and get outside criticism — of their handling of sexual abuse among their clergy.

With membership in steady decline, they’ll hear a report on how an earlier effort to reverse that trend fell short.

And they’ll vote for a new president from among six candidates.

Speaking of presidential candidates, an outside group is inviting attendees to a virtual speech by former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, at an off-site event.

Proposed resolutions deal with topics ranging from Gaza to abortion and in vitro fertilization.

Here’s some of what’s facing the SBC:

What’s the latest with the sexual abuse crisis?

The convention has struggled to respond to sexual abuse in its churches since a 2019 report by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, saying that roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers faced allegations of sexual misconduct in the previous two decades.

A subsequent consultant’s report said past leaders on the convention’s Executive Committee intimidated and mistreated survivors who sought help.

But survivors and advocates say the denomination’s actions don’t match its promises of reform.

An Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force recently concluded its work.

While it has provided a curriculum for training churches on preventing and responding to abuse, it has not achieved the mandate of previous annual meetings to establish a database of offenders, which could help churches avoid hiring them.

In a recent YouTube interview with a fellow pastor, the chairman of the SBC’s Executive Committee, Philip Robertson, sought to downplay reports that there was a “systemic problem” of abuse in the denomination, which he contended were “not true.”

This has been a talking point for some outside critics of SBC efforts to respond to the crisis, now voiced by at least one person in SBC leadership.

Robertson also said insurers warned they wouldn’t cover the denomination if it had the database due to liability risks.

In response, the reform task force proposed having a separate nonprofit handle the list, but that has yet to materialize.

“Robertson’s remarks provide a window onto what has always been true,” said Christa Brown, a longtime advocate for fellow survivors of abuse within Southern Baptist churches, in an email.

“SBC officials’ resistance to a database has always been about trying to minimize liability risks to the institution. … And SBC officials are trying to operate this multi-billion dollar organization without taking on the inherent responsibilities that go along with it.”

In May, federal prosecutors charged Matt Queen, a former professor and administrator at an SBC-affiliated seminary in Texas with providing federal investigators with a false document.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York asserted this document, involving an alleged case of sexual abuse by a seminary student, was provided with the intent to impede their investigation into sexual abuse within the convention.

The Executive Committee says it was told the federal investigation into its own actions has been completed.

Why would the SBC ban churches with women pastors?

In 2000, Southern Baptists amended the Baptist Faith and Message, their statement of doctrine, to say the office of pastor is limited to men, citing Bible verses such as one forbidding “a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.”

This came amid a larger rightward push in the late 20th century SBC.

The doctrinal statement is nonbinding, and the denomination can’t tell its independent churches whom to call as pastor.

Some churches with women pastors left, while others stayed but kept a low profile.

Still others later appointed women pastors or allowed women to serve under male leaders in associate pastoral roles, citing biblical examples of women in ministry.

At this year’s meeting, messengers will vote on whether to give final approval to amending their constitution to ban churches — by deeming them not in “friendly cooperation” — with women pastors in lead or associate roles.

The denomination preliminarily approved the amendment last year.

That’s when it also began expelling congregations with women pastors, such as Saddleback Church, a California megachurch, on the grounds that they don’t closely identify with the Baptist Faith and Message.

The amendment would codify an explicit ban on such churches, putting them in the same category as churches that “endorse homosexual behavior,” discriminate based on ethnicity or fail to address sexual abuse.

Why might this affect non-white churches more?

The National African American Fellowship, a caucus of predominantly Black congregations within the SBC, says an amendment barring churches with women pastors could disproportionately impact its members, many with women working in assistant pastor roles.

Chinese and Hispanic Baptist fellowship leaders also say their churches could be impacted because of language differences in how pastors are described.

Who are Southern Baptists, anyway?

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Members are overwhelmingly evangelical and conservative both in religion and politics, the continuation of a rightward shift that began in the 1980s.

The denomination was founded in 1845 in defense of slavery in a schism with northern Baptists.

In 1995, the mostly white denomination formally repented of its support for slavery and other racism, and it made some strides to diversify racially.

It has lost some Black churches and pastors in recent years due to alleged racial insensitivity within its overwhelmingly white leadership.

How’s it doing?

Southern Baptist membership has steadily declined since 2006 and is now below 13 million, its lowest since 1976.

There are also long-term declines in baptisms — the prime metric of spiritual vitality.

Alarmed by such trends, Southern Baptists in 2010 approved a seven-point plan to reenergize evangelistic efforts.

A task force, evaluating how that went, reported this year that only two of the goals were met, and some were quickly forgotten.

The task force reported: “Regarding the simple question of whether or not the implementation (of the 2010 plan) reversed the decline of baptisms in the SBC, the answer is a clear and decisive, No.”

The report noted “a clear erosion of ‘trust, transparency and truth’ from within our convention which has ravaged our cooperative work.”

Who wants to lead the denomination?

Six men are being nominated to succeed Bart Barber, a folksy cattle farmer and small-church pastor, as president.

The candidates include five pastors and a seminary dean.

As in recent years, the contest will be among candidates with varying degrees of conservativism.

Will there be politics?

Trump will speak virtually at a nearby event on Monday, the day before the annual meeting.

That program includes some Southern Baptist leaders.

It’s sponsored by an independent group but listed on the SBC calendar of events.

Former Vice President Mike Pence will speak Tuesday at a luncheon hosted by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, but not in the main hall, as he did in 2018.

Messengers are expected to vote on resolutions supporting Israel and blaming Hamas amid the Gaza war; recommitting to the abolition of abortion; and urging parents diagnosed with infertility to carefully consider ethical options.

SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION

Delegates boot out church that had woman as pastor

INDIANAPOLIS — Even as they prepare to vote on a formal ban on churches with women pastors, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting voted Tuesday to expel one such church from its ranks.

Messengers, as voting representatives are known, voted 6,759 to 563 to oust First Baptist Church of Alexandria, a historic Virginia congregation that affirms women can serve in any pastoral role, including as senior pastor.

The Virginia congregation has been involved in the nation's largest Protestant denomination since its 19th century founding and has contributed millions toward denominational causes.

But it came under scrutiny after the pastor of a neighboring church reported it to denominational authorities over its having a woman as pastor for women and children.

The vote came after the denomination's credentials committee recommended earlier Tuesday that the denomination deem the church to be not in “friendly cooperation,” the formulation for expulsion, on the grounds that it conflicts with the Baptist Faith and Message.

That statement of Southern Baptist doctrine declares only men are qualified for the role of pastor.

Some interpret that only to apply to associate pastors as long as the senior pastor is male.

The Alexandria church is currently led by a man, Robert Stephens, but the church has made clear it believes women can serve as senior pastors, too.

The decision was made before the delegates had a chance to consider enshrining a ban on churches with any women pastors in the convention's constitution.

Fort Worth pastors weigh in on Southern Baptist Convention’s vote on women

Pastor Anyra Cano said she received a call from God to do ministry when she was 13 years old.

“I didn’t know what God was calling me to. I just knew God was calling me,” Cano said.

She remembers getting a clearer picture when she was around 18 years old and heard a woman preach in a Hispanic Baptist Church in El Paso for the first time.

Now, she and her husband have been pastors at Iglesia Bautista Victoria en Cristo in Fort Worth for 16 years.

Cano grew up Southern Baptist but doesn’t consider herself one anymore, she said.

She was one of thousands of faith leaders who signed a letter by Baptist Women in Ministry in opposition to an amendment being voted on this week at the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis.

Southern Baptists across the country are expected to ban churches with women in leadership roles from one of the most influential faith groups in the county.

“We have moved along so much in the equality of women and gender, and so it’s pretty disheartening,” Cano said.

Virginia Pastor Mike Law told the Baptist Press, the official news service for the SBC, that the amendment is meant to provide clarity as to who can serve as a pastor within Southern Baptist Churches.

“At the end of the day, placing women in the pastoral office is fundamentally a rejection of biblical authority, and that’s why we want to encourage in the life of our convention, really a joyful submission to the sufficiency in the authority of the Bible,” Law told Baptist Press.

Fort Worth’s Broadway Baptist Church was formed in 1882 as a Southern Baptist Convention church but was kicked out of the SBC in 2009 for its inclusion of LGBTQ+ members and allowing women to serve in leadership roles within the church.

“This is a part of the rising tide of the patriarchy,” Ryon Price, senior pastor of the church, said of this week’s SBC vote. “And it is not separate from the broader political ramifications in the country.”

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth is one of six seminary schools operated by the Southern Baptist Convention and is one of the largest seminaries in the world.

The seminary “does not have a position on the proposal,” a school spokesperson said.

The amendment is expected to be considered during the meeting at 9 a.m. June 12, according to a spokesperson for the SBC. The

Southern Baptist Convention’s 2025 meeting is expected to take place in Dallas.

What’s happening in Indianapolis

Over 10,000 local church representatives attending the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis are poised to vote whether the group should add an amendment to its constitution stating that churches who want to be affiliated with the convention can appoint “only men as any kind of pastor or elder.”

Virginia Pastor Mike Law introduced the amendment at the 2023 meeting, where it received overwhelming support during its preliminary vote.

The amendment must receive a two-thirds majority in a second vote Wednesday to be cemented in the Southern Baptist Convention constitution.

Southern Baptists are the largest evangelical Protestant group in the United States, according to Pew Research Center.

Tarrant County is home to 325 Baptist churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baptist General Convention of Texas, according to a spokesperson with the Tarrant Baptist Association.

Religious leaders and academic experts weighed in on the issue the Baptists look to decide in the impending vote.

Because Baptist churches run independently, the Southern Baptist Convention can’t tell them who to appoint as pastor.

However, the SBC can decide which churches are affiliated — or “in friendly cooperation” — with the organization.

The reason why churches affiliate themselves with groups such as the Southern Baptist Convention or the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is to collaborate on missions or share financial resources, said Ellen Di Giosia, field coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Texas.

“It’s also how they give their money to share in missions. It’s where they get their Sunday school curriculum. It’s where they send their ministers to be trained. It’s an all encompassing kind of system,” Di Giosa said.

Depending on the vote, Di Giosa said, churches with women in leadership roles might be faced with firing the women in those roles or leaving the Southern Baptist Convention and aligning themselves with other Baptist groups.

The measure could also disproportionately impact Black churches currently affiliated with the convention.

Gender roles in the Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention has historically opposed ordaining women as pastors and has been a “dividing line” between them and other Baptist groups, said Doug Weaver, chairman of Baylor University’s department of religion.

He is also the Barbara Jo Beard Diskell professor of historical studies for the school and focuses on Baptist history.

Baylor University is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

“The way they (Southern Baptists) read the Bible, women are to submit to men,” Weaver said. “And once you start allowing women to be called the same thing as a man, you have confusion of roles, confusion of identity.”

Since 1925, the Southern Baptist Convention has outlined its statement of beliefs in its Baptist Faith and Message and uses it as a guiding document for the denomination.

In 2023 the SBC added a statement to the document saying that both men and women are gifted for service in the church; however, “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

“Up until now, they would say a woman could be anything other than the senior minister,” Weaver said. “Now, this is actually much more restrictive than that, in that they don’t want a woman to use the title of pastor in any way, shape or form.”

Women serving in leadership positions within the Christian faith has been controversial throughout history, said Ted Campbell, professor of church history at Southern Methodist University.

He referenced how the women’s rights movement in the 1970s “gave a great deal of impetus to women coming into ministry.”

Southern Baptists being the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. has an influence on American life at large, Campbell said.

SBC rejects ban on women pastors but cautions against IVF

INDIANAPOLIS — Southern Baptists narrowly rejected a proposal to enshrine a ban on churches with women pastors in the denomination’s constitution after opponents argued it was unnecessary because the denomination already has a way of ousting such churches.

The vote received support from 61% of the delegates, but it failed to get the required two-thirds supermajority.

The action reversed a preliminary vote last year in favor of the official ban.

But it still leaves the Southern Baptist Convention with its official doctrinal statement saying the office of pastor is limited to men.

Even the opponents of the ban said they favored that doctrinal statement but didn’t think it was necessary to reinforce it in the constitution.

Opponents noted that the SBC already can oust churches that assert women can serve as pastors — as it did last year and again Tuesday night.

The vote was perhaps the most highly anticipated of the annual meeting, reflecting years of debate in the United States’ largest Protestant denomination.

Southern Baptists vote to oppose IVF

Also in the final day of the SBC’s two-day annual meeting in Indianapolis, Southern Baptists have elected a new convention president and approved a nonbinding resolution, cautioning couples about using in vitro fertilization.

In the resolution, messengers urged couples to “consider the ethical implications” of reproductive technologies like IVF.

It has become a prominent issue in the wake of a IVF controversy in Alabama, which shielded IVF providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits after a state Supreme Court ruling said frozen embryos are children.

The SBC resolution agrees that embryos are children, regardless of location in or outside the womb.

The resolution expressed alarm over the fact that IVF treatment commonly produces surplus embryos that are frozen, with “most unquestionably destined for eventual destruction.”

While not outright opposing IVF, the resolution also denounces medical experimentation on frozen embryos as well as any use of “dehumanizing methods for determining suitability for life and genetic sorting.”

It expresses sympathy with couples struggling with infertility but urges them to weigh the issues.

It also encourages couples to adopt frozen embryos.

Some messengers gave impassioned defenses of the technology, saying it helped couples bring children into the world, but others said the destruction of frozen embryos outweighs any benefits from IVF.

“Right now we’re trying to open the conversation, remind Southern Baptists of our long-held beliefs of the sanctity of human life,” said Kristen Ferguson, chair of the committee on resolutions. “So in the future, we fully anticipate that you may see much stronger language … but we are not speaking to that at this time, because Southern Baptists aren’t ready to speak to that yet”

Earlier in the day, the much-watched proposed amendment, which received preliminary approval last year, would have formally exclude churches that have women in any pastoral positions, from lead pastor to associates, or even affirms them in that role.

Supporters believe it is biblically necessary, estimating hundreds of Southern Baptist churches have women in those roles.

SBC since 2000:

Only men are qualified for the role of pastor

Since 2000, the SBC’s nonbinding statement of faith has declared that only men are qualified for the role of pastor.

It’s interpreted differently across the denomination, with some believing it doesn’t apply to associate pastors so long as the senior pastor is male.

The proposed amendment, which received preliminary approval last year, would formally exclude churches that have women in any pastoral positions, from lead pastor to associates, or even affirms them in that role. Supporters believe it is biblically necessary, estimating hundreds of Southern Baptist churches have women in those roles.

The rejected amendment would have said any church deemed in “friendly cooperation” — the official term for SBC affiliation — must be one that “affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”

Opponents argued the convention already has the power to remove churches over this issue, and the amendment will have unintended consequences, including disproportionately affecting Black Southern Baptist congregations, which tend to have women on their pastoral staffs.

Ryan Fullerton, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, said the measure is “not about preventing women from exercising their gifts” in the church, in roles on church staff such as “children’s ministers.”

But he said the Bible is clear that the office of pastor is for men.

He said there is “confusion about gender” in the wider culture and cited what he called “the ravages of the LGBTQIA agenda.”

But Spence Shelton, pastor of Mercy Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, argued that it was unnecessary.

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He said there is no doubt that Southern Baptists are “complementarian,” as they describe the view that men and women have equal value but different roles that complement one another.

The denomination can’t tell its independent churches what to do or whom to appoint as a pastor.

But they can say which churches are in and which are out.

Last year, Southern Baptists refused to take back Saddleback, one of the convention’s largest congregations, and a small Kentucky church over the issue.

Both churches, which had women in top pastoral positions, appealed their ouster to the 2023 annual meeting and were overwhelmingly rejected by the delegates.

A similar scenario played out in Indianapolis on Tuesday, when messengers voted overwhelmingly to kick out First Baptist Church of Alexandria in Virginia, which has a woman in an associate position and also asserted that women can hold the top job.

Supporters of the amendment say it probably won’t result in an immediate, large-scale purge, but opponents expressed concern it would burden SBC volunteers and staffs with numerous investigations of churches.

Who is the new SBC president?

Delegates also elected a North Carolina pastor and longtime denominational statesman to be the next president of their convention in a contest between six candidates that went into two run-off votes.

Clint Pressley, who is senior pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, will be the next Southern Baptist Convention president after winning 56% of votes in the final run-off race.

Messengers raise their ballots in support of a motion put up for vote during a Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting Tuesday, June 11, 2024, in Indianapolis.

The SBC president — one of the most prominent faces of the conservative evangelical network of churches — presides over the annual meeting and appoints members to the denomination’s committees.

Pressley’s nearest opponent, Tennessee pastor, Dan Spencer, received 44 percent of the votes after four other candidates were eliminated in earlier rounds.

Pressley has said he favors a measure being voted on later Wednesday to amend the SBC constitution to ban churches with women pastors.

Pressley earned a master of divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisiana, one of the SBC’s official seminaries.

He has led Hickory Grove since 2011 after pastoring churches in Alabama and Mississippi.

Pressley was first vice president of the SBC in 2014-15 and served on numerous other denominational boards.

Messengers early Wednesday rejected a proposal to abolish the SBC’s public policy agency, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

The measure reflected the views of some that the the staunchly conservative commission wasn’t conservative enough.

An Unexpected Turn in the Evangelical Culture Wars

On Wednesday, in Indianapolis, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant body in the United States, rejected a proposed ban on allowing women to be called “pastor.”

The measure, which would have amended the S.B.C.’s constitution, fell just short of a two-thirds-majority vote.

The S.B.C. has officially barred women from leading churches since 2000.

Yet this ban would have gone further, threatening to “disfellowship” churches that allow women to use the title of pastor in any way.

I called Rick Warren, the founder of Saddleback Church, in Southern California, and one of the most influential evangelical pastors, shortly after the vote with the news.

“That’s a relief for over two thousand S.B.C. churches who have women pastors, whether they lead churches or not,” Warren told me.

The vast majority of evangelical Christians, who number about a quarter of adults in the U.S., oppose the idea of female pastors.

For most, the Bible’s stance against female pastors is starkly clear.

“Women should be silent in the churches,” the apostle Paul writes to the members of the early Church.

“For they are not permitted to speak but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is something they want to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”

Other passages reinforce this injunction.

“Let a woman learn in silence with full submission,” Paul writes to Timothy, a leader of the church in Ephesus. “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”

In spite of these verses, many Protestant denominations—including the Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians—ordain women.

Most Christians view these verses as anachronistic and subject to historical context, much like other Biblical passages on stoning adulterers to death and ordering slaves to be obedient to their masters.

“Paul also tells women not to braid their hair or wear jewelry,” Linda Barnes Popham, a sixty-eight-year-old pastor, who leads Fern Creek Baptist Church, in Louisville, Kentucky, told me recently. Popham attended Southern Seminary, the Southern Baptists’ leading academic institution, in the nineteen-eighties—a time when women were allowed to study preaching.

“Women still won the preaching award,” she told me. “And all of my professors affirmed women in ministry.”

That attitude of openness changed quickly.

When Popham graduated from the seminary, in 1985, fundamentalist leaders were staging a coup within the S.B.C., known as the conservative resurgence, firing liberal professors and barring women from taking courses that prepared them to become pastors.

Though the S.B.C. now claims that the Bible is clear in its strictures against female pastors, scholars point to scriptural contradictions.

Katherine Ellis, a doctoral student at Baylor University, noted that, in addition to silencing women and grousing about their hair, Paul praises female leaders: he refers to Phoebe, who travelled to Rome to preach, as a “deacon”; calls Junia, imprisoned for her faith, an “apostle”; and describes Prisca and Aquila as “co-workers in Christ Jesus.”

From the first to the twelfth century, the historian Gary Macy writes in “The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination,” women held roles as priests, deacons, and even bishops, beginning with Mary Magdalene, who left her home to follow Jesus, alongside his twelve disciples.

In addition to Mary, whom Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, calls “the Apostle to the Apostles,” Scripture recounts the stories of multiple women among Jesus’ earliest converts and first teachers.

During the COVID pandemic, Rick Warren read these accounts of women in the early Church.

Since he’d begun preaching, at the age of sixteen, Warren, who is theologically conservative, had vehemently opposed women pastors.

However, the isolation of lockdown allowed him to question that position.

“One of the things that really stood out to me was the hidden history of how much women were involved in the early growth of the first four hundred years of Christianity,” Warren told me. “This has been completely written out of tradition and culture.”

To Warren, ordaining women wasn’t simply good theology; he also believed that it could help save the Church, which, in the U.S., was rapidly shrinking.

During the past three decades, some forty million Americans have left their churches; the number of Southern Baptists has dropped from sixteen million members to about thirteen million since 2010.

“Why have we not been as fast at getting the good news out as they were in the first four hundred years?” Warren asked. “You’ve heard the old saying that women hold up half the sky? Well, women hold up half the Church. Why would you keep fifty per cent sitting on the bench?”

In 2021, Warren ordained three women as pastors at Saddleback: Liz Puffer, Cynthia Petty, and Katie Edwards.

In 2022, he commissioned a fourth, Stacie Wood, to succeed him in leading Saddleback alongside her husband, Andy.

Wood, who is forty-two and a mother of three, welcomed the role.

“I’m serving Jesus under the authority and in alignment with my spiritual leaders,” she wrote on Instagram. “We believe that women can be gifted and empowered as teachers and as pastors.”

Warren’s ordination of the women inflamed a far-right strain within the S.B.C., which he labelled “fundamentalism.”

Although the S.B.C. has long been both theologically and culturally conservative, differences within it had sharpened in 2020, when a splinter organization arose, calling itself the Conservative Baptist Network.

“It began with twenty people from around the country who shared the same concerns that the S.B.C. was moving away from Biblical principles, and against the gains of the conservative resurgence,” Ronnie Rogers, one of the founders of the Conservative Baptist Network, told me.

In a thirty-eight-page document, they listed their concerns: principally, a softening around the role of women and issues of social justice.

The S.B.C. was investigating hundreds of claims that its leadership had covered up sexual abuse by clergy members; Rogers’s group doubted that the accusers, mostly girls and women, were telling the truth.

“In Christianity, both women and men lie,” Rogers told me.

Their manifesto drew more interest. “Now we have ten thousand members,” he told me.

Warren told me, “This is a fight between fundamentalists and conservatives.

All of us believe that the Bible is inerrant, but the fundamentalists believe that their interpretation of the Bible is also inerrant, and that’s the problem.”

By pressing the issue of female pastors among his fellow Southern Baptists, Warren was striving to make a point about a dangerous direction in which he saw the Church moving.

“Rick Warren is a brilliant tactician,” Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and a professor at Eastern Illinois University, told me. “He knew that, by forcing this conversation, he would either help bring Southern Baptists along, or they’d have to kick out one of their most influential and beloved pastors.”

In February of 2022, not long after Warren ordained the three female pastors, the S.B.C. declared that Saddleback Church was “not in friendly cooperation with the convention.”

That spring, on the floor of the S.B.C. convention in Anaheim, California, Warren defended his decision and called for an end to “bickering about secondary issues.”

He asked his fellow Southern Baptists,

“As Western culture becomes more dark, more evil, more secular, we have to decide: are we going to treat each other as allies or not?”

Warren’s actions fuelled a further hardening of the far right of the Church.

A new, more vociferous strain of opposition to female pastors arose, and, at the 2023 convention, the delegates, known as messengers, voted to disfellowship Saddleback.

At that same meeting, in New Orleans, the messengers endorsed the Law Amendment: the proposed ban, named for Mike Law, the Virginia pastor who proposed it, on women even being called pastors.

There was other, unintended blowback.

In Louisville, Kentucky, about ten miles from Southern Seminary, Pastor Linda Barnes Popham had been happily leading Fern Creek Baptist, a quiet congregation of some hundred mostly elderly members.

After Warren ordained the women, Popham learned that she was under investigation by the S.B.C.’s credentials committee as to whether she was qualified to lead her church.

Popham had addressed concerns about her sex when she was officially hired as lead pastor at Fern Creek in 1993.

“I was kind of conflicted about having a woman as a pastor,” one longtime parishioner named George told me.

Later, George fell in love with Linda, and, for the past twenty-two years, they have been happily married.

In myriad ways, George Popham, who is eighty-two and facing health issues, supports his wife in leading the church.

I visited Fern Creek last year, and watched George, without any fuss, drive Linda to visit church members at the local hospital, wash dishes after a church luau, and patiently wait for hours for her to return from a pastoral call so that the two could go to Graeter’s Ice Cream together.

(When she got caught up chatting about Jesus outside the ice-cream shop, George waited some more.)

Despite her unconventional marital role, however, Linda Popham is no liberal.

“I’m more conservative than some of the pastors who oppose me,” she said.

She was staunchly against same-sex relationships and abortion, because she believed both were explicitly forbidden by the Bible.

“But there’s nowhere in Scripture that says it’s a sin for a woman to be a pastor,” she said.

As the fight over women unfolded within the S.B.C. last year, Popham’s congregation took a vote on whether they wanted her to remain as their pastor, even if the S.B.C. decided to kick them out.

Their support for her was unanimous.

Warren, who’d come to know and admire Popham, felt terrible about pulling her into the fray.

“Linda Popham is a pistol,” he told me. “I’m sorry I got her into trouble.”

Popham attended Southern Seminary in the nineteen-eighties—a time when women were allowed to study preaching.

The rejection of the Law Amendment signalled that the radicals of the S.B.C. may have overestimated their support.

Hershael York, the dean of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary, told me, “Sometimes I suspect that the guys who were too young or not yet born when the conservative resurgence happened feel like they missed the war, so they try to start one.”

York supported the expulsions of Saddleback and Fern Creek.

But, he said, of the Law Amendment, “I fear it will only drive out some churches that we can otherwise strengthen and encourage.”

The enthusiasm for the insurgent Conservative Baptist Network was, to York, another sign of trouble.

“When we treat everything like an existential threat and feel the need to form splinter organizations, we lose the cohesion and unity we desperately need to face legitimate threats,” he added.

To many observers, the confrontation over female pastors is simply one salvo in an internal power struggle over the future of evangelicalism.

“It’s a sign that the center held for now, but the culture-war faction is already saying they are regrouping, and their main aim is to turn the Church into a political weapon,” Kristin Du Mez, the author of “Jesus and John Wayne,” a history of American evangelicalism, told me.

The real tension lies between conservatives who possess little interest in influencing secular politics, and those for whom politics are paramount.

At this year’s convention, messengers also approved a resolution condemning reproductive technologies, such as I.V.F.

Another resolution, called “On Defending Religious Liberty,” warned against the influence of Christian nationalism and opposed “any effort to use the people and the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention to establish Christianity as the state religion of the United States of America.”

It was overwhelmingly approved.

Yet another, which drew attention to the ongoing scandal over sexual abuse and called for an end to the S.B.C’s use of nondisclosure agreements, never made it to a vote.

Al Mohler, the seminary president, said, “Given the secularizing pressures of the age, I don’t think anyone thinks that list is going to get shorter.”

For all practical purposes, life after the S.B.C. has proved fruitful for Fern Creek Baptist Church.

Linda Popham told me that her regular group of Sunday churchgoers has grown from a hundred to almost two hundred people, including some young families who saw Popham on the news and joined to support her.

When she heard the news that the Law Amendment had failed, she was getting a group of kids ready for Bible camp.

“It makes me happy for the women who are still there,” she said.

In Orange County, Stacie Wood, at Saddleback Church, didn’t really know what the Law Amendment was.

Her focus, she told me, was on growing the Church and bringing people to Jesus.

She noted with delight that, on Pentecost, Saddleback had joined with some three hundred other churches in California to baptize twelve thousand people.

“God is on the move here doing amazing things,” she said. “Leaving the S.B.C. was barely a bump in the road.”

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Where’s That Database?

Another year passes without Southern Baptist leaders launching the promised public database of sex offenders

The Southern Baptist Convention vowed two years ago to embrace reforms after a damning 2019 newspaper investigation and a third-party report found that churches harbored dozens of sex offenders.

Many of them moved from church to church despite their background.

We can see now how hollow that promise has turned out to be.

The SBC’s decentralized structure and lack of top-down authority made accountability challenging but not impossible.

A key recommendation championed by victim advocates and Guidepost Solutions, the firm that investigated the SBC at its request, was the creation of a public database or offender information system.

This database would help churches identify known sex offenders so that predators wouldn’t just shift to new congregations.

A special task force has been working on this database since the 2022 Guidepost report.

To address SBC leaders’ concerns about liability and insurance coverage, a standalone nonprofit was created to handle the database.

In addition, the criteria for inclusion in the database was narrowed down to people who had been convicted or found liable in court of a sex offense.

The nonprofit over the database, known as the Abuse Response Commission, secured insurance bids and vetted about 100 names for inclusion in the database, called Ministry Check, according to a report by the abuse reform task force.

And yet the SBC’s annual convention came and went last week without the database launching, apparently over lingering objections from church leaders.

Task force leaders raised $75,000 outside of the SBC to vet the initial batch of names, according to Religion News Service.

The task force wrote in its 2024 report that the SBC “has contributed zero funding” to Ministry Check.

The recent death of Paul Pressler, a longtime SBC leader and a former Texas judge, should serve as a reminder of the importance of this database.

In 2017, a former assistant sued Pressler and accused him of periodic rape over the course of decades, starting when the assistant was a teen.

The man accused SBC leaders of covering it up, and at least seven other men came forward with allegations.

Pressler and SBC leaders denied wrongdoing but settled the lawsuit confidentially in December.

The SBC executive committee nixed the idea of an offender database back in 2008, citing the autonomy of local churches and the “impossible” task of including all convicted predators.

Church leaders’ excuses remain as flimsy as their promises.

Is a woman’s place in the pulpit?

Here’s why Southern Baptists are debating female empowerment in 2024

Cathleen Falsani, former religion reporter at the Chicago Tribune , used to say her job was cultural translator — converting the language of religious people for secular publication, and then translating the secular culture back to the faithful.

Having worked in both religious and secular roles, I feel that way sometimes, especially when religious folks make head-scratching news like the Baptists did this month.

In case you missed it, the Southern Baptist Convention met in Indianapolis and considered, among other things, a resolution banning churches that allow women to serve as pastors.

The measure failed to gain the two-thirds supermajority it needed, but 61% of voters supported it.

Are 61% of Southern Baptists misogynists?

Is the denomination simply opposed to empowering women?

What’s going on here?

Acceptance varies widely

First, it’s worth noting the progressive change in attitude on this issue among the faithful.

Since 1998, the Association of Religion Data Archives has conducted a periodic survey called the National Congregations Study that gives a snapshot of the beliefs, practices and demographics of all American religious congregations.

In the latest installment of that survey, published in 2021, 56% of all religious congregations in the U.S. reported that a woman could be allowed to serve as the community’s primary leader — that’s up from 47% in 2006 — and 89% of congregations would allow women to serve on a governing board.

Acceptance of women in leadership roles varies widely among subgroups: 95% of mainline Protestant congregations accept female leaders, at least in theory, compared with two-thirds of Black Protestant churches and a third of white evangelical churches.

In a separate 2020 survey, 72.8% of American evangelicals agreed that women should be allowed to preach in Sunday services, a common function of pastors and senior church leaders.

An older study, from 2011, isolated responses from Southern Baptist churchgoers and found that almost 65% agreed that women should be allowed to serve as clergy, though that survey didn’t delineate between senior and associate pastor roles.

But practice doesn’t track with theory; only 13.8% of all American congregations are led by women, and those congregations account for only 8.1% of all worshippers across all faith traditions.

Among white evangelicals, where most Southern Baptists fall, only 3% of congregations are led by women.

That’s only slightly more than Roman Catholic congregations, where priesthood is reserved for men (some Catholic communities are priestless).

Minority faiths tend to empower women more.

Of non-Christian congregations reporting, 32.6% were led by a woman.

Within religions, these differences often fall predictably along geographic and political lines.

Women are more likely to be in positions of leadership among liberal congregations on the coasts than in conservative congregations in the South or Midwest.

It’s important to recognize that this is a more complex issue than the binary answer to “Can women be pastors?”

Some congregations ordain women but don’t allow them to be the primary leader.

Others allow women to perform certain priestly duties but not all.

When researchers include questions about whether women should be allowed to preach, offer sacraments or sit on governing boards, the responses get complicated.

People of the book

Adherents to conservative faith traditions like Southern Baptists submit themselves to obeying holy writ, even when they would rather not.

Every Southern Baptist expects to live at odds with prevailing cultural norms at some point.

In fact, to do so is often a point of pride. Countercultural movements arise regularly in conservative religious circles seeking to “stand against the tide” of cultural norms in dating, dress, family planning, health care, finance, business, entertainment, housing, philanthropy and dozens of other categories.

All of these movements can connect a group’s raison d’être to sacred writings and thereby turn its chosen issue into a crusade of sorts.

In the case of women, most Christian restrictions find their basis in the writings of the Apostle Paul.

Aside from Jesus, Paul may be the teacher with the most far-reaching impact in the history of Christian thought.

Paul wrote about half of the books in the New Testament, including several letters to young churches in which he laid out rules for orderly worship and church governance.

“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man,” Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy.

And to the church in Corinth:

“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”

Those sentences plainly seem to forbid female leadership.

When religious people read them, they find themselves caught between cultural norms illuminated on their TVs and ancient commands printed in their holy books.

That tension is the root of so many points of variance between religious people and people who scratch their heads at religion.

In 2019, John MacArthur, one of the most influential figures in modern American evangelicalism, got into a spat with Texas Bible teacher Beth Moore over her insistence on preaching.

After women spoke at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, MacArthur took it as a sign that Baptists no longer believed their Bibles.

“When you literally overturn the teaching of Scripture to empower people who want power, you have given up biblical authority,” MacArthur said.

That philosophy was echoed by Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, leading up to this month’s convention vote.

Mohler wrote and spoke publicly of his opposition to women in the pastorate, calling it “contrary to Scripture” and a slippery slope toward more egalitarian interpretations on issues of gender, homosexuality and marriage.

“If you adopt a system that allows you to get around the plain teachings of Scripture in one area, you are going to have a very hard time closing the door on someone else using your same argument on a different issue,” Mohler wrote.

Open to interpretation

Of course that’s not what’s happening in the 3% of evangelical congregations led by a woman.

No serious person of faith would consciously jettison the teachings of the Bible to create a theology of her own making.

Those congregations who empower women have not done so. Rather, they have found justification for their position in the sacred texts, not outside them.

For instance, Paul’s commands about women could be interpreted as unique to the churches he addressed, and not universal for all time.

That interpretation is especially appealing in the letter to Timothy in which Paul also forbids women to wear gold or pearls to church.

Also, the submission Paul enforced “as the law says” may refer to the ancient Roman law of tutelage.

For a woman to speak in church would not have broken the law of God, but the law of Rome, and therefore censured. Since America has no such law, Paul’s command here may be null, some interpreters say.

Another issue: The title of “pastor” debated by Southern Baptists is not a biblical office. The New Testament describes only two ecclesiastical offices: elder (or overseer) and deacon (or servant). And the most common pattern of church leadership seems to be a board or council of elders rather than a single all-powerful leader.

That’s a wise move for churches for the same reasons it’s a wise move for corporations, political parties and even neighborhood associations that employ a plurality of voices for governance.

But many Southern Baptist churches operate with a single leader, the pastor serving as the only or most powerful overseer.

Indeed, according to the National Congregations Study, more than half of American congregations are led by a single leader with no additional paid ministerial staff.

And some evangelical churches have all three offices — elder, deacon and pastor.

It’s hard to claim the biblical high ground in a debate over an office the Bible doesn’t address.

Something else must be said here: This debate is not only about differing interpretations of sacred writings but about differing weights given to those interpretations.

The Bible affirms that some commands are more important than others.

Loving God and loving your neighbor top the list. Matters of church governance are simply less important.

Believers can agree to disagree over what Paul calls “disputable matters.”

Only when every issue becomes a holy crusade do you get the likes of Al Mohler.

In fact, this may be one way that church leaders are following the very culture they seek to “stand against.”

In our current ideological debates, every issue is an existential one.

Every politician warns us that a vote for the other guy is an extinction-level threat.

Last year, I was invited to speak to a class of students at the University of Texas at Dallas.

We discussed many issues, from climate change to election integrity to puberty blockers, and every single one was considered a matter of life and death.

In such an environment, the job of a cultural translator is a fraught one.

OPINION Evangelical world lacks accountability

Amid cases of male misconduct, women are still denied pastoral roles

What disqualifies a person from pastoral ministry?

We’ve seen different answers to that question in the evangelical world recently.

The Southern Baptist Convention reaffirmed its ban on women serving in any pastoral role by expelling a congregation that had a female pastor for women and children.

And in North Texas, Robert Morris, the founding pastor of nondenominational Gateway Church, was allowed to resign after a woman came forward to say that he had sexually abused her for over four years starting when she was 12 years old.

Unlike in some of these stories, the allegation was known by his previous church.

But instead of being rung out of ministry forever (let alone facing criminal charges), Morris underwent two years of “freedom counseling” and “restoration” before being allowed back into ministry in 1989.

Outside of a small circle of male elders, it seems no one was ever informed of this behavior.

The split-screen picture was unavoidably striking.

On the one hand, there is not a pastoral job so modestly defined that a woman may hold it; on the other, there was profound indulgence for a man accused not only of violating Christian morality but the law and the ethical obligations of ministry.

On one hand, swift and final discipline.

On the other, a gracious and face-saving exit.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that whatever structures of accountability and oversight exist in the evangelical world are fundamentally broken.

Cindy Clemishire, who accused Morris of abuse, reached out to Gateway starting in 2005 to ask them to address the issue, she said.

But, as has often been the case in these stories, nothing happened until it became a public scandal.

Morris hosted Mark Driscoll, then in disgrace for his own alleged abusive church practices and misogynistic theology, for his first public appearance only days after his resignation from Mars Hill.

A pastor scheduled for this summer’s Gateway education series was removed at the last minute, dealing with his own accusations of pastoral misconduct.

Another pastor in the same series, Dallas’ Tony Evans, had just stepped away from his megachurch ministry over unspecified alleged moral lapses.

That’s just part of the circle around one Dallas-area megachurch.

The stories are repeated all around the country with chilling regularity.

A pastor with a big following turns out to have done something very wrong; he acknowledges something like “moral failures,” usually in minimizing language, and always as if sexual abuse or pastoral misconduct primarily concerns the perpetrator rather than the victim; huddles with a few male elders for a process of “reconciliation” or “restoration,” lasting a few weeks or months, and then he’s back, either in his old pulpit or founding a new church.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Christianity’s ethic of forgiveness is used as a mask, even a license, for abuse of all kinds.

If this sounds eerily similar to patterns of abuse and cover-up exposed in the Catholic Church in past years, that’s no coincidence.

The Southern Baptist Convention, to its credit, has at least begun to grapple with the problem of revolving-door abusers.

But in the wild world of nondenominational evangelicalism, there’s no mechanism for accountability apart from those interchangeable circles of male leaders, sharing an ethic of male domination and sexual entitlement, and the individual survivors who occasionally become loud enough to supply in public embarrassment what those leaders seem to lack in private shame.

While it is true that God can forgive any sin, it does not follow that every kind of sin is compatible with church ministry.

Some offenses are also crimes and need to be dealt with civilly as well as within church structures.

Some offenses have implications for their victims that are more important than the self-proclaimed moral struggles of the offender.

And some offenses betray a lack of trustworthiness so severe that the person cannot be allowed back into a position of comparable trust and authority ever again.

If a dentist can be stripped of a license, a pastor should be, too.

Even pastors should be willing to make an honest living some other way.

A pastor with a properly formed Christian conscience would welcome it, rather than justify himself and bask in the applause of an audience.

But ultimately, I suspect a church culture that won’t trust women as official pastors and elders — and let’s be honest here, women in churches everywhere do a lot of pastoral work even if they’re denied the title — will not trust their claims or value their safety either, at least not if it comes at the cost of male prestige.

As long as churches are more afraid of women being leaders than women being victims, that’s exactly what they’re going to get. Benjamin J. Dueholm is pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in University Park.

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