Baptist Panel Rejects Women as Pastors

Women should no longer be pastors in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, a key leadership committee of the Southern Baptist Convention recommended Thursday.

The proposal, expected to be overwhelmingly approved next month at the church’s national convention in Orlando, Fla., declares that “while both men and women are gifted and called for ministry, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

The move appears to be the first time that a major denomination has ever sought to put the brakes on women pastors after local congregations had begun calling them as leaders. Baptist leaders said they were unaware of any precedent.

Roughly 100 women now serve as senior pastors in the 42,000 churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which has 15.9 million members. Current women pastors would not lose their pulpits, but the declaration would put the denomination on record against any new ones.

Although local churches would not be legally bound by the statement to bar women as their pastors, denominational leaders said they expect local churches to follow scriptural injunctions against choosing women.

The proposal by the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee came as part of an overall restatement of Baptist principles that underlined the defiantly conservative tone of the convention’s leadership.

“Rampant relativism” and “denial of absolute truth” pervade America, the statement said.

“A pervasive secularism has infested our society, and its corrosive effects are evident throughout the life of our nation,” it added. “Moral decay and assaults upon cherished truths dominate the arena in which we must now minister, and to which we must now proclaim the Gospel.”

Among its tenets, the statement reaffirmed the Southern Baptists’ strong rejection of homosexuality and abortion. The panel also repeated the Baptist convention’s repudiation of the idea that many different religious traditions are meritorious.

“Given the pervasive influence of a postmodern culture, we are called to proclaim Jesus Christ as the only Savior, and salvation is in his name alone,” the committee said.

“Baptists thus reject inclusivism and pluralism in salvation, for these compromise the Gospel itself,” the statement said.

In saying that women should not be called as pastors, the Baptist committee cited the New Testament book of 1 Timothy, which declares: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”

The Rev. Anne Thomas Neil, 80, of Wake Forest, N.C., a foreign missionary who was ordained March 19, said passage of the male-only clergy proposal would leave the denomination “a crippled body.”

But Southern Baptist leaders said Thursday that they would not be moved by what they saw as secular concerns.

“This is a statement from Southern Baptists that our positions and our perspectives are not going to be dictated by the culture. They’re going to be dictated by Scripture. If we stand alone, then fine, we’ll stand alone,” Paige Patterson, the president of the Baptist convention, said in an interview.

Patterson, who is president of Southeastern Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, appointed the committee that made the recommendations. He noted that other evangelical Christian bodies, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, limit women’s ministerial roles. Women cannot be ordained as priests in the Catholic Church, but do serve in various ministerial positions.

Nonetheless, Patterson said he expects at least some churches to leave the convention because of the new declaration. The denomination has been losing an average of four or five congregations a year since conservatives took control of the convention a decade ago. Others will probably follow, he said.

“Some of them have been wanting to go anyway and have wondered if they had sufficient currency to sell it to their congregations. They will seize this and probably make an exit,” Patterson said. But he added that the denomination grew by 1,479 new churches this year.

California Southern Baptist leaders said most of the convention’s churchgoers would agree that pastoral roles should be restricted to men. That has long been the practice in most Southern Baptist churches, they noted.

But growing pressure within the larger society for gender equality, they said, prompted the move to formalize what had been until now an unwritten assumption.

“This would not have been an issue in 1926 or 1963, and it’s not much of an issue now, but since it was beginning to become an issue, we felt like it should be addressed,” said the Rev. Roger Spradlin, a member of the committee and senior pastor at Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield.

Women as pastors have been an on-and-off controversy among Southern Baptists in California. During the past six years, for example, a woman pastor in San Francisco has been alternately approved for and denied membership in the California Southern Baptist Convention, executive secretary Fermin Whitaker said Thursday.

Thursday’s recommendations are another demonstration by conservatives of their control over the Southern Baptist Convention.