Brian Bushard - Former Staff, Brian is a Boston-based Forbes breaking news reporter. article originally posted here
Topline
The Southern Baptist Convention rejected a controversial ban on women pastors in the country’s largest Protestant Christian denomination in a monumental vote on Wednesday, allowing women to remain the heads of Baptist churches, ending a two-year battle stemming from the interpretation of the Bible.
Key Facts
The vote on Wednesday reverses a June 2023 preliminary decision to bar women from presiding over Southern Baptist churches and specified a church could only be considered Southern Baptist if it “affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder.”
That first vote, taken last year in New Orleans, required a second vote at the convention’s June 2024 meeting, according to the church.
The second vote on Wednesday required a two-thirds majority to pass, coming just short with over 61% of voters at the convention supporting the ban, and just over 38% rejecting it.
At the heart of the issue are competing interpretations of the Bible on whether women are allowed to preside over men or whether the two sexes stand on equal footing in the church—an issue that has already prompted the convention to oust multiple churches that allow women in pastoral positions.
Wednesday’s vote also comes as a surprise: Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor, told NPR this week she believed the ban would pass, albeit “closer than we were expecting,” arguing a “significant amount of opposition within the party” could tip the scale.
Chief Critic
Baptist Women in Ministry, an organization that promotes women in Baptist leadership roles, said it was “grateful to the churches and messengers” who supported the “message that women have equal value to God,” though it lamented the matter came to a vote in the first place. In a Wednesday statement, the group said the fact that a majority of convention voters supported the ban showed “that women in ministry are still devalued,” adding that the group is “grieved” the vote took place.
Key Background
The Southern Baptist Convention represented nearly 47,000 churches and 12.9 million members last year, though the organization has seen major drops in membership in recent years, with losses reported in 17 consecutive years following its 2016 peak. In 2022, membership dropped by a whopping 13.2 million, according to SBC affiliate Lifeway Research, the same year a bombshell Houston Chronicle report found hundreds of pastors and church leaders had been accused of sexual abuse as the church stayed quiet. The church lost another 241,000 members last year, according to the SBC annual census. In recent years, the church has also been rocked by the divisive question of women in leadership. The convention had expelled five churches last year, deciding their female pastors made them “not in friendly cooperation” with the church. The convention overwhelmingly ousted a Virginia church just this week over its policy of allowing women to serve as senior pastors.
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