Southern Baptist Church Expel US Churches With Female Pastors

Two churches have been expelled by the largest Baptist denomination in the US because their pastors are women.

According to a vote of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) members, the megachurch in Southern California Saddleback and the Fern Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky were “not in friendly cooperation” with the SBC.

The mission statement of the SBC states that only men should hold the role of pastor.

The pastor of Fern Creek told CBS News that it was a “sad day for Southern Baptists”.

According to the organization’s website, the SBC is an alliance of more than 47,000 Baptist congregations with more than 13 million members.

Pastors oversee the congregations of the church, a protestant Christian group. Five churches in total have been kicked out of the SBC for having female pastors.

Despite their attempts to challenge their expulsions, two were resoundingly rejected at the SBC’s annual convention in New Orleans, according to the Baptist Press, which bills itself as the organization’s official news agency. The three others were not appealing.

“This is a sad day for Southern Baptists because they are losing gifted and talented and called women of God, as we continue to proclaim the gospel. Why they want to get rid of folks like us, makes no sense,” Fern Creek Pastor Linda Barnes Popham said after the vote.

She claimed that the expulsion conveys the message that “you are not valued” to the millions of female members of SBC churches.

According to Rick Warren, former founding pastor of Saddleback, the second-largest congregation in the SBC, “Messengers voted for conformity and uniformity rather than unity,”

“To love difference is the only way you can have unity. We made this effort while knowing we wouldn’t succeed.

Following the expulsion of the two churches, the SBC’s annual convention also approved a constitutional amendment mandating that SBC-affiliated churches hire “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture”; however, the modification must still be approved in the convention the following year.

The amendment, according to Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Texas, “puts us all on the same page about what a pastor is, and who a pastor is: a biblically qualified man.”

However, the motion was rejected by Bob Bender, a pastor of the Bross Fellowship Church in Colorado Springs. According to statements from him provided to the Baptist Press, “Should not title and function be synonymous?

“Let’s not give women responsibilities to shepherd other women, children, or youth and not have their title line up with their responsibilities.”

In recent years the SBC has come under increasing scrutiny from officials.

In 2022, it was found to have covered up decades of abuse within the church.