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Southern Baptists again reject strict prohibition on women pastors
Southern Baptists again reject strict prohibition on women pastors
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The Southern Baptist Convention in 2025: The key issues
The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's largest Protestant denomination denomination. It is headquartered in Nashville.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
The convention has 12.7 million members in the United States.
Southern Baptists have long held to a view called complementarianism, which prescribes different roles for men and women.
In recent years, the Southern Baptist Convention has taken a stricter stance on churches with female pastors and some members sought to enshrine a ban into the SBC's constitution.
For the second year in a row, a vote on the ban has failed to garner the needed two-thirds majority to pass.
DALLAS — The Southern Baptist Convention on Wednesday again spurned a constitutional ban on female pastors as the prohibition's proponents failed to move the needle on a contentious issue that has prompted several years of debate and the exit of multiple congregations from the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
For the second year in a row, 61% of SBC messengers, or delegates, voted for the measure, just short of the required two-thirds majority.
The matter has tested the Nashville-based denomination's commitment to church autonomy as some churches choose to embrace more egalitarian views about women in ministry rather than complementarianism, which prescribes different roles for men and women.
The SBC has disfellowshipped several prominent churches because of female pastors within the last several years, including Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Southern California; Fern Creek Baptist of Louisville, Kentucky; and First Baptist Church Alexandria in Virginia.
Others, like NewSpring Church in South Carolina, have left voluntarily.
James Goforth, senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Ferguson, Missouri, spoke against the measure, calling it an unnecessary distraction from more important issues.
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But Alexander Odum, pastor at Northside Baptist Church in Fort Myers, Florida, expressed frustration with such characterizations, noting that the SBC's credentials committee had initially failed to recommend Saddleback's ouster in 2022 despite the church employing a female senior pastor. The SBC eventually expelled Saddleback in 2023.
"That yearlong delay was the direct result of the committee not having clarity," Odum said. "There is no reason to run away from our biblical beliefs about the office of pastor."
The motion limiting pastor and church elder roles to men only was introduced by Juan Sanchez, senior pastor of High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, who said the measure simply echoed Baptist principles but was needed to provide clarity for the nation's largest group of evangelical Christians.
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He noted that some have worried about the legal ramifications of passing the measure but said it was important to adhere to biblical principles.
"There will always be legal concerns," Sanchez said. "We are not a people governed by attorneys. We are a people governed by a book."
Approval of the ban could have risked the departure of additional churches from the denomination, which is struggling to maintain its membership of just under 13 million. But the measure's backers have said adherence to doctrine should trump membership concerns, despite opponents' concerns that it would be too repressive.
