The headlines from the left-wing secular media were gleeful and celebratory:
Southern Baptist ban on women pastors fails in historic vote — The Tennesean
Southern Baptist Convention allowing women pastors after vote — KACO
Southern Baptists Fail to Pass Measure Banning Churches Banning Churches With Women Pastors — WSJ
Southern Baptists narrowly reject formal ban on churches with any women pastors — CNN
On and on it went with a parade of disinformation (don't expect all those ubiquitous fact-checkers to call out the error).
The truth is that the SBC did NOT vote to allow women to be pastors. The group voted down the Law Amendment, which would have added clarity to the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) regarding the roles of men and women in the church. The BF&M already bans women pastors, stating in Article III, "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." Full stop.
The Law Amendment would have added, "... a church [is] in friendly cooperation with the Convention... which... Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture." The aim was to make it crystal clear that churches with women pastors are out of cooperation.
[Note: I am not a Southern Baptist, but I've followed this issue closely. Pastor Mike Law, for whom the amendment is named, is a friend and was my son's family's pastor when they lived in Virginia. I ask my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters to forgive me if I've misconstrued anything or used the wrong terminology.]
Ultimately, the Law Amendment failed to garner the necessary 66% to pass. The BF&M requires a supermajority two years in a row to amend the document. Last year, 80% voted to approve it, but that number fell to 61% this year, still a healthy majority.
The issue arose because there are currently around 1,000 SBC churches with women as pastors — something that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. The Credentials Committee has been dragging its feet in removing these scripture-bending churches from the SBC. Still, last year, they voted to remove Rick Warren's Saddleback Church — one of the biggest and most vocal churches in the U.S. — from the SBC for having women pastors, and they voted this year to remove First Baptist Church of Alexandria (Virginia) for the same reason, so it's blatantly dishonest to claim that the SBC is going soft on its strong complementarian views.
Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College, summed it up this way:
But this does raise the question why messengers would vote so decisively to remove FBC Alexandria (92%) while not voting with the same decisiveness on the Law amendment (61%)? I believe the argument that carried the day was the one that says the Law Amendment isn’t necessary. This was always the strongest argument against the Law Amendment. The one person who spoke against the amendment during the debate made this argument. And I think that it was enough to keep the Law Amendment just shy of the supermajority and final ratification.
Nevertheless, hundreds of churches continue to flout the BF&M on the issue. Backers had hoped the additional language would prompt the Credentials Committee to deal decisively with the other churches disregarding the Bible's clear teaching on the roles of men and women. None of this was intended to force a top-down diktat but to make it clear that they were not in friendly cooperation.
As Burk wrote last year after the SBC voted to disfellowship Saddleback:
The SBC does not have the right or authority to tell any church whom they may call as pastor. The SBC has zero authority to tell a church what they can or cannot do or what they must or must not believe. How a church governs itself or chooses its pastors is not what this dispute is about.
This discussion is about whether the SBC has a right to recognize which churches are in friendly cooperation with the convention. Our polity says that the SBC does have that right. Furthermore, the SBC Constitution defines some parameters for determining which churches are in friendly cooperation.
These belligerent churches are free to employ female pastors, but they are not considered to be in fellowship with the SBC if they don't follow the rules, simple as that.
Pastor Law encouraged his fellow Baptists to continue the fight in an X post.
The bottom line is that while the BF&M definitively states that only men may hold the office of pastor, it's unlikely that there will be a rush to disfellowship the hundreds of other churches whose views on the issue do not comport with biblical truth. And that's sad.
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