SBC 2021 (Part 1): Gender Again

The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is taking place this week in Nashville, and it looks to be a very active business meeting.  COVID prevented last year’s meeting, so we have two years’ worth of concerns, much of which has been unproductively battered around on social media, to try to settle in one way or another.  And the stakes may be high, as the votes may send one group or another out from under the SBC tent.

So what are the issues that loom darkly over the SBC?  There are several, and I’ll try to give some thoughts on the big ones.

Back in the late 1970’s, the SBC went through something called the Conservative Resurgence.  Recognizing that some leaders were moving the convention in a more liberal theological direction, an effort was begun and eventually accomplished to move things back to the right.  One of the liberal positions pushed back by the Conservative Resurgence was the idea of ordination of women.  In 2000, the SBC adopted a revision to its statement of beliefs known as the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M), and one of the changes to that document was the statement that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”  This statement is based on multiple passages, such as I Timothy 3:2 and I Timothy 2:12.  While the BF&M doesn’t specifically mention it, the latter text would also disqualify women from preaching or teaching to an audience that included men, such as a Sunday morning service.

Since the last annual meeting, it has been observed that there are multiple church plants that were invested in by the North American Mission Board (NAMB) that have women listed on their websites with a title of “pastor” or “co-pastor.”  Is NAMB not paying attention to the churches they are helping to start, or do they know and not care, or worse, desire to see this despite its contradiction to the BF&M?

One of the most prominent women teachers in Southern Baptist life has been Beth Moore.  Her beginnings are noble - a woman digging into Scripture to teach God’s truth to other women.  Along the way, some significant issues came up, and one of those was that she began to allow her audiences to include both male and female.  There were even times when she was asked to speak for the Sunday morning worship time.  While not technically violating the BF&M, it violated the underlying Scripture.  Just a few months ago, she had heard enough of people telling her she shouldn’t do that and took herself out of the SBC.

A little over a month ago, a megachurch within the SBC had what they called an “historic night” by ordaining three women as pastors.  The chuch is Saddleback Church in California, and its lead pastor is Rick Warren.

How the convention will respond to this issue is crucial - it will either be stopped or it will expand markedly.  There is no chance that it will stay at only what we see today.  This is a battle that we have already fought.  It seems strange to need to be fighting it again.

The Illogical Is Becoming Conventional

I realize that I let the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis slip by without a single comment. In fact, I've let a lot of stuff slip by without a peep. I am planning some posts that will explain why I haven't been able to jump up on my little Internet soapbox and say anything. So be watching for those.

This past week, there was another gathering of people who call themselves Baptists. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) met in Memphis, where they made some pretty outlandish statements. Take a look at this one, for example, in a Baptist Press article. One speaker claims that some passages of Scripture "embody the Spirit of Jesus" more than others. Maybe I'll come back to that one, because that is big enough to go on about for quite some time. But as this same speaker considers the "spirit" of Galatians 3:28, he came to the illogical conclusion that, "if we were not going to ordain women, we were going to have to stop baptizing girls."

Egalitarians, those who believe that there are absolutely no differences aside from genitalia between the genders, almost always start their argument off with Galatians 3:28. They rip it from its context to make it say much more than it does. Its context is a discussion of salvation, and the verse makes the point that everyone, not just Jewish males, but every person, has a need for salvation in Christ, and are saved in exactly the same way, not by works but by faith in Christ Jesus. The verse mentions three areas of distinction - race, status, and gender. Nothing about any of those makes any difference in a person's need for or means of salvation. But those three areas of distinction do still exist. The Jews do seem to still have their own part to play in events that have been prophesied, and by Jesus' command were to be preached the Gospel first. Paul did not use this concept to try to keep the slave Onesimus from going back to his master Philemon, and there will always be those who are workers and those who are their masters or leaders. Likewise, there continues to be differences between the genders that go beyond the physical.

One of those areas of difference has to do with preaching and pastoring. The CBF speaker fails to recognize that God does not use everyone He saves in the same way. And even if he does recognize that some are called or gifted for this or that, he does not recognize that God considers gender in His calling. But the Scriptures that list the qualifications for pastors (or elders) of a church are very specific that the pastor be a "man of one woman." The qualification goes one way; it does not turn around and say "or a woman of one man."

There is more that could be said about that, but stepping away from the pastoral position, what about just preaching? First Timothy 2:11 instructs that the way the church is supposed to work is that women are not supposed to teach or to take authority over the men. That can be extremely offensive to some people. And so they try to explain it away by saying Paul was reacting to a problem with women who lacked proper training or understanding, or it was a cultural thing, that's just how things were done. But the problem with all these attempts to explain this verse into saying something other than exactly what it says is that the rest of the verse gives Paul's explanation for giving this instruction. It comes out of how God created things from the very beginning. There was an order in how and why God created man and woman.

Some will ask, "Can't God call a woman to preach?" as if to imply that if we say He can't, we are saying something is impossible for God, and thus they are attempting to set a trap. Contrary to what we sometimes say, there are wrong questions. Perhaps you've heard the question, Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it? That's a wrong question because it is illogical. The question of "Can God call a woman to preach?" is similar to "Can God tempt a person to sin?" God cannot tempt a person to sin, because it goes against His nature. Likewise, God cannot call a woman to preach within the local church context because it goes against His own Word. But God can and does definitely gift women to teach, and call them to teach, and that calling and that giftedness definitely should be exercised within the Biblical parameters God has given. Without really getting into the subject of God's "calling," our subjective sense of God's calling is limited by what He tells us forthrightly in His Word. If we sense God calling us into something that contradicts His Word, we either misunderstood what the message is or who it was from.

For more about this topic, you can see the articles "God's High Calling for Women, Part 3" (check out the other three parts, too) by John MacArthur or "Women Preachers" by Robert Lewis Dabney. Also, be sure to read the article "Able to Teach and Complementarian?" by Kim Pennington.

Note: I have dealt with only the I Timothy passage in this post, but this doctrine is not built on this single Scripture. The articles I have referred discuss other Biblical texts regarding this issue.