Southern Baptists upheld the expulsion of two churches that have female pastors on Wednesday and voted to change its constitution to formally restrict women from church leadership moving forward.
The Convention voted in February to expel five churches with women pastors, including Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch in Southern California. Saddleback and another smaller church called Fern Creek Baptist from Louisville, Kentucky, appealed that decision.
But the Southern Baptist Convention’s 12,700 members — known as “messengers” — overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to reject those appeals saying the two churches were no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the denomination.
The Southern Baptists Convention later approved an additional amendment to its constitution that says churches in the denomination must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder.” The amendment must be approved for a second time at the next annual meeting by a two-thirds vote to go into force.
If it does become the body’s operating policy, the new restrictions could see an estimated 1,900 other churches at risk of expulsion, The New York Times reported. Bart Barber, the president of the Convention, said the ultraconservative wing of Southern Baptists could push to file complaints against those churches, but stressed leadership would be careful moving forward.
“Even with these changes, they have to be applied church by church, and Southern Baptists have a history of being judiciously careful when they look at specific circumstances,” Barber said Wednesday, per the Times.
The votes took place at the Convention’s annual meeting in New Orleans. The decision will not have any overt impact on the two churches, which will still operate, but reflects Southern Baptists’ growing conservative bent.
Linda Barnes Popham, who has been the pastor of Fern Creek for 30 years, told The Washington Post she was disappointed her church had been ejected from Southern Baptists, amounting the decision to “a group of power-hungry men who are working in the darkness.”
“If I were them I’d be really sorry I’d done this because what will be the next reason?” she told the Post. “It seems like they’re trying to purify the church according to their standards when only Jesus Christ can purify the church. It’s like they’re trying to legislate purification.”
Warren, who waged a public campaign to remain with Southern Baptists, excoriated the vote Wednesday and said leadership wanted to take the body backwards “to the 1950s.” Saddleback ordained three women as pastors in 2021.
“That is their golden age for the church, the 1950s, when basically white men rule supreme, and the woman’s place is in the home, and there is not a lot of diversity,” Warren said after the vote, per The New York Times. “A fundamentalist is someone who has stopped listening.”
The convention’s 2000 statement of faith, called the Baptist Faith and Message, has said for decades only qualified men can serve as pastors.