Messengers at the SBC Annual Meeting in Indianapolis will vote on the Law Amendment to the SBC Constitution that passed on by the required two-thirds vote last year. A second vote is required. This amendment would limit pastors to male only, and provide additional grounds for dismissing churches with female pastors of any kind. Three current candidates for SBC President are for the amendment, and three are against. Here are two views from outside the presidential election. The full versions are available at BaptistPress.com.
FOR: Robin Hadaway
“I want to be the pastor,” said the woman in our church. It was 1985, and I was a first-term missionary in Tanzania. The lady was a graduate of Tanzania’s Baptist seminary and the wife of a government official, while the other candidates were uneducated men. I explained to her why this was not biblical.
In 2002, I was the International Mission Board’s regional leader for eastern South America, supervising about 350 missionaries in Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. I received word that a local Brazilian church had ordained a female IMB missionary. A trustee and I asked her to rescind the ordination. She agreed, but soon after her retirement, a stateside Southern Baptist church ordained her.
Messengers to the 2024 SBC Annual Meeting in June will vote on an amendment which would add a sixth subparagraph to Article III, Paragraph 1 of the SBC Constitution. Article III outlines the criteria for churches to be able to seat messengers at an annual meeting.
In order to be deemed “in friendly cooperation” with the SBC, a church should:
▶ Align with the Baptist Faith and Message (2000)
▶ State its intention to cooperate (often this is in the form of filing an Annual Church Profile report)
▶ Contribute through the Cooperative Program or other SBC-related channels
▶ Align with the Convention’s beliefs regarding the handling of sexual abuse
▶ Refrain from exhibiting or affirming racial discriminatory behavior.
The Law Amendment would add a sixth criterion. A church will be in friendly cooperation only if it “affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
I support the amendment for three reasons:
1. It clarifies Southern Baptists’ view of who should be a pastor. Even on the mission field this issue emerges. The matter is not about a woman’s status before the Lord. The amendment addresses only who can be a pastor. Scripture teaches that men and women are equal before God (I Peter 3:7). Yet their roles are different and complementary. Men and women need one another for Southern Baptist churches to represent Christ to a lost world.
2. I do not believe passing this amendment will result in a flood of efforts to exclude churches who use the title “pastor” incorrectly. I served on the SBC Credentials Committee (CC) at the 2000 annual meeting (and the Resolutions Committee in 2005 and 2006). Although configured differently today, the CC still responds to issues brought to it rather than search for violations.
Article III states that one evidence of cooperation is “regular filing of the annual report requested by the Convention.” According to the latest ACP data, only 69% of Southern Baptist churches fulfilled this marker indicative of friendly cooperation. Even though many churches do not file an ACP report, there has been no movement to dismiss these churches—only encouragement for them to do better.
3. One’s stance on the amendment should be based upon Scripture and not perceived cultural, ethnic, or linguistic factors. I served as an IMB missionary in Africa for 12 years, and the finest Christians I know live there. These believers decide doctrinal issues according to biblical hermeneutics, not to match certain cultural practices.
Furthermore, I supervised IMB missions in eastern South America for six-and-a-half years. I dealt with the usage of the Portuguese and Spanish term, pastora. In most cases, the word was used for the pastor’s wife, not to indicate a female pastor or co-pastor. When a church did use the term pastora incorrectly, they were lovingly corrected. The use or misuse of a foreign word or perceived cultural preference should not influence a determination of the merits of the Law Amendment.
As secular culture pushes Christianity to conform to its evolving redefinitions of orthodoxy, the SBC must periodically recalibrate its documents accordingly. The Law Amendment clarifies what Southern Baptists believe the Bible teaches concerning who is qualified to serve in the role of pastor.
At last year’s convention, my wife, Kathy, and I were thrilled to see all the young pastors and their wives lifting their ballots and voting for the first reading of the Law Amendment. This year we will again join them.
Robin Hadaway is senior professor of missions at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (semi-retired). He was a candidate for SBC president in 2022.
AGAINST: Randy Davis
I am firmly conservative and complementarian in my theology, and I wholeheartedly affirm the Baptist Faith and Message (2000). Article VI of the BF&M speaks to the senior pastor role. We are not confused. However, I believe the Law Amendment draws a line that points us away from our denomination’s historical polity.
I have three primary concerns about this amendment and its possible unintended consequences, so therefore I am not in favor of it becoming a permanent part of our Convention’s governing documents.
Southern Baptists throughout our history have respected differences of opinion on doctrinal issues for the sake of a shared mission. I sincerely pray we can capture that civility regarding this challenge. I respect views on both sides of the Law Amendment, but I believe we would do well to pause and give its implications thoughtful consideration.
1. I am concerned about whether the amendment is imperative.
Messengers to last year’s convention overwhelmingly voted not to seat messengers from churches that had either a lead pastor or a campus pastor who is a woman. It was the messengers’ clear affirmation of their understanding the BF&M’s statement defining a pastor “as qualified by Scripture.” The messengers’ vote also demonstrated the SBC has a healthy mechanism in place to address questions related to doctrine and cooperation. Collectively and collaboratively, we as a Convention can—and do—address challenges without the need to modify our governing documents.
2. I am concerned that the amendment could be unintentionally damaging.
Our confessional statement has provided doctrinal clarity and has served the SBC well. It has effectively provided needed parameters for SBC seminaries, its mission boards, state conventions, other entities and churches. The BF&M 2000 committee was composed of brilliant minds, men and women. Dr. Adrian Rogers, who chaired that committee, moved at the 2000 SBC Annual Meeting the adoption of the BF&M report with the following paragraph added as the sixth paragraph of the report’s preamble: “Baptists cherish and defend religious liberty, and deny the right of any secular or religious authority to impose a confession of faith upon a church or body of churches.
“We honor the principles of soul competency and the priesthood of believers, affirming together both our liberty in Christ and our accountability to each other under the Word of God.”
We’ve ardently maintained through the years that the BF&M is a confessional statement (defining our distinctives as Southern Baptists) and not a creedal statement. However, if we begin narrowly interpreting the BF&M through the Law Amendment and require (through the Credentials Committee) strict adherence by every Southern Baptist church to participate in a like-minded, cooperative, Great Commission effort, haven’t we begun “to impose a confession of faith upon a church or body of churches,” denying their liberty in Christ?
The Law Amendment brings the SBC to the brink of becoming a legalistically narrow road that chokes participation rather than being a Great Commission superhighway promoting missions and traveled by churches of all sizes and cultures. Our historical Baptist polity is to trust the local church to decide its own structures under the umbrella of our doctrinal belief system.
3. I am concerned about the future implications of the amendment in SBC life.
If we…rewrite our Constitution and Bylaws to include the Law Amendment, where does it end? Will the Convention (or the Credentials Committee) then decide which “official” version of the Bible churches must use to be considered in “friendly cooperation”? Or that churches must adhere to a premillennial, postmillennial, or an amillennial perspective to participate? Or that churches must be reformed or non-reformed to maintain their status?
And at what point will we have thwarted the local church’s autonomy while continuing to propagate the idea that its members have freedom to govern themselves? As one of my fellow state executives said last summer, “The Southern Baptist Convention is organized to promote a mission, not to police our churches.”
We have proven through the messenger process we can police ourselves without infringing on a local church’s right to govern itself and without making monumental changes to the SBC Constitution and Bylaws.
Randy Davis is Executive Director of the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board.