When the Southern Baptist Convention holds its annual meeting in Dallas in two weeks, the role of women in ministry will take center stage — again.
An issue many thought was settled 25 years ago just won’t go away for the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination. In advance of another likely showdown on the convention floor, two groups not controlled by the SBC are drawing attention.
First, some inside the SBC are highlighting that Woman’s Missionary Union, a missions-support auxiliary to the SBC, continues to do something no SBC agency has been willing to do — disclose its finances in the way most other U.S. nonprofits are required to do.
WMU is the only SBC-related entity that files an IRS Form 990, which provides a level of transparency internal critics of the SBC wish the denominations mission boards and seminaries would follow.
WMU is the only SBC-related entity that files an IRS Form 990.
WMU is the only SBC-related organization run by women. And it has a long record of Form 990 transparency, including reporting the compensation of its top executive and its sources of income and expense.
A Facebook group called SBC Issues and Ministry Q&A Group called attention to WMU’s financial transparency in a post May 27.
Southern Baptist layman John Kaleo wrote on X: “If the @NationalWMU can fill out and submit 990s that everyone can see, what is every other SBC entities’ excuse to not show that level of information to the members? The WMUs world is not ending and they may have the highest trust out of any of our groups, so what could it hurt?”
It is possible another effort will be made from the floor this year to demand greater financial accountability from other SBC entities. Such proposals in previous years have been ruled out of order or sent to certain death by referral to the very bodies that oppose transparency.
Unlike WMU, all other SBC entities have declared themselves to be “churches” in IRS terms to avoid disclosure.
While women lead the way in financial transparency, they should not lead the church, according to the prevailing view within the SBC. The denomination’s Baptist Faith and Message doctrinal statement precludes women serving as pastors, and an effort to enshrine that prohibition more boldly in the SBC Constitution will come to the floor again this year.
That proposed Constitutional change, known as the Law Amendment, received the required two-thirds majority support in 2023 but not in 2024 on second reading. This year, an effort will be made to resurrect the Law Amendment.
Meredith Stone
Beth Allison Barr
That will be the focus of a Baptist Women in Ministry event in downtown Dallas June 10, the first night of the SBC annual meeting. BWIM is an independent entity that promotes and resources women in ministry across all Baptist denominational lines.
The event at First United Methodist Church of Dallas will feature a dialogue with BWIM Executive Director Meredith Stone and Beth Allison Barr, a Baylor University history professor and author of Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry and The Making of Biblical Womanhood.
Registration information is available at the BWIM website.
The theme of the evening will be “A Conversation About the State of Women in the Southern Baptist Convention,” according to a news release.
“Understanding how the country’s largest Protestant denomination views and regulates women is paramount,” Stone said. “The SBC’s actions foreshadow and create a climate for continued threats to women’s equality throughout Christian communities and broader society within the United States.”
BWIM began as a group called Southern Baptist Women in Ministry but as the SBC took a sharp rightward term in the late 1990s dropped its identification as “Southern Baptist.”
Convention debate over women in ministry likely will not be limited to the Law Amendment. The SBC North American Mission Board continues to draw flak for its alleged sponsorship of church starts with female leaders.
The latest example publicly cited is Clovis Hills Church in Clovis, Calif., where four women hold jobs with the word “pastor” in their titles.
Another example of a church that could face sanction exists much closer to this year’s convention site. Lakepointe Church in Rockwall — a Dallas suburb — allowed a woman to preach on Mother’s Day. She said she was doing so “under the fathers of this house.”
Other churches have been expelled from the SBC for lesser offenses.
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