An acclaimed documentary on the crisis around women in ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention has become available for free viewing just days before the denomination’s 2025 annual meeting in Dallas.
The YouTube release of Hold the Line is especially timely because the issue of banning women from ordination, preaching or holding jobs with “pastor” in the title will be reprised during the SBC’s June 10-11 gathering.
The documentary zeros in on two opposing pastors — Tom Ascol and Linda Barnes Popham — in the debate around women in ministry during the 2023 annual meeting in New Orleans. Messengers there approved the first reading of a constitutional amendment affirming men alone may serve as bishops, elders, pastors and deacons. They also adopted two resolutions on women’s role in ministry. In addition, two congregations were voted out of the denomination for calling female leaders.
A project of The New Yorker magazine and filmmaker Daniel Lombroso, the 2024 documentary premiered at more than a dozen film festivals before its national release later that year.
The 17-minute film opens with messengers speaking from the floor of the 2023 annual meeting wanting to ensure an amendment introduced by Ascol, an ultra-conservative pastor from Florida, was clear enough that women were absolutely prohibited from serving as pastors.
Al Mohler
“It is the unity and harmony of the Southern Baptist Convention that is now at stake,” Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says from a microphone. “The issue of a woman serving in the [role of] pastor is an issue of fundamental biblical authority that does violate both the doctrine and the order of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
After a montage of speakers describing the contributions of Baptists to the nation’s history, the scene cuts to Ascol interacting with family in his home. In a voiceover, he cites a passage in 1 Timothy declaring women in the church should “learn quietly,” “remain quiet” and not to teach or have authority over men.
“We are people who have a book, and that book teaches us what the will of our God is,” Ascol adds. “The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in North America, so what happens to the Southern Baptist Convention matters.”
He also concedes the SBC is undergoing a major decline in membership, but says the answer is not allowing women in the pulpit. “We need reformation, we need revival, and it needs to start with the household of God.”
Linda Barnes Popham prepares to baptize a girl.
Popham is introduced as she baptizes a child at Fern Creek Baptist Church, a former SBC congregation in Louisville, Ky., where she has served as pastor since 1993.
“When I was called as pastor, some people left because of the woman’s issue, but other people left just because they felt I was too conservative,” she explains.
Popham says her goal is only to follow the Bible as faithfully as she can, whether or not she is considered conservative in the process.
“The direction the Southern Baptist Convention is going now seems very dangerous, that you have to think exactly like a particular group of people. To me, it’s like they want to purge to their standard of purity, which is different from God’s standard of purity,” she says.
That standard no doubt has moved further and further to the right since conservatives took control of the SBC from 1979 to 2000. Since then, the denomination has become synonymous with the Republican Party on issues like abortion and polling shows most Southern Baptists are supporters of Donald Trump.
And despite being saddled with a national sex abuse scandal, the SBC also has undertaken a drive for theological uniformity exemplified in part by resolutions blocking women in ministry and ousting congregations out of step with that standard.
A resolution approved in 2023 to respect and value women as “co-laborers” in the Great Commission still emphasized they could not be pastors.
Rick Warren
The 2023 resolution qualified the point further emphasizing their exclusion from pastoral ministry and urging churches to call only men to roles such as “bishop,” “deacon,” “elder” and “pastor.”
And the denomination isn’t through with declaring its stance on women as ministers. At the gathering this month in Texas, messengers will consider a third run at the so-called Law Amendment that would alter the SBC Constitution to declare any church that ordains women, welcomes women to preach or gives them a job title with “pastor” or “minister” will be disfellowshipped.
Popham’s church was one of those kicked out of the SBC during the 2023 annual meeting, as was Saddleback Church, the California congregation founded by Rick Warren.
“If you think every Baptist thinks like you, you’re mistaken,” Warren says during the meeting in a moment captured in Hold the Line. “We should remove churches for all kinds of sexual sin, racial sin, financial sin, leadership sin, sins that harm the testimony of our convention. But the 1,928 churches with women on pastoral staff have not sinned.”
Popham becomes emotional in the documentary as the vote tally — 9,700 to 806 — to expel Fern Creek Baptist Church is read during the annual meeting.
Linda Barnes Popham
“It hurts my heart, and I think what hurts it even more is the hypocrisy of these people who call themselves Southern Baptist leaders. Why do I threaten the Southern Baptist Convention? A woman who is leading people to Jesus, working with the homeless, the down and out, the children and the youth. What is the threat?”
But Ascol takes a victory lap in in the film, claiming the vote dealt “a mortal wound” to the devil.
“This is not something unique to Southern Baptists, it’s just that Southern Baptists have been able to hold the line on this,” he says. “It’s God’s world, he sets the rules. It’s Christ’s church. You can’t make it up as we go. Somebody needs to be holding the line.”
“You don’t hate people to Jesus, you love people to Jesus,” Popham counters. “I’ve heard different folks say if we let a woman be a pastor, the next thing we know we’re going to have homosexual pastors and this and that and the other. But guess what? We’ve never slipped a bit.”
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