The Southern Baptist Convention’s current attempt to put women in their place “is one of the harshest measures against women in ministry” in history, according to Baylor University history professor Beth Allison Barr.
“If you follow church history, this is one of maybe the most rigid” actions against women ever, Barr told a group gathered by Baptist Women in Ministry June 10 just a few blocks from where the SBC annual meeting is taking place this week.
Earlier that day, SBC messengers, as those with voting credentials are called, set up a rerun of vote on a Constitutional amendment that would make explicit a ban on women serving in any roles that carry the title “pastor.” That vote will take place Wednesday morning, June 11. Even though the motion did not get the two-thirds majority needed last year for approval, its advocates appear ready to keep pushing it until they win, she said.
“It’s constant. They’re just going to keep introducing it over and over again so they can make sure and limit the ways women understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in their lives and what the Holy Spirit is,” Barr said. “They keep bringing this up over and over again when they already have mechanisms by which they can disfellowship churches because they don’t agree on women pastors. Honestly, what it does is it keeps drawing narrower and narrower boundaries and saying if you’re not within this, then you’re not with us, you’re outside.
During debate on other motions Tuesday, one pastor rattled off a list of assorted church roles — from preaching to children’s Sunday school teacher — and said the SBC should clarify exactly what women are allowed and not allowed to do nationwide.
Those advocating the strict gender roles for women say they are only upholding historical standards, Barr noted. “They say that this is historic, that they’re doing what Southern Baptists always have done.”
She quipped: “That is such a lie.”
Barr is the author of two bestsellers on women in the church: The Making of Biblical Womanhood and Becoming the Pastor’s Wife. Before speaking to the group at First United Methodist Church in downtown Dallas Tuesday evening, she had spent the day at the SBC annual meeting, held in the cavernous Kay Bailey Hutchison Dallas Convention Center.
There, she spotted evidence of another lie, Barr said. Across the convention center the SBC North American Mission Board has enormous displays with its slogan, “It’s all about the gospel.”
“If you were all about the gospel, you would not be putting limits on some of your most valuable members of the church.”
“If you were all about the gospel, you would not be putting limits on some of your most valuable members of the church who have always supported and run your churches,” she said. “If you were all about the gospel, you would be supporting and encouraging women in whatever ways possible.”
Barr also pointed out a key bit of language that appeared in a 1,000-word resolution on gender, marriage and family that was adopted by messengers Tuesday. That resolution appeals to a “created order” as God’s intent for men and women to hold different roles in the church and family.
This is about “men above women, the emphasis on the family as the foundational institution for society,” she said.
Barr warned: “It’s almost to the point where the created order has become the essential belief where if you don’t agree with this, then you’re not really a Christian. Even to the point they’re using language of this is not just a Christian conviction, it’s a universal reality.”
Beth Allison Barr
Barr was asked why she thinks created order has been elevated to such an essential doctrine, and she replied this is something relatively new within the past 40 or so years. “Complimentarianism has changed over time, things they enforce and they emphasize change over time.”
She called created order theology “stupid” and said it doesn’t even line up with a conservative reading of the biblical text in Genesis. If creation order is based on Genesis, then the woman — Eve — ought to have authority over Adam since woman was created last, she said. And if created order runs the other way, then the animals should have authority over men because they were created first.
“It doesn’t work,” she said.
The effort by mainly white men in the SBC to narrowly define what women can and cannot do — even what the Holy Spirit might empower them to do — is all about power, Barr said. “We have to honor the full humanity, dignity of women. And by doing that, then, we potentially are giving women power.”
One thing particularly jarring about attending the SBC annual meeting and listening to the debates was how personal it felt, she added. “It is one thing to read the words of men standing up and questioning what women can do in the church, and it’s another thing to hear them do it from a microphone on the floor and have the whole row behind you start clapping. That was something else entirely.”
On a positive note, Barr said she did find some encouragement from talking with women at the Ministers’ Wives Luncheon: “The best thing I heard at this conference was this talk at the lunch today, which was about mental health and about taking mental health seriously and taking care of oneself.”
Barr said her research into the history of Baptist women in ministry and the evolving role of Baptist women as pastor’s wives highlights the true devotion of women of faith, even if they see their roles differently.
“It was a reminder how deeply women in the Southern Baptist Convention want to follow Jesus and want to be faithful,” she said. “… It’s really easy to forget the women who are honestly just wanting to serve God, and many of them have never grown up in a space where they have been taught that they can do something beyond that.”
Her hope for women and girls alike — including her teenage daughter — is to see models of women leading in church that will inspire their imaginations.
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