God calls women to preach. This is not a progressive talking point or a cultural accommodation. It is a theological fact, attested across centuries of Christian witness and confirmed in the lives of countless women who have heard the Spirit’s voice and answered it.
The Southern Baptist Convention has decided otherwise.
On Wednesday, messengers to the SBC annual meeting in Orlando voted 6,028 to 2,026 to advance a constitutional amendment that would permanently ban women from pastoral ministry in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. The amendment moves to next year’s annual meeting, where another two-thirds supermajority will make it permanent law. The men who championed this vote spent months organizing and fearmongering about women in pulpits. They won by a landslide and still call the opposition “concerning.” They secured their power and remain afraid someone might challenge it.
This was a power move.
“The denomination that began by telling Black people they had no voice now tells women the same thing.”
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 to defend the right of slaveholders to be missionaries. The denomination split from Northern Baptists because the North suggested people who enslaved other human beings should not be sent out to preach the gospel. The SBC said slaveholders were fine.
That original sin, that founding commitment to silencing and subjugating people in the name of God, runs through the institution’s DNA. The denomination that began by telling Black people they had no voice now tells women the same thing. Different century, same reflex.
The biblical justification is selective and convenient. SBC leaders cite Paul and draw from the second creation story in Genesis 2, where Adam is formed first and Eve second, to argue for male priority and female subordination. There are two creation stories in Genesis, and they contradict each other.
In her landmark work God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, biblical scholar Phyllis Trible illuminated what the SBC ignores: The first creation account, Genesis 1, presents humanity created simultaneously, equally, in the image of God. Male and female together, bearing the divine image without hierarchy, without rank, without one being the prototype and the other the afterthought.
Trible read the whole text. The SBC reads the parts that keep men in charge.
“A denomination that misreads its own founding text has no business making rules about who gets to preach it.”
A denomination that misreads its own founding text has no business making rules about who gets to preach it. The SBC has decided a person’s fitness to preach the gospel, to shepherd a congregation, to interpret Scripture and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ is determined by sexual anatomy. Think about that. It is like saying you cannot be a concert pianist unless you have a certain blood type, or you cannot teach mathematics unless you were born on a Tuesday. The logic is preposterous.
We are talking about the work of the Spirit, the calling of God, the gifts of teaching and preaching and pastoral care. The SBC has reduced it all to a genital inspection. If that sounds vulgar, good. The policy is vulgar.
Women are the backbone of the SBC. Women run vacation Bible school. Women teach Sunday school. Women lead Bible studies. Women organize mission trips, coordinate food pantries, disciple teenagers and keep the whole enterprise running. If every woman in the SBC walked out tomorrow, the denomination would collapse by Sunday. It could not survive a week without the labor of the people it just told do not belong in the pulpit.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Women can do everything except the one thing that confers authority and visibility. They can serve but cannot lead. They can teach children but not adults. They can prepare the Communion table but cannot preside at it.
The SBC has confused the will of God with the comfort of men in charge.
Here is the contrast that should make every Southern Baptist squirm: Since 2000, more than 220 Southern Baptist leaders have been convicted of sex crimes. Another 160 have been credibly accused. More than 700 victims — many of them children — have been silenced, dismissed and re-victimized by SBC leadership that protected abusers and buried reports.
“The SBC has confused the will of God with the comfort of men in charge.”
On Wednesday, the convention spent more floor time debating where to hold next year’s annual meeting than debating whether to ban female pastors. Women preaching is the crisis. Predators in the pulpit are apparently manageable. The priorities are obscene.
This vote causes real harm to real women — women who have felt a genuine call from God to preach and lead as pastors, who have studied, prepared, led and served with faithfulness and courage.
The SBC earlier expelled Saddleback Church, one of its largest and most influential congregations, for ordaining women. The denomination wounds women who answer God’s call. It tells them their gifts do not matter, their sense of vocation is illegitimate, the God they love and serve has no use for their voice.
Baptist Women in Ministry called the vote a further restriction on women already marginalized in their own tradition. This is spiritual violence.
The church is hemorrhaging people because institutions like the SBC make it impossible for spiritually serious people to stay. The culture is not too secular. Young people are not too distracted. The problem is that denominations waste the gifts of half the body of Christ and call it faithfulness.
The waste of women’s gifts is an injustice to women and a self-inflicted wound on the church. Every woman silenced is a sermon unpreached, a soul not shepherded, a community unserved. The church is poorer for it. The world is poorer for it.
To the women who have been called: The SBC does not have the final word on your calling. God does. You know what you have heard. You know what you have been given. No vote, no amendment, no convention of fearful men can take that away from you.
Preach anyway. Lead anyway. Pastor anyway. Find the communities that will receive your gifts with gratitude and joy. They exist. They are waiting for you. The Spirit that called you in the first place is still speaking. Listen to that voice, not theirs.
Andrew Daugherty serves as senior pastor of Pine Street Church in Boulder, Colo. He writes at the intersection of Christianity, culture and the common good at andrewdaughertyboulder.substack.com—