MOBILE, Ala. (ABP) — An Alabama Baptist church has been ejected from its local association for hiring a female associate pastor — which may be a first of sorts.
The Mobile Baptist Association voted Oct. 19 to withdraw fellowship from Hillcrest Baptist Church in Mobile. Associational leaders cited the church's July decision to call Ellen Guice Sims to the associate position, saying the congregation had violated the association's policy of adherence to the 2000 version of the Southern Baptist Convention's “Baptist Faith and Message” confessional statement.
That document, in its article on the nature of the church, states: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Messengers to the association's annual meeting voted 204-44 to oust Hillcrest.
Sims said she has “mixed feelings” about her church getting ousted. “Primarily, however, I'm inexpressibly thankful to be serving with a congregation that understands the gospel to be inclusive and loving and that strives to follow Jesus with courage and humility,” she said.
“Frankly, we don't have a quarrel with them,” Hillcrest pastor Dudley Wilson said of the association. “We're not angry with them. I did not recognize the validity of them coming to us to question anything we had done as an autonomous body. And they granted that, but they said they were an autonomous body too, and they could vote to exclude us.”
The revision to the SBC doctrinal statement proved controversial at the time, mainly because of the ban on female pastors. But even some of the supporters of the revision say the ban applies only to senior pastors.
The doctrinal statement is not binding for local congregations — there are between 50 and 100 SBC-affiliated congregations with female pastors and many more with ordained women in other staff positions. But many Southern Baptist-affiliated state conventions and local associations have adopted the revised “Baptist Faith and Message” as their doctrinal guideline.
Hillcrest's ouster apparently is the first time the doctrinal statement has been cited to exclude a church for having an ordained woman in a staff position other than pastor. Prior to 2000, other SBC-affiliated churches were occasionally ousted from, or voluntarily left, local associations or state conventions over issues of women in ministry.
In 2004, a Georgia church, led by a husband-wife co-pastoral team, voluntarily left its local association after the association adopted the “Baptist Faith and Message” as its doctrinal standard. Leaders of North Broad Baptist Church in Rome, Ga., said the Floyd County Baptist Association's decision to adopt the document was related to the congregation's decision to call the co-pastors.
Wilson, Hillcrest's pastor, said a representative of the Mobile association's membership committee first contacted him about two months ago to inform him that Hillcrest was under investigation for hiring Sims.
He said he and church leaders met with representatives from the committee. “It was obvious already that they had already made a decision about what they were going to recommend,” he said.
The church then had five congregational meetings to develop a response to the expected ouster. Wilson said the congregation — with about 200 members — unanimously adopted a statement on women in ministry and agreed it would not pick a fight during the Oct. 19 meeting.
Instead, lay leaders from Hillcrest read the statement which, in part, said God calls those who serve the church: “We do not believe we should submit to any human rules that seek to limit how God calls and equips persons for ministry.”
Wilson said two “stalwart moderate pastors” in the association spoke out in Hillcrest's defense but the church's members chose not to defend themselves. “It was not ugly, from our standpoint,” he said.
Thomas Wright, the association's director of missions, agreed the issue was settled amicably. “There was no floor fight, and both sides presented their differing view[s],” he said in an e-mail interview. “In the end, the messengers overwhelmingly recognized that Hillcrest has chosen to step outside the guidelines for affiliation.”
Wright defended the association's interpretation that the Bible restricts women from all ordained ministry roles. “Our exegesis confirmed no distinction biblically in the office of pastor between the contemporary titles of pastor, senior pastor and associate pastor,” he wrote. “Even the Internal Revenue Service sees ordination as the distinction for all pastoral roles.”
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