MOUNT AIRY, N.C. (ABP) – A North Carolina pastor says he thinks a Baptist association’s vote to remove a church for calling a woman pastor isn’t what Jesus would do.
“All four Gospels tell us that the message of the Resurrection was given to women to proclaim to men,” said Roger Gilbert, pastor of First Baptist Church of Mount Airy N.C. “That leads some of us to believe that is evidence that God just might call a woman to be pastor.”
Gilbert was talking about his church’s Dec. 4 vote to pull out of Surry Baptist Association in protest of the July ouster of Flat Rock Baptist Church for electing 28-year-old Bailey Nelson as pastor.
Gilbert, pastor of the 500-member church since 2001, said he opposed the ouster vote on both scriptural and procedural grounds. Afterward he wrote about it in the church newsletter and in a letter to the association’s director of missions expressing strong disagreement with the decision.
Gilbert said his preference was to leave it there, but he began receiving dozens of phone calls from both pastors and lay people unhappy about the vote. First Baptist’s deacon body discussed how the congregation should respond and referred it to the church council for consideration.
The council recommended that First Baptist Church withdraw from Surry Baptist Association. After a “very long and healthy conversation” Oct. 26, Gilbert said, the congregation decided to postpone a vote scheduled Nov. 6 for another month. After meeting Nov. 16 with Billy Blakley, the association’s director of missions, the congregation finally voted to end ties 145-34.
Gilbert said the four-month process was deliberate because the ties run so deep. In the beginning, the association office was located at the church. The first associational missionary was Kitty Sullivan (a woman) and some church members knew her well and worked with her as she sought to unite Southern Baptist churches.
Gilbert is a past moderator of the association and said he enjoyed involvement until recent years. Then differences over things like pastoral authority and women’s roles that divided the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decades of the 20th century began to trickle down. One example, he said, is adherence to a 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message, which directs that, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Gilbert, a 1972 graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who attended his first SBC annual meeting as a young pastor in 1975, said an even bigger problem with the new Baptist Faith and Message was removal of a phrase from the 1963 version that, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.”
Gilbert said in order to determine whether Paul’s commands for women to be silent and submissive in church reflected accommodation to a first century culture or still apply today, modern Bible readers must look to the benchmark of Jesus as “God’s highest revelation.”
Gilbert said Jesus “began a radical shift in the view of women” in a world where a woman’s testimony was not accepted in court and men could divorce their wives for any reason. Inclusion of women among Jesus’ followers was unprecedented in Judaism, he said, and writings in Acts and even in the letters of Paul indicate that women had a much larger role in the early church than in society at large.
“I respect those who disagree with me, but in light of the life and ministry of Jesus, I think we are on shaky ground to say that God could not call a woman to be a pastor,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert said he recognizes that a majority of the association’s churches don’t support female pastors, but they didn’t have to remove Flat Rock Baptist Church for having a different view.
He also objected to the fact that churches weren’t given advance notice for a typically poorly attended summer meeting that a motion was coming to withdraw membership from a member church.
Gilbert said it isn’t the first time he believes the association has acted hastily and without ample opportunity for open discussion.
First Baptist and Flat Rock aren’t the only churches disenfranchised by the process. Piney Grove Baptist Church in Mount Airy voted unanimously Nov. 30 to leave the 66-church association.
Pastor Mark Reece said Piney Grove decided the previous month to end its financial support for the association. “I feel like our withdrawal from the association has been a gradual process over six years,” said Reece, a native of Surry County who served as Piney Grove’s youth minister before being called as pastor in 2009.
Blakley said withdrawal by the two churches won’t affect associational ministries. “The economic loss from both those churches has already been made up by other churches and individuals,” he said
Blakley also said he expects the association to stick with its vote to dismiss Flat Rock and with its view that Scripture prohibits women from serving as senior pastors.
“We as Surry Baptists and as Southern Baptists simply believe the Bible is true,” he said. “That’s where it all begins. Our churches back in July made a statement that God’s word says what God’s word says, and that Flat Rock was disobedient to God’s word by calling a woman as senior pastor.”
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Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press. Robert Dilday of the Religious Herald contributed to this report.
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