Southern Baptists Vote on Female Pastoral Leadership

Have you heard about the meeting of the Southern Baptist Church in Orlando this week?  At their meeting they did something remarkable, read about it here.  They passed a constitutional amendment forbidding women from preaching to an assembled congregation which practically forbids women from serving as pastors. As you can imagine, some Baptists were upset by this decision and others were celebrating it as biblical.  

Now I want to take a national news story and make it personal. Madeline and I have a friend from seminary who pastors a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Church in Louisville Kentucky. She asked us if we could take a photo of the billboard the sponsored by a group called Baptist Women in Ministry. Madeline drove down the 528 and took the photo you saw in the graphic. 

Two days after she took that photo, United Methodists were celebrating the 70th anniversary of the ordination of women in our denomination at our annual conference meeting. How is it that people and churches who believe in the same God and read the same Bible can draw such dramatically different conclusions? 

Let’s explore two commonly referenced Bible passages relevant to this conversation. The first is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, “Women should be silent during the church meetings. It is not proper for them to speak. They should be submissive, just as the law says.  If they have any questions, they should ask their husbands at home, for it is improper for women to speak in church meetings.” The second is, John 20:18 “Mary Magdalene found the disciples and told them, “I have seen the Lord!” Then she gave them his message.” In the first passage Paul writes to the church in Corinth about women being silent in their meetings and in the second Jesus asks Mary to tell the disciples the good news of the resurrection. These passages seem to be in tension with one another.  

As people who believe that God speaks to us through the Bible, how do we navigate interpreting and applying these passages? First, I would read other scripture passages that address the topic. Then I would use the Wesleyan quadrilateral (scripture, tradition, reason, experience) to provide further clarity. I suspect that you know my own personal views on this topic as I am married to a gifted and called female pastor.  

Maybe you are wondering how I make sense of the first verse advocating against female leadership. First, I would acknowledge that Paul wrote that verse to a specific context. Some Bible stories are descriptive of events not prescriptive about how to live. As interpreters we have to ask if Paul’s reference to law was cultural law or Biblical law. How we answer that question has a big impact on how we interpret the passage.  

Second, we need to ask a much bigger question. What is our theology of the Holy Spirit? Drawing from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.” God gives gifts to people regardless of their gender, age, or race. The power of God comes through the Holy Spirit, and we are simply vessels of the Holy Spirit. The Southern Baptist Church is essentially saying that the Holy Spirit only works through certain kinds of people. Repeatedly in the Bible, the Spirit of God works through people in ways we don’t expect, and I believe the Spirit continues to do that today.