Home Christian News Amid Tension, Southern Baptist Women Lead Where They Can

Amid Tension, Southern Baptist Women Lead Where They Can

Southern Baptist Women
In this photo provided by the Second Baptist Church, Jacki King speaks at a Ministry to Women event called "The Gathering" at Second Baptist Church in Conway, Ark., on Feb. 20, 2020. King, an author as well as a Bible teacher, worries that too much of the conversation about women’s roles in the church is focused on what they cannot do — namely, serve as senior pastor in a Southern Baptist church — rather than what they can do. (Second Baptist Church via AP)

(RNS/AP) — Jacki King, the women’s minister at Second Baptist Church in Conway, Arkansas, first felt a call to ministry as a college student.

She decided to follow it, giving up her pre-med major and her spot on a college softball team for ministry training at a small Bible school with a mostly male student body. She picked Criswell College because it was where her pastor was a dean. She wanted to teach the Bible the way he did.

King thought at the time she only had two options for ministry — marrying a pastor or serving as an overseas missionary.

“I really didn’t want to be married to a lead pastor,” she said.

But God, as the saying goes, had other plans.

She met Josh King, an aspiring preacher at Criswell, fell in love and married him. They went into ministry together with his pastor role opening doors for her. Today, King is an author as well as a Bible teacher, and worries that too much of the conversation about women’s roles in the church is focused on what they cannot do — namely, serve as senior pastor in a Southern Baptist church — rather than what they can do.

The Bible shows women and men as partners and portrays women leading in the early church, King said, pointing to Phoebe, who is mentioned in the New Testament book of Romans, along with other women leaders.

“Women are part of the Great Commission,” she said, a reference to Jesus’ command to spread his teaching around the world.

Few congregations could function without the work of female members. Still, there is tension in the Southern Baptist Convention over the role of women, mainly over how to put a section of the denomination’s statement of faith, known as the Baptist Faith and Message, into practice. That section, based on the SBC’s interpretation of Bible verses like 1 Timothy 2:12 and Titus 1:5-9, deals with leadership in churches.

“While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” the statement reads. But local Southern Baptist churches, because they are governed autonomously, are free to decide how to implement that teaching.

For some in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the statement of faith means the senior pastor must be a man, but staff and other pastoral roles can be filled by women, including teaching the Bible to both men and women. For others, pastoral duties, especially preaching, are limited to men, and women are only allowed to teach the Bible to other women and children.

These two views clashed in spring 2019, when Beth Moore, then a beloved Southern Baptist women’s Bible teacher, tweeted about speaking at a Mother’s Day church service. It led to a social media firestorm and renewed criticism of women preachers and teachers from more conservative Southern Baptists. In the spring of 2021, Moore left the SBC, citing a number of concerns, including how the denomination has handled sexual abuse allegations, as well as sexism and racism within its ranks.