Those state and local meetings were often smaller, making it easier for the question of kicking out a church to get on the agenda. That is harder at national SBC meetings, which have at times drawn tens of thousands of messengers.
By the 1990s, however, fights over kicking out churches had gone national, largely over the place of LGBTQ people in the church. In 1992, the SBC constitution was changed to bar churches that affirmed LGBTQ members and clergy. Those changes happened in the wake of the so-called Conservative Resurgence when more moderate Baptists began to leave.
Those changes led to a series of churches being removed for being affirming, beginning with Pullen Memorial Baptist Church and Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist in North Carolina. Both were voted out at the SBC’s annual meeting.
Though the language of having only male pastors was added to the Baptist Faith and Message in 2000, Southern Baptists repeatedly resisted calls to add language to the denomination’s constitution to bar churches with women pastors.
However, in 2014, the denomination’s constitution was amended to include only churches with “a faith and practice which closely identifies” with the Baptist Faith and Message. That 2014 rule change opened the door for more churches to be removed from the SBC, including for issues like racism and mishandling sexual abuse. As part of additional rules passed in 2019 to name those issues, the credentials committee was given the job of deciding whether or not a church is in “friendly cooperation” with the denomination.
At the 2018 annual meeting, messengers expelled Raleigh White Baptist Church in Georgia for discriminating against a Black church that shared their building. Two years later, Ranchland Heights Baptist Church was disfellowshipped for employing a registered sex offender as pastor.
The push to kick out churches with women pastors — that have women preaching in them — gained momentum in 2019 after former Southern Baptist Bible teacher Beth Moore tweeted about speaking in a church on Mother’s Day. That led to outrage by SBC leaders like seminary President Al Mohler, who had helped draft the Baptist Faith and Message changes two decades earlier. The debate was intensified by the country’s increased polarization, which has eroded much of the trust that made the SBC’s work possible in the past.
Things came to a head in May 2021 after former Saddleback senior pastor and bestselling author Rick Warren announced that the church had ordained several women as pastors. Not long afterward, a messenger at the 2021 SBC meeting called for the church to be investigated.
Kicking out Saddleback was not a simple matter.
Some Southern Baptists, like Mohler, say that no woman can have the title of pastor. Others say that only the senior pastor role is limited to men alone, while other women on a church staff could be referred to as pastors.
This disagreement left the credentials committee in a pickle since they did not know exactly how the beliefs about pastors should be applied. At the 2022 SBC meeting in Anaheim, California, Linda Cooper, chair of the credentials committee, asked messengers to form a study group to look at how local churches use the term “pastor.”
That request led to heated debate, with Mohler arguing that Southern Baptists know exactly what the word “pastor” means, while Greenway supported the idea of a study group, saying it should be expanded to look at how closely churches need to follow the SBC statement of faith.
For example, Greenway, a former seminary professor, said in a recent interview that the Baptist Faith and Message states that Communion should be limited to church members. But few churches, he said, follow that rule strictly.
“That might be the ‘most not observed’ article in the Baptist Faith and Message,” he said.
In an interview and on social media, Greenway disagreed with the Saddleback vote, saying it put too much power in one interpretation of the Baptist Faith and Message.
Barber said voting Saddleback out was the only way for local church messengers to have a say in the matter. SBC rules allow two options for challenging a church’s status. If a messenger does so at an annual meeting, the credentials committee can either rule immediately or take time to look into the matter, said Barber. If they decide against an immediate ruling, then the committee makes a recommendation to the Executive Committee.
If anyone disagrees with the recommendation, they can start the process over again.
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Now that the Executive Committee has voted out Saddleback, they or another of the other disfellowshipped churches can appeal to the upcoming annual meeting this June in New Orleans. Saddleback is expected to appeal, setting up a vote on the issue.
“In June we will find out what the messengers feel about Saddleback having a woman pastor as part of the regular preaching team,” said Barber.
(This story has been updated to reflect that the SBC constitution, not the Baptist Faith and Message, was updated in 1992.)
This article originally appeared here.
