“Our churches are all autonomous, but our churches want help,” Barber said. “We want the Southern Baptist Convention to be a place that churches can turn to, to get the help they need in order to be able to improve on these fronts.”
Barber later again emphasized church autonomy in the SBC’s vision, saying, “Southern Baptists can no more repeal church autonomy than they can repeal gravity. Church autonomy is simply a fact of the organization of our churches.”
Noting that his home church owns its own building, funds its own budget, and hires its own staff, Barber rhetorically asked of SBC headquarters, “What will Nashville do to us to make us do one thing differently about sex abuse, about the roles of men and women, about the doctrine that we hold?”
Barber went on to reiterate that affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention is entirely voluntary, and that the requirements for affiliation are set by the will of the majority of SBC churches.
“It’s really about churches looking and saying, ‘What kind of a fellowship of churches do we want the Southern Baptist Convention to be?’ And we’ve been making decisions about that from the beginning,” Barber said, noting that the denomination’s first decision in 1845 to send slaveholders into the mission field was “a really bad thing,” but that the denomination has also made many “no brainer decisions,” such as affirming believer’s baptism.
“I think the messengers are saying that they want this fellowship of churches to be a fellowship of churches who do not tolerate sexual abuse, who are active in trying to prevent it, who are active in trying to serve survivors of sexual abuse,” Barber said. “And also that this is a fellowship of churches that are united by a belief in biblical doctrine that includes gender roles for the office of pastor.”
Noting that in the broader culture, supporting abuse survivors is seen as a “feminist” thing to do while limiting the role of pastor to men is not, Barber said he recognizes that it may be difficult for outsiders to understand the SBC’s framework of beliefs and values.
“But we don’t really care whether one of them is feminist and one of them is not feminist. We just believe that they’re both biblical,” Barber said.
 president Bart Barber emphasized unity and consensus during a press conference at the denomination's annual meeting on Wednesday (June 14), focusing his comments on missions work, male eldership, and abuse reform.){kind=link}