The Rev. Gregory Perkins, the fellowship’s president, wrote to Barber earlier this month asking for the meeting. Perkins pointed out that many of his organization’s churches “assign the title ‘pastor’ to women who oversee ministries of the church under the authority of a male Senior Pastor, i.e., Children’s Pastor, Worship Pastor, Discipleship Pastor, etc.”
In a video posted Wednesday on the fellowship’s Facebook page, Perkins and Barber appeared with fellowship vice president Jerome Coleman, briefly discussing their meeting during the Black Church Leadership and Family Conference.
“We have spent the last day and a half in intensive conversation and dialogue,” Perkins said in the video. “Here is our single goal: to ensure that the SBC family remains unified. We are one family. We have all kinds of different aspects of our family but we’re one family.”
Barber noted in the video that he is not the “doctrinal czar” of the convention but strives to aid Baptists in fostering helpful discussions with each other on and off the convention floor.
“I think the meeting goes best when we’re talking to each other and working toward making good decisions in all the months leading up to the meeting,” he said. “And anything that I can do to help different folks within the Southern Baptist Convention come together and have reasonable, healthy dialogue to help us make God-honoring decisions, I’m down with that.”
Barber, who noted he was attending the conference of Black church leaders and visiting the North Carolina retreat center in Ridgecrest for the first time, also spoke to the conference attendees during their meeting.
This article originally appeared here.
 urging its staff to continue to affirm women in “ministerial and leadership roles.”){kind=link}