Last week the Southern Baptist Convention ousted Saddleback Church, one of its largest and highest-profile member churches, from its ranks. The reason? Because after the Orange County megachurch ordained three women as associate pastors, it named Stacie Wood, wife of the church's senior pastor, Andy Wood, a teaching pastor.
The SBC added a ban on female pastors to its statement of core beliefs, the Faith and Message doctrine, in 2000, but the decision to remove Saddleback, a rare success story in a time of declining church membership, has not been met with uniform enthusiasm among the SBC's roughly 47,000 member churches.
Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, shared his displeasure on Twitter, writing that the decision to "disfellowship" Saddleback was not about Scripture or adherence to the Baptist Faith and Message. "It's driven by power, male supremacy; and it stinks in the nostrils of God," he wrote.
