The US Southern Baptist Convention voted to uphold the expulsion of two churches due to their having female pastors.
On Wednesday at the annual SBC conference in New Orleans, representatives also known as “messengers” upheld an executive committee decision to expel the California-based Saddleback megachurch and Fern Creek Baptist church, a smaller congregation in Kentucky.
The votes were overwhelming. For Saddleback church, 9,437 voted for expulsion while 1,212 voted against. For Fern Creek Baptist, the votes were 9,700 to 806.
Saddleback, established in the 1980s by the influential pastor and author Rick Warren, stirred controversy in 2021 when Warren ordained three women as pastors, in contradiction of the SBC statement of beliefs.
Warren announced his retirement and transferred his leadership role to Andy and Stacie Wood. While Andy Wood leads the church as head pastor, his wife functions as a “teaching pastor” and occasionally preaches.
According to the SBC beliefs: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture.”
Fern Creek Baptist has been led by Linda Barnes Popham since 1993.
Both churches were deemed to “not be in friendly cooperation” with SBC beliefs, reported Baptist Press, the self-proclaimed official news service of the denomination.
Warren accused people of wanting to “take the SBC backward”, the New York Times reported.
“There are people who want to take the SBC backward … Some people want to take it back to the 1950s – that is their golden age for the church, the 1950s, when basically white men rule supreme, and the woman’s place is in the home, and there is not a lot of diversity,” he said at a news conference.
Popham told CNN on Thursday the expulsion felt like a divorce but added: “On the other hand, there is something liberating and freeing, being bound no more to the traditions and opinions and the power of those in leadership in the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The denomination also voted this week to amend its constitution to enshrine its ban on female pastors. The amendment approved on Wednesday updates the constitution to state that SBC churches must “affirm, appoint or employ only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by scripture”.
The change will go into effect once it is approved in a second vote next year.
