Every year, Southern Baptist life centers briefly around the annual convention. As I noted in a previous “Baptist insider” article for The Federalist, the denomination technically only exists for the two days of this convention. As such, those days become a source of high drama. Each year tends to have one or two issues that dominate the discussion. The 2023 convention was focused on women in pastoral leadership.
A brief backstory: Across the 1970s and 1980s, the Southern Baptist Convention fought a denominational civil war resulting in the SBC moving from theological liberalism to theological conservatism. The SBC remains the only Christian denomination to enter theological liberalism and then return to conservative theological positions. The two interrelated areas were biblical inerrancy and the role of women in ministry.
Inerrancy is a nuanced theological position affirming that the original documents of Scripture are “without error,” and leads in practice to a church’s leadership affirming that all of Scripture is applicable to the church today. The nuances within the inerrancy discussion are best left to another article, but the position leads to the broad claims that Scripture is authoritative and theologians cannot pick and choose which portions apply today and which portions applied only to the original audience. The SBC has consistently affirmed that Scripture is authoritative, but push comes to shove when the question of women serving as pastors arises.
In the New Testament epistles I Timothy and Titus, Paul lists “husband of one wife” as a requirement for
