Due to having female pastors, the largest Baptist denomination in the US voted to expel two churches.
According to a vote by SBC members, the megachurch in Southern California Saddleback and the Fern Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky were "not in friendly cooperation" with the SBC, the Baptist Press reported.
According to the mission statement of the SBC, only men should hold the position of pastor. ".
It was a "sad day for Southern Baptists," the pastor of Fern Creek told CBS News.
According to the SBC website, the organization is made up of more than 47,000 Baptist churches and has more than 13 million members.
Pastors oversee the congregations of the church, which belongs to the protestant branch of Christianity.
The SBC has expelled five churches for having female pastors in total.
According to the Baptist Press, which bills itself as the SBC's official news service, two were soundly rejected at the SBC's annual convention in New Orleans after attempting to appeal their expulsions. The other three were not compelling.
"This is a sad day for Southern Baptists as we continue to share the gospel because they are losing gifted, talented, and called women of God. Linda Barnes Popham, a pastor at Fern Creek, said after the vote, "I don't understand why they want to get rid of people like us.
The expulsion, according to her, sends the message that "you are not valued" to the millions of female members of SBC churches. ".
According to Rick Warren, the retired founding pastor of Saddleback, the second-largest congregation in the SBC, "Messengers voted for conformity and uniformity rather than unity.".
"You can only achieve unity by valuing diversity. We made this effort even though we knew we wouldn't succeed. ".
Following the expulsion of the two churches, the SBC's annual convention also approved a constitutional amendment mandating that churches affiliated with the SBC hire "only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture"; however, the amendment must still be approved at the convention the following year.
The amendment, according to Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Texas, "puts us all on the same page about what a pastor is, and who a pastor is: a biblically qualified man. ".
However, the motion was opposed by Bob Bender, a pastor at Colorado Springs' Bross Fellowship Church. He stated in quotes used by the Baptist Press, "Should not title and function be synonymous?".
"Let's not assign women roles as mentors for other women, kids, or young people without having their titles correspond to those roles. ".
The SBC has come under more and more official scrutiny in recent years.
It was discovered to have covered up years of abuse within the church in 2022.
According to a report, those who came forward with allegations of child or sexual abuse within the SBC encountered "resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within" the church.
