Southern Baptists appreciate the Baptist Faith & Message because we believe that it is an accurate summary of the Bible’s teachings. Thus, when state conventions openly defy the Baptist Faith & Message, they are defying our God’s Word. The authority and sufficiency of the Bible are functionally abandoned when the faithful are absent or fail to speak up. This creates a lack of clarity for the SBC as a whole: do we prohibit female pastors in our confession but permit them in our practice? This is uneasy circumstance cannot last.

In March of 2022, Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked, “What is a woman?” She could not answer the question. Three months after Justice Jackson’s testimony, the Credentials Committee—which is tasked with determining what churches are in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—asked that a Study Committee be formed because they could not answer the question, “What is a pastor?” Since then, this committee has shown both a reluctance and refusal to identify egalitarian SBC churches as not in friendly cooparation with the SBC.

I want the SBC to be faithful to Scripture. This is why I proposed what is now being called the “Law Amendment” at the 2022 SBC Annual Meeting after making little progress with the Credentials Committee. God has written in his word that only qualified men can serve as pastors, and this Amendment merely takes what is already in God’s Word and the Baptist Faith & Message and puts it into the SBC constitution to define which churches compose the Convention.[1] The Amendment passed overwhelmingly in 2023, but it needs to pass one more time in order to be ratified.

After all the arguments have been made, the bottom-line is this: We will either have women pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention, or we will not. We will either coddle sin, or we will be faithful to what our wise God has revealed in the Scriptures and what we have summarized in the Baptist Faith & Message.

This is my last appeal to SBC messengers before I see you, Lord willing, at the Indiana Convention Center. And with these final words, I want to encourage you to vote in favor of this Amendment—for the sake of fidelity to Scripture, clarity in our Convention, and unity in our mission.

1. Adopt the Amendment for the Sake of Fidelity to Scripture

A Pastor is a Pastor

Fidelity is simply faithfulness to our commitments. A vote to adopt the Amendment is a vote in favor of our Convention’s faithfulness and commitment to Scripture, because the Amendment simply mirrors Scripture’s teaching on the pastoral office.

There are some people who want to allow for women to be SBC pastors as long as they are not elders, or as long as they are not over men, or as long as they are not a senior pastor. The problem is that the Bible doesn’t make these kind of overly-technical distinctions; In the Bible, every pastor is an elder, and every pastor/elder exercizes oversight over the whole congregation.

In the apostle Paul’s farewell speech of Acts 20:17–31 we see multiple words used for the pastoral office: Paul calls the male leaders of the church elders (Acts 20:17) and overseers (Acts 20:28), and he uses shepherding language when he exhorts them to care for the church of God. (That’s where we get our word for “pastor” from—it’s the noun form of the verb to “care/shepherd.”) We see the same concept in 1 Peter 5:1–5, where the language of pastoring, eldering, and overseeing are all used in the same passage to refer to the same group of individuals (see diagram below).

These titles and terms are all addressing the same men, their office, and their work. For this reason, it will not work to claim that women can be pastors who just don’t oversee or who don’t serve as elders. An elder is an overseer who shepherds (or pastors) their local flock of God. Pastor is perhaps the best word, the strongest word, the one word that wraps up all that elder and overseer mean into one package.

Historically this has been the understanding of Southern Baptists—that pastor/elder/overseer are all terms which speak of the same office. Through their writings, SBC greats like James Pendleton (1867), E. C. Dargan (1897), J.J. Taylor (1899), O.C.S. Wallace (1913), H.W. Tribble (1929), and Herschel Hobbs (1964) all affirm what Dr. Malcom Yarnell nicely summarized in 2007, that “The three major Greek New Testament terms describing a pastor are episcopos, ‘overseer’ or ‘bishop’; presbyteros, ‘elder’; and poimān, ‘shepherd’ or ‘pastor’” (see Appendix A for these historical writers in context).[2] In fact, we never see the language of pastoring/shepherding applied to women in the entire New Testament. It’s an office that God has uniquely called qualified men to bear, and for good reasons.

The Larger Picture

Acts 20:29–30 teaches us that pastors protect the flock from fierce wolves who would draw disciples away from Christ. Although it’s a metaphor, would the Apostle Paul send wives and daughters and sisters in Christ to confront these fierce wolves? There is a strong basis for why Paul uses masculine language in the elder qualifications in 1 Timothy 3:1–7—Paul is drawing from a larger theology from creation that rightly upholds qualified men as protectors, just as Adam was supposed to be (Gen. 2:15; see also Titus 1:9, 13).

Its this very order of creation that Paul appeals to when he does not allow for a woman “to teach or exercise authority over a man” in 1 Timothy 2:12. In our androgynous and transgender age, some may recoil at that command as exclusionary or old-fashioned. But the very One who breathed-out this prohibition was God himself (2 Tim. 3:16). The God who created everything with powerful words, the God who humbled Job with seventy-seven questions, the God who holds in himself all of the secrets of wisdom and knowledge—this all-wise God wrote this text for the good and instruction and flourishing of his beloved people. Is it not somewhat presumptuous to think that we know better than the God who made us?

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