Amid Declining Membership Numbers, Southern Baptists Confront Demands for Women Pastors, Legal Bills at Annual Convention

Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) president Clint Pressley believes something unpredictable will happen at their annual convention in Dallas on June 10-11.

Elected last year and expected to pour oil over the troubled waters of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Pressley believes he has soothed some of the angst concerning the role of women in the church ministry, abuse, politics and other matters. “I do feel like right now it’s less contentious than it has been the last several years,” Pressley said. “One of the goals was to bring some of that temperature down, and I feel like we’re seeing some of that.”

Maybe. Those issues are still up for grabs and debate, and the convention of 10,000 church representatives, aka messengers, will be run by “Robert’s Rules of Order,” meaning any of those 10,000 can rise and speak their mind.

Take the matter of women as pastors. For a quarter century, the SBC rulebook was explicit: “no women pastors.” End of story. Or is it?  Some churches do have women pastors, but, being in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC, have been allowed to go their own way. After all, that word, “pastor,” can mean a lot of things. 

Some church leaders assert that the restriction to male pastors applies only to the role of senior pastor, while others’ eyebrows rise at the thought of the word “pastor” in front of a female name, even if it’s music pastor or children’s pastor or teaching pastor. The confusion over the definition of the word, along with the reluctance of the SBC’s powers-that-be to attempt a final delineation on it, has provided much wiggle room, leading to the defeat of a measure last year that would change the wording in the SBC constitution to explicitly state that “only men” can be “any kind of pastor” in Southern Baptist churches.

It’s an issue that won’t go away. At the upcoming convention, a vote is expected to be on the agenda on what to do about existing women staff pastors in affiliated churches.

Historian Beth Allison Barr, who is Southern Baptist and married to a pastor, said, “The SBC is not listening to women. It’s walked away from the sex abuse reforms. It has continued doggedly to push this path of pushing women completely out of all pastoral roles.”

Barr invoked the names of two legendary missionaries—Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon—whose names are now titles of SBC charities that raise hundreds of millions of dollars for missions each year. Yet women are still officially shut out from the ministry. “I don’t know why they are treating women this way, when the only reason the SBC is so successful is because of women,” she said.

Another item on this year’s agenda is the budget. Usually a yawn-inspiring subject at the convention, this year promises to be different. $14 million in legal fees stemming from a sexual abuse investigation report have placed a large crimp in the SBC Executive Committee’s balance sheet. The Committee is now asking for another $3 million this year to pay more legal bills, funds that would come out of monies that are already earmarked for missions and national ministries.

Meanwhile, abuse reforms—mainly a database to track abusive pastors—have been stalled for years by red tape, despite overwhelming approval by messengers.

The commotion on these and other issues has shoved the most important matter to the background: the denomination is rapidly shrinking. It has lost nearly a quarter of its membership in the past 18 years, going from over 16 million in 2006 to 12.7 million today. There have been no upticks in the numbers for 18 years—just a continuous downhill slide.  Also trending down is designated giving, by more than 10 percent this year from last year. And the century-old SBC Cooperative Program has a $3.5 million shortfall as of May.

And the decline will continue as the denomination becomes more fundamentalist and less evangelical, according to Baylor University sociologist George Yancey. 

“And fundamentalist is that you circle the wagons, and you make entrance very hard,” he said. “There’s sort of a purifying type of mentality.”

Evangelicals, he said, are open to partnering with other groups on issues they care about, while fundamentalists are suspicious of outsiders and see partnering with them as problematic.

Then there are the nondenominational churches, where people can find similar values without denominational infighting. That, too, will siphon off members.

And what of the remaining members? They’re getting old. Two-thirds of adult Southern Baptists are 50 or older, according to data from the Pew Religious Landscape Study. Only 10% are between the ages of 18 and 29.  

With those percentages, it will be unrealistic for the SBC to rely on births to replenish its ranks

President Pressley takes pride in the way Southern Baptists work together, adding that denominational leaders have to go out of their way to earn trust.

“I think we’ve got to continually prove and earn the trust of our church members, just like you have to do if you’re a pastor,” he said. “You’re continually earning that and proving that you would be trustworthy. I think the SBC has to keep doing that.”

Is increased trust the solution to infighting and the momentum of shrinkage? This convention and its aftermath may tell the tale.

Photo credits: First Baptist Church on Lafayette St. in downtown by J. Michael Jones – stock.adobe.com.