Should the SBC adopt the so-called Law Amendment in Indianapolis this summer? That’s that question many of us are asking heading into the convention this year. Some may find themselves surprised both at who is for the amendment and who is against it. In a twist of irony, some proponents are unhappy with how the debate has played out, while some opponents are leading churches functioning in accordance with it. Why is this issue so heavily discussed and debated? I want to try to lay out here a way of thinking through the issue. I won’t conclude either “for” or “against.” My hope is to help us see how many are wrestling through the many factors related to the amendment, and why some find it so complicated.
1. The clear witness of Scripture is that the office of pastor is reserved for qualified men.
The reason that Article VI of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 claims that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by the Scripture…” is because we believe Article I: “…all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.” We take 1 Timothy 2 seriously, gladly and wholeheartedly affirming a simple truth: the office of pastor/elder/overseer is restricted to biblically qualified men.
2. In a time of cultural upheaval, Southern Baptists must be clear.
Some have asked a good question about these proceedings: “Why now? After so many years—24 since the BFM2000 was adopted—why do we need to have this discussion?” But isn’t it apparent that today’s world isn’t the world of 24 years ago—or even 10 years ago? I believe there are good arguments to be made against this amendment. At the same time, there seem to be fewer good arguments against a renewed clarity in a world beset by gender confusion. That’s not to mention the many innovative approaches to employing the word pastor divorced from the biblical office of elder, a practice more prevalent today than in 2000.
3. The SBC should state its belief regarding the office of pastor without embarrassment or equivocation.
Among the capstone achievements of the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message was the inclusion of statements on gender complementarity and the limitation of the office of pastor to men. For some, this is a sufficient clarification of our beliefs and sufficient for determining the bounds of our cooperation. For others, concerns remain about whether our orthodoxy matches our orthopraxy.
4. Some are embarrassed, and some others are equivocating.
Some of the arguments against the Law Amendment sound like the same arguments against the BFM 2000 itself. “Instead of building a consensus statement, they are using it as a club to drive out people they disagree with,” one Baptist leader said in 2000. Similar arguments are heard today. Whatever motivates opposition to the amendment, it should not be an apology for biblical convictions.
5. Most who are against the Law Amendment are unreservedly complementarian.
Many meaningful critiques of the proposed amendment come from men and women whose churches have male-only elder boards and/or male-only pastors. The question of the Law Amendment is about the best way to determine cooperation, not a question of whether or not the SBC affirms women pastors.
6. The amendment is a risk to our fellowship if we make it about function rather than about title.
The way that some advocates have talked about the amendment creates potentially serious problems for our cooperation. For example, Mike Law defines a pastor as those who “preach, pray, provide oversight, and exercise authority.” I have no issue with that—as a pastor I do all of those things. And yet in our church, many non-pastors do all of them, including men I have invited to preach. If the amendment becomes a question not about titles, but about the extent to which those functions are carried out in a church, the repercussions will be massive. The exception does seem to be preaching, which is reserved for pastors, or those who could meet the qualification of pastor. How we apply Article III will be important, if passed. Heath Lambert has shared a similar concern.
By the way, this is also a key problem with the actual language of the amendment, which codifies as a cause of disfellowshipping those who do not employ as pastor “qualified” men. The SBC can never get into the business of determining that qualification—but we also cannot then act as if “male” is the only qualification that matters. The amendment itself, in this regard, is not well-written.
6. Policing the vocational functions of women in ministry who are not ordained and do not bear the title or office of pastor is ruinous to our cooperation and trust among women in ministry.
Not every church is going to approach the women in ministry leadership question the exact same way (such as in an Executive Director role), or providing oversight (such as a Children’s Minister, Music Minister, or Women’s Minister). The most obvious answer would be “well, it’s those things plus preaching.” Maybe so. But we need to be clear. If the function of women within churches who are not pastors becomes a point of investigation, many churches will resist such inquiries as a gross overstep of the credentialing process into a church’s autonomous governance. Sometimes, after all, autonomy means the right to be wrong (within reason).
7. It is possible to create guardrails to avoid these misapplications.
The mere possibility of misapplication does not mean the inevitability of misapplication. Southern Baptists are too quick to throw their hands up and say, “This is how it’s always been and if we do anything, everything will break.” If the current language is adopted, it basically adds an enforcement mechanism for the credentials committee to an issue related to one article of the BFM 2000. The Executive Committee would be wise to provide detailed guidance to the standing Credentials Committee on how to carry this out, as well as possible mistakes to avoid.
8. The way this conversation has gone has upset many women in the SBC, and that matters.
From the widespread dissemination of women’s contact information (yes, posted publicly on their church websites for their congregants; but no, not posted to be shared online as transgressors in this debate and harangued online) to the all-too-common disregard for women’s voices throughout the discussion, SBC leaders at all levels are hearing from SBC women who are saying, “I’m out.” From some, there is a perceived air of suspicion toward women leaders. That must end, and it could take years to undo the silence of many in the face of this kind of behavior.
Countless women have been part of our successes and accomplishments, and we should not be indifferent to their voices. Just like the church in Acts 6 was not indifferent to a certain group of common concern (the Hellenists), we should not either. If we say “we don’t care how _______ feels” in our convention, our fellowship is already worse off. Untethered empathy may be a danger, but so is callousness.
9. How women feel about this is not all that matters.
To fail to consider how this debate affects women is negligent. At the same time, to act as if this is the only point that matters is untenable. “We may upset _______” can not be the trump card in our convention’s deliberations on any issue. If the question is addressed in Scripture, and if the debate is causing division in our convention, then there is no out-and-out reason why it must not be addressed.
10. The amendment adds nothing in terms of doctrinal clarity that the BFM doesn’t already have.
Given that Saddleback and Fern Creek Baptist were just removed on the basis of the BFM2000, and this amendment reflects that language, what exactly are we doing here that we don’t already have in our confession? Are we having this debate to ultimately end up right where we started? Sometimes in a conversation about gun laws or immigration laws you’ll hear the refrain that we don’t need new laws, we just need to enforce the laws we have. Could it be that this is like that?
11. The amendment may help us prevent a long session of “Fern Creek” level appeals year after year after year.
I think we can all agree that we want a morning full of appeal speeches and convention votes to disfellowship about as much as we want to get rid of the IMB sending celebration. Which is to say, not at all.
12. The amendment risks creating a super-doctrine category.
Many arguments have been made for understanding the Baptist Faith & Message as a confessional document for all Southern Baptist Churches which they do not have to adopt but must not contradict. Does it not undermine the nature of a confessional statement to take a few articles and determine that they are more important than others?
13. The amendment could be a tool for responding to a particularly prevalent compromise.
One of the things we say at our church is, “Bylaws are intended to serve us. We are not intended to serve our bylaws.” That doesn’t mean we wantonly break the bylaws (we don’t) or constantly amend them (we don’t). But it does mean that we have the freedom to amend the bylaws as we need to in order to deal with rare, but specific, needs. It is possible that this issue is unique in our time and requires special attention. Southern Baptists will have to decide if this is such an occasion.
14. Do we want to set a precedent for solving debates via amendment?
How many future issues could messengers attempt to concretize by way of constitutional amendment? You could imagine other issues at some point in the future receiving attempts at the same thing. For example, should churches have to adopt the BFM2000, and not just maintain non-contradiction? Is multi-site Baptist? What about Baptist approaches to religious liberty? You could imagine a future time in which other issues—perhaps not these—become a question of amendment. Some may have grounds to oppose the amendment simply on this basis.
15. The immediate post-CR years clearly didn’t prioritize strict enforcement on this.
Much debate has taken place about the intention of the group who authored the BFM2000. Putting that conversation aside momentarily, one thing that is obvious as a historical fact is that the post-CR years did not lead to any quick purge related to this issue. IMB President Paul Chitwood spoke at Fern Creek Baptist in 2013 in his role as KBC Executive Director. That’s hardly an action a state executive, known for his conservatism, would take if rooting out egalitarian churches was a plan in action.
16. The Conservative Resurgence itself had universal adoption of complementarian faith and practice as a goal.
The Conservative Resurgence saw itself as a movement against many things, one of which was the cultural tides of feminism. That the 1963 BFM was amended on this topic in the BFM2000 indicates that by itself. The moderates understood this. A 1984 full-page ad in the Louisville Courier-Journal included a list of signatories who were taking a stand for “equal participation of women and men in the life and work of the church… [and] traditional Baptist polity, which recognizes the autonomous character of each local Baptist church, and allows for no institution, individual, or convention to speak for Southern Baptists.” This, they perceived, was in response to a movement whose goal included a complementarian view of the pastorate. So no, it hasn’t always been this way. But it was intended to one day be this way. Southern Baptists have to decide if they still believe this is a needed area of reform beyond the adoption of the BFM2000.
17. The 2015 amendment on Article III changed what it meant to be a Southern Baptist.
One of the difficult realities when we talk about “historic Baptist polity” in the SBC, whether the Calvinistic polity of the mid-19th century or the pervasive pragmatic polity of the mid-to-late 20th century is that neither reflects the changes made recently. In 1845, all that was required to join the SBC was a donation. In 1948 it was “in friendly cooperation with this Convention and sympathetic with its purposes and work.” In 1993, friendly cooperation excluded affirmation of homosexuality. In 2014, an amendment came that would disfellowship churches “in any manner demonstrating opposition to the doctrine expressed in the Convention’s recently adopted statement of faith.” The language of “a faith and practice that closely identifies with the Baptist Faith & Message” was substituted after concerns about non-contradiction language, and was adopted in 2015 after successive years of voting in favor of it. In 2021, messengers added (after two years of votes in favor) examples of “indifference in addressing sexual abuse” and racial discrimination was examples of being out of fellowship.
Whether intended or not, nearly a decade ago we changed what it meant to be Southern Baptist formally, and now we are grappling with what we meant when we did it. Al Mohler argued in a recent interview with Baptist21 that “closely identifies with” is a statement of non-contradiction, worded that way only to avoid churches being forced to adopt the BFM2000. To closely identify is to hold beliefs that are synonymous to those in the BFM2000. Others have argued that given the assumption of local church autonomy, close identification refers to general similarity between Baptist churches that allows for objections on secondary applications. Either way, there is no doubt since 2015 the content of a church’s faith and practice does matter for cooperation, and not just their willingness or desire to cooperate.
18. We are going to have to answer the question about BFM objections at some point, if this is the direction we are headed.
In one way, this answers it (messengers say ‘you can’t object here’) and in another way complicates it (messengers could at any point draw a new line). Some have warned against a ‘two-tiered’ system of belief. In other words, you can’t agree to disagree on women pastors (in violation of the BFM) and draw the line on baptism by immersion. At some point we are going to have to talk about open communion, churches with no democratic processes, and churches that advocate for a complete departure from the historic Baptist conception of religious liberty (such as the new theonomists). Some have said that this conversation is a distraction from the main point, but if we are truly against a two-tiered system, what is our mechanism for dealing with BFM objections? We are in this situation now because of the unintended consequences of an amendment we didn’t fully think through. Do we want to do this again?
19. The amendment doesn’t account for a larger question.
How does a church become SBC? Or a related one: “What about when we remove churches, and they remain associated at the state and local level?” Some have argued that the Law Amendment is a Band-Aid on a bigger wound. After all, how do churches become SBC? The same way they always have: give money. The SBC awards no church membership. State conventions do that. No one signs the statement of faith or is required to adopt it at their church. Consider the inconsistency on the backend of this process: Saddleback is removed, but remains part of the CSBC and Orange County Southern Baptist Association. Fern Creek is removed from the SBC, and then KY removes them from the KBC. Are these equal weights and measures? By the way, that means Saddleback is a Southern Baptist Church. (Edit: Saddleback voluntarily withdrew from the CSBC. The CSBC did not remove them, and it was described as a "sad day" for the convention when announced. The point remains that the two situations were handled quite differently.)
20. There are great, faithful, biblical Southern Baptists on all sides of this debate.
A post this long, with this many angles, cannot possibly leave anyone thinking in a strict binary of good guys vs. bad guys. This is not ‘liberals’ versus ‘conservatives,’ nor is it ‘moderates’ versus fundamentalists. Both ‘sides’ are full of Bible-believing inerrantist Southern Baptists doing their darndest to answer the same question: “What does it mean to be Southern Baptist?” and “Who am I willing to work with?”
21. Framing this as a “pro or con” on women pastors is obviously untrue.
Finally, as the complexities of this issue show, this simply is not a question of whether you are ‘for’ or ‘against’ women carrying the title of pastor. The reality is there are many reasons that a messenger might vote in favor of the Law amendment. There are also many reasons that the very same Southern Baptist might vote against it.
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Undoubtedly this is a heated issue. I would be lying if I said I'm not still conflicted as I think through it. I don't want to come out on the other side with a result where many churches who should remain Southern Baptist instead self-select out of the convention over this; nor do I want to come out on the other side with an invigorated culture of suspicion and accusation. Unity in truth is essential. How much truth—which truths? —remains the question. Maybe the problem with the Law Amendment isn’t the question it answers, but all the questions it doesn’t answer. The only thing worse may be a convention where this debate continues annually.
Griffin Gulledge
Griffin Gulledge is pastor of Madison Baptist Church in Madison, GA. He is married to Rachel. Together they have two children. Griffin is a graduate of Auburn University (B.A.) and Samford University's Beeson Divinity School (M.Div.). He is currently completing his Ph.D. at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in systematic theology. Griffin is a member of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board Executive Committee and a leader in his local Baptist association.. Previously, he served as Director of Marketing and Communications at SEBTS. In 2021, he was recipient of the ERLC's John Leland Religious Liberty Award. He is a founder and member of the leadership team for The Baptist Review.