NY Times: “After overwhelmingly voting to finalize the expulsion of two churches with female pastors, Southern Baptists voted on Wednesday to further expand restrictions on women in church leadership, potentially opening up hundreds of new churches to investigation and expulsions.
Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in New Orleans approved an amendment to their constitution that their churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
Until now, the fight was limited to pastoral leadership and was included in theological statements, not the group’s official legal documents. The amendment must be passed again next year for it to go into effect.
“Now is not the time for half measures or delay,” Mike Law, a young pastor who proposed the amendment said, speaking from a microphone in the convention hall. He framed voting against the amendment as being afraid of the Bible.
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The constitutional amendment threatens to unleash a crisis for the denomination ahead of next year’s final vote. Bart Barber, who was re-elected president of the S.B.C. on Tuesday, acknowledged that the faction pushing for the change was poised to file complaints against every church that they believed violated the tightening standards — potentially an estimated 1,900 churches who have women pastors.
But, he said, “Even with these changes, they have to be applied church by church, and Southern Baptists have a history of being judiciously careful when they look at specific circumstances.””