Southern Baptists Then and Now

The Southern Baptist Convention has been in the national news (again) this month, and I am reflecting here upon that denomination with which I was directly connected for sixty years. 

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was formed in 1845 at a gathering in Augusta, Georgia. It was founded by Baptists who disagreed with the antislavery attitudes and activities of Baptists in the North.

In 1967, the SBC became the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., surpassing the Methodist Church. Its peak membership of around 16,300,000 was reached in 2006.

I began attending an SBC church in 1945, exactly 100 years after its founding. I didn’t know anything about the SBC’s beginning for a long time, and I wasn’t happy when I finally learned about the reason it was organized.

Still, I was happy to be a Southern Baptist during the ten years I attended the SBC church in my northwest Missouri hometown. I was happy with the vibrancy of the SBC as I knew it in the 1950s and remember well the nationwide membership drive for “a million more in ’54.”

And I was happy to graduate from two Southern Baptist colleges in my home state (Southwest Baptist and William Jewell)—and then go on to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky.

During my years as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at SBTS (1959~66), I was happy to serve as pastor of two small-town Southern Baptist churches in Kentucky, Ekron BC (1959~63) and Clay City BC (1964-65).

Further, June and I were happy to be appointed in 1966 as SBC missionaries to Japan, and during our 38 years there we greatly appreciated the support of SBC churches through the Cooperative Program and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.  

A strong shift to the right in the SBC began in 1980. As a result, I increasingly became an embarrassed Southern Baptist,** and in the 1980s and early 1990s many respected SB professors and pastors, including some close friends, left the SBC.

Disgruntled Southern Baptists formed the Alliance of Baptists in 1987 and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991. One of the co-founders of the former was Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, who died on June 7 at the age of 81.

Gaddy and I were graduate students at SBTS at the same time, but I didn’t know him well (he was three years younger than I). But I remember him as a bright, talented young man.

The sub-heading of a June 16 New York Times article about Gaddy states, “He started out in the Southern Baptist Convention, but when that group took a sharp conservative turn he became a voice for tolerance and diversity.”

Gaddy was known nationwide because of serving as president of the prestigious Interfaith Alliance from 1997 to 2014. Had it not been for that “sharp conservative turn” in the SBC, he could have served in that position as a Southern Baptist.

The 2023 annual meeting of the SBC was held earlier this month, and there was much that needed attention, such as last year’s half-million decline in membership. (Unlike “a million more in ’54” they could have talked about “why so few in ’22?”.)

But the action that garnered the most interest in the news media was the SBC’s renewed objection to female pastors. Rick Warren, the retired pastor of Saddleback Church in California, made an appeal for that megachurch to be restored to membership in the SBC.

Not only was Warren’s appeal rejected, opposition to female pastors even intensified. On June 22, The Washington Post published an opinion piece by Warren. It was titled “Expulsion of female pastors will only speed the Southern Baptists’ decline.”

The nationally known SB pastor remarked that the votes at this year’s annual meeting “helped ensure that the once great SBC will be known as the Shrinking Baptist Convention.”

Even though I’m glad not to be a Southern Baptist now, I still am sad because of the recent decline in the SBC and the likelihood that there will be even greater decline in the decade ahead because of its stance on women pastors—as well as because of its being a hotbed for the MAGA Movement.

_____

** In my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism, first published in 2007, I included a short section titled “An Embarrassed Southern Baptist” (see p. 5 in the revised/updated 2020 edition).

Women in the Church

Five days ago, I posted an article about an important decision made in the Roman Catholic Church in 1870. This article is about an action of the Catholic Pope 100 years later, as Pope Paul VI announced in July 1970 that he was going to name Teresa of Ávila the first female Doctor of the Church. 

Teresa of Ávila (1515~82) 

Women Doctors of the Church?

“Doctor of the Church” is a title given by the Roman Catholic Church to saints recognized as having made a significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research, study, or writing.

Up until 1970, there had been thirty named as Doctors of the Church. The first four, so designated in 1298, were Ambrose (340~397), Jerome (c.343~420), Augustine of Hippo (354~430), and Gregory the Great (540~604).

Over the next 672 years, twenty-six other men were similarly declared as Doctors of the Church. But then on September 27, 1970, Pope Paul VI declared Teresa of Ávila (1515~82) the first female Doctor of the Church. Just a week later, Catherine of Siena (1347~80) was also so designated.

Since then four more Doctors have been added to the list, and two of them are women: Thérèse of Lisieux (1873~97) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098~1179).

In spite of this high recognition of four outstanding women of the past, though, the Roman Catholic Church still does not permit women to be ordained as priests.

Women Pastors in the Churches?

Before 1970, hardly any Southern Baptist (SB) women had become preachers/pastors. During the time I was a graduate student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, though, in 1964 Addie Davis (1917~2005) was ordained in an SB church in North Carolina.

Other Protestant denominations had ordained women much sooner. For example, Anna Howard Shaw was ordained by the Methodist Church way back in 1880, and women were similarly ordained by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1888.

According to this 10/18 Christian Century article, at seminaries and divinity schools affiliated with mainline churches, women have been about half of M.Div. students since 1998—but are still only 27 percent of pastors in congregations.

The church that June and I are members of belongs to the Western District Conference of Mennonite Church USA. An Aug. 2019 article in Mennonite World Review reports, “Today, 40 of Western District’s 85 active pastors are women.” This includes Ruth Harder, who has been June’s and my pastor for the past six years—and a fine pastor she is!

My Experience with Women Pastors

Long before being a member of a church with a woman pastor here in the U.S., from the early 1980s I began to have more and more female students in the seminary classes I taught in Japan. Many of them went on to become pastors in Japan Baptist Convention churches.

One of my students was Okamura Naoko-san. While a student, she began attending the Fukuoka International Church, of which I was the founding pastor, and then after graduation she became the assistant pastor. A few years later she became my co-pastor, and that worked out well.

It was my privilege to preach Okamura-sensei’s ordination sermon. And it was partly because of that close relationship with a woman pastor that June and I could not conscientiously sign the statement that we would work “in accordance with and not contrary to” Baptist Faith & Message, 2000.

That historic doctrinal statement of Southern Baptists as revised in 2000 stipulated that women should not serve as pastors. Our refusal to sign our agreement with that statement led to our being unilaterally placed on retirement status in 2003 by the International Mission Board of the SBC.

The Catholic Church, in spite of now having four female Doctors of the Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention since 2000 are, by far, the largest Christian churches/denominations that do not ordain women.

What a shame!