A Response to the SBC Actions Towards Women

​By Rev. Dr. Virginia Ross Taylor
Compelling Preaching Initiative Program Director, Baptist Women in Ministry North Carolina

I first visited a Southern Baptist church when I was a young girl visiting my grandparents over the summer, and they took me to Vacation Bible School. I have fond memories of stories about God, songs about Jesus, making crafts out of popsicle sticks, and eating round butter cookies with a hole in the middle that we could slip on our fingers like rings.

When I was in high school, a friend invited our group of friends to visit her Southern Baptist Church. It was a small church plant of a larger church. There was nothing small about the love of the congregation though, and over the course of time, I surrendered to that love and made a profession of faith and was baptized.

After high school, I went to college and became involved in the Baptist Student Union (BSU), a ministry of the Mississippi Baptist State Convention (a Southern Baptist entity). During college I was discipled through MasterLife and Experiencing God (both published by Lifeway, also a Southern Baptist entity). Those groups formed the foundation of my spiritual life. That, along with many leadership opportunities in BSU, led to my first call to ministry from God while I was in college.

After college, I served as a Southern Baptist Mission Service Corps missionary to several campuses in the Boston area. I attended trainings led by Southern Baptists and served as a part of the Southern Baptist campus ministry to the greater Boston area. Near the end of my time there, I experienced an even clearer call to ministry, and was ordained to the ministry by my Southern Baptist Church in Cambridge, MA.

It was during this time (late '80s) that things were beginning to get a little heated for women called to ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention. I remember hearing stories of ordained women not being allowed to serve any longer as missionaries. In light of that, I made the decision to attend a non-Southern Baptist seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. My husband and I attended a Southern Baptist Church in California while I was in seminary, and we had some friends there who questioned whether a woman could be a minister or pastor, but we were all able to co-exist peacefully together.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) was formed in the early 1990s, in part, to offer a place for Baptists who believed that women could be called by God to serve as ministers. My family moved to North Carolina during the early days of CBF and I was able to join the staff of a church with CBF ties. At that time, many churches were dually aligned with CBF and the SBC, as was the case with the church I was serving. I eventually became the pastor of a small Southern Baptist Church and happily served there for five years. They became dually aligned during the time I was with them because of the change the SBC had made to the Baptist Faith and Message in 2000 limiting the office of pastor to men, and since their pastor was a woman, they chose to align with CBF. Most recently I served a Cooperative Baptist Church that is still friendly with the SBC (they use Lifeway Sunday School literature and attend some SBC camps for children and youth), but they no longer include the SBC or local Southern Baptist Association as line items in their budget.

This past week, the SBC held a vote to change their constitution to read that churches who are members of the SBC “do not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.” The vote narrowly failed. The SBC did, however, successfully vote to disfellowship a church in Alexandria, Virginia simply because of their stance that women should be allowed to serve in any pastoral role. That church currently has a woman serving in the position of Pastor for Children and Women. This is not the first church the SBC has cut ties with over this issue. Last year they disfellowshipped two other churches with women pastors (Saddleback Church in California and Fern Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky). 

​As a woman called by God to be a pastor of many kinds, I do not affirm the Southern Baptist Convention’s actions towards women called to ministry. I still love my friends and mentors, but I choose not to serve an organization that intentionally keeps half (or more than half) of God’s children from living into who and what God has called them to be.  Thank God, we are not limited to the SBC in order to live out our call.

---