Everyone in the Southern Baptist world and beyond was talking this week about Rick Warren and Saddleback Church. But what about Linda Barnes Popham and Fern Creek Baptist Church? Fern Creek Baptist is in Louisville, Kentucky, the city that is also home to theologian Albert Mohler’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Interestingly enough, it was Mohler who led the charge to make sure Popham’s church stayed out of the Southern Baptist Convention. But why now? Popham has been the pastor at Fern Creek for over thirty years?
Here is Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham at The New York Times:
The letter in October came as a shock to Linda Barnes Popham, who had been the pastor of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for 30 years, the first woman to lead her congregation. She had served in ministry even longer, since she started as a pianist at age 16.
But now, she read in the letter, officials of the Southern Baptist Convention had received a complaint about her church being led by a woman. The denomination was investigating, it said.
She replied at length, listing her qualifications and her church’s interpretation of the Bible that affirmed her eligibility to lead. Church deacons, including men, rallied to her defense.
Convention officials decided to expel her church anyway, along with four other congregations that have female pastors, including one of the most prominent in the country, Saddleback Church, based in Southern California.
“I never believed this would happen,” Ms. Barnes Popham said of the move to expel her church, as she prepared to appeal the expulsion on Tuesday afternoon before thousands of delegates at the annual S.B.C. convention in New Orleans. “Why would you want to silence the voices of the faithful churches? Why?”
However the delegates vote on her appeal, the larger message is clear: There is a movement in the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination that is often a bellwether for evangelical America, to purge women from its leadership.
The right wing of the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is now — like conservatives more broadly — cracking down on what it sees as dangerous liberal drift. Most people in the denomination have long believed that the office of head pastor should be reserved for men. But an ultraconservative faction with a loud online presence is going further, pressing for ideological purity and arguing that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.
Some ultraconservatives are now pushing for investigations and expulsions of the churches whose practices differ, like Fern Creek.
The fight over the place of women in the church, long contentious, has been escalating as American evangelicalism increasingly fuses with Republican politics and a vocal ultraconservative minority pushes for power.
The crackdown comes at a moment when the country is broadly re-examining women’s rights, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. For the Southern Baptists, it also comes as victims’ advocates continue to press the denomination to take action after devastating reports of sexual abuse of women and children, and are met with resistance from some men in the organization.
As the convention got underway on Monday in New Orleans, Mike Law, a Virginia pastor, pushed for his proposed amendment to the S.B.C. constitution that would further restrict the role of women in leadership, by stating that a church could be Southern Baptist only if it “does not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”
More than 2,000 male pastors and professors signed a letter in support of the proposed amendment before the convention began. Church officials decided on Monday to advance the proposal to a full floor vote this week, even as they cautioned that they opposed it, arguing that it was unnecessary given the denomination’s existing theological positions. The amendment would need to be passed twice, in consecutive years, to go into effect.
Read the rest here.
Since the 2023 Annual Meeting ended earlier this week, Linda Barnes Popham has been making media appearances. Here is some of what she is saying:
MSNBC:
In this CNN interview Popham asks “Why now?”:
PBS Newshour:
Associated Press: