The Southern Baptist Convention voted this week to advance a constitutional amendment that would bar women from preaching to assembled congregations in any SBC-affiliated church — a move that advocates say could limit women’s voices across the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and that critics argue runs counter to both Scripture and church history.
Delegates to the SBC’s annual meeting in Orlando voted 6,028 to 2,026 June 10 — a nearly 3-to-1 margin — to advance the measure, known as the “Truth and Unity Amendment.” Sponsored by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler, the amendment would require cooperating churches to affirm that they do not “affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation.” A second two-thirds vote at next year’s annual meeting in Indianapolis would be required for the amendment to become part of the SBC constitution.
The vote followed three consecutive years in which similar proposals cleared a majority but fell short of the required two-thirds threshold.
Supporters framed the amendment as a matter of doctrinal clarity and faithfulness to Scripture. “We need constitutional clarity on this issue,” Mohler said before the vote. Mohler and other backers cite 1 Timothy 2:12, in which Paul writes that he does not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man, as the foundational text for limiting the pastoral office to men. The SBC’s Baptist Faith and Message 2000, its doctrinal statement, already holds that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Critics, however, say the amendment goes beyond previous restrictions and could be interpreted to prohibit women from any formal leadership function within a church — not just the senior pastoral title.
“Beyond Scripture”
Beth Moore, the Texas-born Bible teacher and author who left the SBC in 2021 after years of conflict over her advocacy for abuse survivors and her criticism of the denomination’s leadership, has been among the most prominent voices pushing back on the amendment’s underlying logic.
When Mohler argued recently that a woman discussing a sermon on a church podcast was “functioning as a pastor,” Moore responded publicly.
“I’ve never pastored a church,” Moore said. “Couldn’t pay me a jillion dollars to. Never been ordained. Have no desire to. The only paid staff position I’ve ever held in a church was as an aerobics teacher in our church gym. But how in heaven’s name a woman discussing a sermon on a podcast could be objectionable to some is beyond me — and what I believe to be beyond scripture.”
Moore told RELEVANT back in 2023 that decades of public scrutiny have not changed her conviction that women are called to teach and lead.
“It has been very, very difficult,” Moore said. “But one of the things that has kept me out there through all the controversy, through all the criticism, through getting on social media, was all the young women out there.”
Moore said she was concerned about the message the debate sends to younger women considering ministry.
“I kept thinking to myself, ‘What I’d love to do is just go completely out of the public eye,'” Moore said. “But what became my concern is that the culture was going to use me as a cautionary tale and make women say, ‘Whoa, I don’t ever want that to happen to me.'”
A Question of History
Beth Allison Barr, a professor of history at Baylor University and author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, argues that the SBC’s position misreads both Scripture and church history.
“I knew the problem wasn’t a lack of women leading in church history,” Barr wrote. “The problem was simply that women’s leadership has been forgotten, because women’s stories throughout history have been covered up, neglected, or retold to recast women as less significant than they really were.”
Barr’s scholarship documents women serving in ordained ecclesiastical offices and pastoral functions throughout church history. She argues the modern complementarian reading of Paul’s letters reflects cultural accommodation rather than clear biblical mandate.
“Ironically, complementarian theology claims it is defending a plain and natural interpretation of the Bible while really defending an interpretation that has been corrupted by our sinful human drive to dominate others and build hierarchies of power and oppression,” Barr stated.
Supporters of the amendment dispute that framing. They argue the complementarian position reflects a consistent reading of Scripture across centuries of Christian tradition and that the office of pastor carries specific biblical qualifications that apply to men.
Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, has argued in her research that the emphasis on male-only church leadership in modern American evangelicalism is shaped as much by 20th-century cultural forces as by biblical exegesis. She has said the convention’s direction reflects a long-running effort to codify a particular vision of gender and authority within institutional Christianity.
“Different Muscles”
Christine Caine — speaker, author and the founder of A21 and Propel Women — told RELEVANT that the opposition women in ministry face has, for many, become part of their formation.
“I’ve endured so many of those things,” Caine said. “It’s developed a faith muscle in me and a resilient muscle in me that enables me to get back up.”
Advocates for women in ministry have said the amendment’s scope — extending beyond the senior pastoral title to the act of preaching itself — represents a significant escalation from prior SBC positions and will have practical effects on churches where women have long served in teaching and preaching capacities without holding the title of senior pastor.
Baptist Women in Ministry, an advocacy organization, sponsored a billboard at the Orlando airport during the annual meeting that read: “God calls women to pastor, preach and minister.”
The amendment still requires a second vote. If it clears that threshold in Indianapolis in June 2027, churches that do not comply risk expulsion from the convention. While the SBC cannot compel autonomous local churches to change their practices, it does have the authority to disfellowship churches it deems not in “friendly cooperation” with the denomination — a power it has used in recent years against churches with women serving as senior pastors.
Moore said the debate, whatever its outcome, would not end the conversation.
“What God is calling some young women to might not even exist yet,” Moore said. “He’s getting us ready for things that we don’t even know how to prepare for. We just have to trust it.”
