The List: Policing Women’s Pastoral Titles and the Failure of Racial Reconciliation in the SBC

Abstract

This article analyzes recent controversies around gender in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) by examining an online list of women pastors from 112 SBC churches created in 2023 by supporters of an amendment to restrict “any kind” of pastor to qualified men. Using interviews with listed women and primary sources posted to church websites in the form of statements of beliefs, staff pages, church newsletters, church council minutes, and pastors’ blogs, this study examines the identity of these women and how they and their churches responded to being publicly identified. It also analyzes the making of this list in the context of denominational history and contemporaneous crises. This study argues that while the proposed amendment largely borrowed language, recycled tactics, and reiterated themes from previous changes to the SBC Faith and Message, divergent responses to the list revealed the persistence of racial divisions in the denomination. Most striking is the absence of any direct response to the list or the proposed amendment by listed Black churches, indicating the complicated and contingent relationship between these churches and the denomination. The absence of engagement also subtlety signals the underlying failure by 2024 of a racial reconciliation movement championed by SBC leaders throughout the previous three decades.

1. Introduction

On 6 May 2021, Saddleback Church, the largest congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) ordained three women elders, and soon thereafter Kay Warren, the founding pastor’s wife, preached on Mother’s Day. A year later, the church named Andy and Stacie Wood to succeed Rick and Kay Warren, signaling that both husband and wife would actively preach and lead the 24,000-member congregation. These moves resulted in immediate backlash from SBC leaders who had formally limited women’s ministry roles decades earlier and who were simultaneously facing sexual abuse scandals, divisions over critical race theory, and rapidly declining membership across the denomination (Wingfield 2022).

At the 2022 annual meeting, an attempt to disfellowship Saddleback failed after Rick Warren recounted the church’s deep commitment to missions, evangelism, and church planting in a passionate speech from the convention floor. At the same meeting, Mike Law, a little-known pastor from Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia, made a motion to amend the denomination’s constitution to explicitly exclude any church that affirmed women pastors. Both issues were shelved and referred to the Executive Committee for further review (Wingfield 2022).

Temporarily defeated, Mike Law and other supporters of the proposed amendment immediately got to work. In the months leading up to the 2022 annual meeting, Law had already begun contacting women pastors in his local Baptist association through emails and phone calls, alerting them of his plans to report their churches to the SBC Credentials Committee for being “out of step with Article 6 of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000”, which stated, “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture” (Bridgeforth 2024). In July, Law drafted an open letter asking the Executive Committee to support a constitutional amendment that would clearly stand against churches who “trade on the office of ‘pastor’” by applying the term to women on staff. Recycling language from previous denominational debates over inerrancy and gender, Law claimed that an amendment would bring clarity and promote unity in the convention and warned that maintaining the status quo amounted to “embracing empty doctrines” (Law 2022). The open letter was uploaded to the internet so supporters could add their signature and, before the next annual meeting, the letter garnered 2249 signatures.

The alarmist letter was not the only document Law and other supporters crafted in their appeal to the Executive Committee. They also curated a list, shared through a Google document, of SBC churches with women pastors on staff. This 219-page document, titled “Churches with Female Pastors from churches.sbc.net” listed 112 Baptist churches and used a general template for each entry, starting with the church’s name and address, a link to its website, the church’s affiliation(s), the name(s) of the woman in question, her title, and a screenshot of her face. A screenshot of the church’s sbc.net page, showing a map of its location, usually appeared on a second pdf page (Law 2023). Thus, in an attempt to provide convincing evidence for the supposed widespread presence of women pastors in SBC churches, Law’s list effectively doxxed hundreds of women by making their names, work titles, photos, and addresses all easily accessible for anyone interested in tracking down a practicing woman pastor in the denomination.

At a February 2023 meeting, the SBC Executive Committee recommended the removal of Saddleback as well as four other churches with women pastors (Knox 2023). Two churches, Saddleback and Fern Creek Baptist, appealed the committee’s decision, which meant it would have to be confirmed by messengers at the annual meeting the following June. Baptist leaders on both sides of the controversy quickly began publicity campaigns. Press coverage of these ousters centered on Saddleback and its famous founder, Rick Warren, who went on a podcast tour, emphasizing the Baptist commitment to church autonomy.1 Despite these efforts, SBC messengers upheld the church expulsions in an overwhelming vote at the 2023 annual convention and also approved a proposed amendment to restrict “any kind” of pastor to qualified men (SBC Amendment—Will the SBC Compromise God’s Word 2023).

Per SBC governance rules, a second round of voting was set for the 2024 annual meeting to determine if the amendment would go into effect. In the interim, Mike Law created a website to argue for the amendment, various SBC leaders issued statements both affirming and opposing the amendment, and affected churches responded in a variety of ways, ranging from disassociating from the denomination to sending a full slate of messengers to the 2024 Annual Meeting.2 On 12 June 2024, the “Law Amendment”, as it had by then been monikered, failed to garner the required two-thirds majority in a nail-biter 61–38% vote (Banks 2024). That evening, Law issued a statement describing the majority support as “encouraging” and “something we can build upon” (Law 2024).

Although the ouster of five churches, the list, and the proposed amendment centered around the question of women and the title “pastor”, women’s voices were largely absent in public discourse about these issues. The focus on men as primary religious actors on matters of faith and church governance is typical in the way ecclesial matters have historically been described and remembered, though, over the last twenty-five years, scholars of American religion have begun to ask questions that center the experience of women in religious spaces.3

When our focus turns to Baptist women at the heart of the controversy, the historical narrative around the Law Amendment expands beyond a simple debate about biblical interpretation and church autonomy between men in formal roles of church authority. Instead, the story becomes more complex, reflecting complications endemic to Baptist polity and women’s historic struggle to define the parameters of gracious submission and embody complementarian gender roles (Flowers 2022). A good starting point for centering women in a historical account of the Law Amendment is to seek out information about the women and churches identified on the list Mike Law generated to demonstrate a supposed pervasive problem in the SBC. Who were these women, and how did they and their churches respond to being identified on the list? This study seeks to provide an initial answer to this question through a careful analysis of “Churches with Female Pastors from churches.sbc.net”.

Predominantly White churches that made the list were, by far, the most likely to engage in public conversation on the topic of women in ministry in response to the proposed Law Amendment. Some had long ago decided to affirm women and ministry and made action to either disassociate themselves or accept being removed from the denomination. Given the clear terms in the Baptist Faith in Message 2000 that limit women’s roles in church ministry, it is somewhat surprising that some White churches seemed to be surprised by the proposed amendment, though the creation of an online list did inject a higher level of intimidation into the theological debate.

Most listed SBC churches remained quietly resolute by keeping their women pastors on staff. A small number of multi-ethnic churches made potentially related staff and title changes in the year between votes on the Law Amendment, though almost all continued to employ and call at least one woman on their staff “pastor”. Listed Black churches gave no public indication that they engaged with the Law Amendment or any other SBC policy or statement. Rather, their websites celebrated God’s call on the lives and work of the women pastors. Just as Law’s rationale for the amendment largely borrowed language, recycled tactics, and reiterated themes from previous changes to the SBC Faith and Message, divergent responses to the list reveal the persistence of racial divisions in the denomination, rooted in both its origins and recent history. Most striking is the absence of any mention of their association with the SBC by listed Black churches, indicating the complicated and contingent relationship between these churches and the denomination. The absence of engagement also subtlety signals the underlying failure by 2024 of the racial reconciliation movement that had previously been celebrated within the largest and most diverse Protestant denomination in the United States.

2. A Brief History of Race and Gender in the SBC

Debates, disagreements, and controversies in the Southern Baptist Convention have historically centered around issues of race, gender, and biblical interpretation. The SBC was founded in 1845, largely in response to the rejection of James Reeve, a slaveholder, as a missionary for the Baptist Home Missionary Society. The SBC remained an almost exclusively White denomination well into the twentieth century, and a significant faction of the laity was stunned when the SBC encouraged churches to comply with desegregation orders after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. While it remained racially homogenous, Southern Baptist polity allowed for a degree of diversity on non-essential theological matters through the middle of the twentieth century. The 1963 Baptist Faith and Message (BFM) reflected a convention that was more pragmatic than doctrinally conformed (Leonard 1990). Moreover, churches were not required to adopt the Baptist Faith and Message in order to be associated with the SBC.

A slow but steady movement toward defining and enforcing orthodoxy in the SBC began in response to disputed interpretations of Genesis in relation to the scientific theory of evolution. In 1961, Ralph Elliot, Old Testament professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, published The Message of Genesis, in which he employed higher criticism in his interpretation. The book worried conservatives in the denomination that its seminaries were drifting leftward. Meanwhile, an economic boom in the post-World World War II era meant that Southern Baptists were increasingly entering the middle class and their sons and daughters had more opportunities to attend institutions of higher learning, including the six SBC seminaries. The Women’s Missionary Union (WMU), long the flagship organization for SBC women, emphasized that God spoke to and called both women and men to missions and encouraged churches to sponsor women-run book clubs and missions fairs. Often inspired by a call to missions, a small but influential number of young SBC women attended seminary, sought ordination, and moved into the pulpit in the 1970s (Flowers 2012). Against the backdrop of major cultural events like the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the rise of feminism, these conservatives rallied around the slogan “back to the Bible”, asserting that an inerrant approach to the Bible could save the denomination from a cultural shift toward secularism.

Inerrancy and gender issues were often integrated in SBC discussions and decisions, as evidenced in the passage of Resolution No. 3 at the 1984 annual meeting. The resolution stated that women should be encouraged to serve in “all aspects of church life and work other than pastoral functions and leadership roles entailing ordination” (Resolution on Ordination and The Role of Women in Ministry 1984). When Carl Henry introduced the amendment on the convention floor, he justified it through a strict interpretation of 1 Timothy 2. Inerrancy and gender were also at the heart of a 1998 submission statement meant to clarify the SBC stance on the family by defining marriage as “between one man and one woman in covenant” and outlining a wife’s responsibility to “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”. Wording around gender roles in the church was further clarified in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, limiting “the office of pastor” to men.

Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the SBC made major efforts to address its long and lamentable racial history. At the 1995 annual meeting celebrating their sesquicentennial anniversary, Southern Baptists, for the first time, officially recognized “the role that slavery played in the formation” of the convention. In its first 150 years, convention resolutions sporadically addressed racial issues by expressing shame over the pervasiveness of lynching, supporting Black theological education, and, eventually, committing to integrate their churches. But none of these statements addressed how the SBC itself was bound to and had perpetuated systemic racism. So, it surprised many onlookers both inside and outside the convention when SBC messengers overwhelmingly passed a resolution that acknowledged the ongoing nature of racism and apologized for the convention’s part in “condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime” (Resolution On Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of The Southern Baptist Convention 1995).

This resolution marked the Southern Baptist Convention’s first step in a concerted, decades-long effort to promote racial reconciliation among its members and, more broadly, in society. The denomination dedicated resources to plant multi-ethnic churches and recruit historically Black churches to co-affiliate and, by 2000, it had become the most racially diverse denomination in the United States. In light of a series of highly public and racialized police brutality cases throughout the 2010s, the SBC issued official statements that used explicit language to lament White supremacy and uncover its own historical complicity in it (On The Anti-Gospel of Alt-Right White Supremacy 2017; Mohler 2018).

Despite these efforts at racial reconciliation, controversies related to gender and race intensified and plagued the Southern Baptist Convention and received significant national media attention in the final years of the 2010s. Simmering racial tensions within the SBC came to a head over critical race theory (CRT), a framework developed in the 1970s by legal theorists to understand systemic racism. The SBC initially tried to take a moderate stance in the CRT debate with a 2019 resolution, “On Critical Race Theory And Intersectionality”, which stated that, given the SBC’s duel commitment to racial reconciliation and biblical inerrancy, these analytical tools could be employed to help understand how race functions in society, but only in subordination to Scripture (On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality 2019). CRT gained more public attention after President Trump’s order for federal agencies to cease using the framework in diversity training in September 2020. Soon, in a move mimicking tactics from the inerrancy controversy, activists from the right flank of the denomination accused SBC seminary professors who discussed systemic racism of being proponents of CRT. In November 2020, the six SBC seminary presidents issued a joint statement prohibiting the use of critical race theories in their institutions. For several prominent Black pastors who had been recruited to dual affiliate with the SBC in the early days of the racial reconciliation movement, the seminary presidents’ statement was the deciding factor in their choice to disassociate from the convention (Willis 2022, pp. 223–28).

At the same time, sexual abuse scandals and ongoing debates around gender roiled the SBC. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle published a series of articles detailing a widespread pattern of sexual abuse and assault in SBC churches. Its investigation identified over 700 victims in the denomination and 380 known abusers on church staffs (Tedesco et al. 2019). In response to these reports, the denomination hired a third-party investigation that resulted in a 2022 report detailing known sexual abuse allegations, including of a former SBC president, as well as a general pattern of denominational leaders ignoring complaints, keeping a secret list of offenders, and shielding its institutions from liability (Smietana 2022). Messengers at the 2022 annual meeting passed a series of reforms to set up a “Ministry Check” website to track abusive pastors and provide training materials for churches (Smietana 2023c). Several SBC entities pledged millions of dollars toward enacting these reforms, but by the 2024 annual meeting, the Ministry Check website contained no names of abusers, and the oversight committee reported that “the process has been more difficult than we could have imagined” (Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force 2024).

Meanwhile, Beth Moore, the SBC’s most famous woman Bible teacher, indirectly brought greater attention to the denomination’s inconsistent application of complementarianism in 2019 when she received online backlash for preaching at her church’s Mother’s Day service (Hankins 2022, pp. 190–96). Within two years, Moore announced her departure from the SBC. Hers was not the only public departure from the convention in the years leading up to the Law Amendment.

These public departures came at a time of a larger decline in attendance and baptisms in the denomination. From 2006 to 2023, the SBC lost three million members, many of whom were raised in the denomination as children but did not remain as adults (Smietana 2023b). There was also instability at the top of the SBC, as it went through five Executive Committee presidents in the five years leading up to the 2024 annual meeting (Smietana 2023a). In the context of this constant state of crisis, Mike Law deemed it the right time to propose an amendment that would further restrict women’s roles in churches in order to buttress denominational unity via enforced theological and practical uniformity. Perhaps unknowingly, Law’s hyper-focus on the gendered use of “pastor” as a litmus test for SBC orthodoxy ironically exasperated the fragile and fraying denominational attempts to unify across racial lines.

3. Limitations and Caveats

Before diving into the evidence, I want to acknowledge important restrictions in this analysis. First, Law himself conceded that the list was not a representative sample of the Southern Baptist Convention but rather a rough-shot compilation of churches he was personally aware of or that were relayed to him through personal networks (Law 2023). This explains both the overrepresentation of Virginia churches as well as the presence of thirty-seven churches on the original list that were, in fact, not associated with the SBC and that ended up being removed from sbc.net within a year.

Second, two separate but overlapping lists of SBC churches with women pastors were circulated and published in the run-up to the 2023 annual meeting. As previously noted, the first list was compiled by Mike Law and published on the internet in March 2023 for wider distribution. A second list was compiled and published in June 2023 by “a team of all-volunteer members from various SBC churches” (Christ Over All 2023). While the second list attempts to use more scientific methods to provide an accurate sample set of SBC churches, I chose to examine the original list because it was circulated early in the campaign, and some of the churches on it responded in real time. Thus, a close look into the churches and women on the original list will shed light on who the supporters of the Law Amendment had in mind when they voiced their concern that “abiding women in the pastoral office…contaminates the soil of our Convention with distrust of and disobedience to the Scriptures” (Law 2022).

Third, this analysis was conducted in the year between the 2023 and 2024 annual meetings votes, and travel constraints resulted in a scope of analysis mostly limited to online observations. I corresponded directly with seven listed women or church representatives but largely depended on primary sources posted to church websites in the form of statements of beliefs, staff pages, church newsletters, church council minutes, and pastors’ blogs. I determined the racial makeup of the listed congregations by observing both a church’s leadership team as well as available photos of the congregation. I categorized a church as either White or Black if all or most of both the leadership and congregation were of one race. I categorized a church as multi-ethnic if there was significant racial diversity in the makeup of both its leadership and congregation, as well as a statement on its website that indicated a commitment to diversity as a central value or main priority of the church. Conversations with some church leaders about the makeup of their congregation confirmed a sample of these classifications. Importantly, though this categorization is largely limited to observations from afar, these racial categories did correlate with SBC history and its recent racial reconciliation initiatives outlined above. Historic SBC churches were predominantly White, most multi-ethnic churches had been planted in the last thirty years, and none of the Black churches clearly claimed an affiliation with the SBC, indicating that they were aligned with several associations and presumably included in the SBC through technical ties via local associations. With these limitations and caveats in mind, a thorough examination of the churches and the women on the list provides a glimpse into the complex landscape of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2023 to 2024 and offers insight into the various ways women did or did not respond to a denominational controversy of which they were, sometimes unknowingly, at the heart.

4. The List

Many of the list’s 112 churches underwent changes between its 2023 publication and the SBC’s June 2024 annual meeting. In that interim, three of these churches voted to disassociate, two were disfellowshipped, and a total of thirty-seven were removed from sbc.net. Of the sixty-four remaining on the sbc.net page in June 2024, seven identified the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, not the SBC, as their national association. Based on the categorization method described above, 77 of the 112 churches were predominantly White, 19 were predominantly Black, and 14 were multi-ethic. Two churches seemed to be shut down by June 2024.

4.1. Disfellowshipped and Disassociated Churches

In the fifteen months between the list’s publication and the 2024 annual meeting, the relationship between several listed churches and the SBC permanently changed. Surprisingly, Saddleback Church did not appear on the list of “Churches with Female Pastors” despite its central role in the national press coverage before and after the 2023 SBC annual meeting. In fact, only one of the five churches disfellowshipped by the SBC Executive Committee in February 2023 for having a woman pastor appeared on Mike Law’s original list: Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, a majority White church led by a White woman (Knox 2023). Perhaps this was due to Law’s intention that the list demonstrate women serving as pastors was not a localized situation but rather a widespread practice in the denomination. Whatever the case, leaders of the disfellowshipped churches were the first to respond to the 2023 affirmative vote on the Law Amendment.

Linda Barnes Popham, pastor of Fern Creek, appeared on CNN a week after the 2023 annual meeting to share her reaction to being targeted and disfellowshipped. First, she expressed surprise, given that she had served as pastor for thirty years. Popham called the situation sad, comparing it to getting kicked out of a family, and expressed anger at the hypocrisy in the convention’s inconsistent defense of church autonomy. When pressed on the SBC’s position that the office of pastor only be held by men, Popham noted that her church believed the Bible as much as those who led the campaign for its ouster, subtly invoking decades-old denominational debates over hermeneutics and gender roles (Asmelash 2023).

Leaders at First Baptist Church Alexandria (FBCA), a majority White church with historic ties to the SBC, underwent similar scrutiny for their views on women in ministry after a turbulent year that included an internal review of the church’s historic relationship with the SBC, a J-term class on “Women in Pastoral Ministry”, and the creation of a website to house all the information related to their future with the SBC. A detailed timeline indicated that these actions were initiated after being reported to the Credentials Committee in 2022 for being “out of step” with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (First Baptist Church Alexandria 2024b). In April 2024, the Credentials Committee asked the church to complete a questionnaire with questions ranging from their identification with the Baptist Faith and Message to the job descriptions of various pastoral positions in their church. In their response, FBCA noted that a senior pastor from their church attended the inaugural convention of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845 and that the church had contributed $9.6 million to the SBC’s Cooperative Program over their 179 years of “friendly partnership” with the convention. In the letter, the church affirmed that it “agrees specifically with the vast majority of beliefs articulated within” the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 but that the church did not believe the Bible limits the role of pastor exclusively to men (First Baptist Church Alexandria 2024a). A month after sending this letter, FBCA sent twelve delegates to the annual convention, but, after a messenger made a motion to unseat the church’s delegates and the Credentials Committee recommended the church be expelled, an overwhelming majority of voting messengers agreed (Wingfield 2024). Despite considerable effort to salvage their relationship with the SBC, First Baptist Alexandria found itself removed from the convention they had a hand in creating.

Three other majority White churches on the list took the initiative themselves to disfellowship from the SBC. Chesterfield Baptist Church in Moseley, Virginia, voted unanimously to disassociate in July 2022 in response to the sexual abuse scandal in the denomination but did not officially communicate this decision until its inclusion on the list prompted leaders to write an open letter to the Executive Committee in March 2023. In eloquent language, church leaders, including the Kids’ Pastor who was identified by name on Law’s list, described the alarm they experienced at having a “qualified, gifted, and called clergy” named on a public document that could subject her to “danger and ridicule among the more radical, fringe segments of a highly polarized society”. They poetically contrasted their alarm at being included on this list to their horror at the “much more grievous and heinous list” of accused sexual abusers kept secret by the SBC in the name of church autonomy. The letter closed by strongly affirming the calling of women into the ministry (Frame et al. 2023).

Ox Hill Baptist Church in Chantilly, Virginia, also voted to disassociate from the SBC soon after the list’s publication. Rev. Dr. Sarah Boberg saw herself identified as a “Children’s Pastor” after clicking on a link in a social media post soon after the list was published. Seeing her name and photo was “defeating”, “violating”, and “sad”. For Boberg, appearing on the list caused her to see her job as potentially putting herself and others “at risk for ridicule, difficult decisions, or even danger”. In the end, she felt affirmed by her local church even as being listed confirmed her view that the SBC was mostly interested in power and made her question its ongoing, broad base of support (Boberg 2024).

The five listed churches that disassociated from the SBC, either voluntarily or by force, spoke out publicly against the Law Amendment. They were all majority White churches, mostly well-resourced and with high profile or historical associations with the SBC. All but one was led by a male pastor. These churches represented a section of the SBC landscape with theologically conservative (but not fundamentalist) leadership, a deep commitment to church autonomy, and practical support for women in ministry. In church meetings and public statements ranging in tone from distressed to outraged, these churches lamented the growing distance between their congregations and the SBC, defended the women pastors on their staff, affirmed the biblical grounds for women to hold pastoral roles, and expressed a profound desire to move forward in ministry.

4.2. Churches with Distant Relationships to the SBC

Another faction of churches on the list was led by women pastors who were aware of their church’s distant relationship to the SBC but did not understand that relationship as contentious until they were publicly identified on the circulated online document. Carlisle Davidhizar, a White associate pastor of May Memorial Baptist Church in Powhatan, Virginia, with historic SBC ties, expressed this viewpoint in a March 2023 editorial titled “I’m One of the Female Pastors on the SBC’s Hit List”. Davidhizar explained that, though she was well aware of the barriers that prevented her from pastoring in most SBC churches, she felt dismayed at being considered an “active threat”. Davidhizar claimed that economic injustice, racism, and sexual abuse all represented far more important issues for the SBC to address than her pastoral title. She also noted that May Memorial was “taking steps to finalize breaking all ties with the SBC” (Davidhizar 2023). By June 2024, the church was no longer listed on sbc.net.

The biographies of the women pastors in two other majority White Virginia churches offer a glimpse into the significant changes in the SBC over the past forty years. Rev. Lisa Cole Smith founded Convergence as a re-start of Fair-Park Baptist Church, a historic SBC church, in 2006. Cole Smith grew up under the spiritual tutelage of her grandmother, an ordained deacon in her rural SBC church, and enjoyed participating in AcTeens as a teenager in the late 1980s, though she noticed “an underlying current of harsh authoritarianism surrounding cultural issues.” As a pastor at Convergence, she had “little to no relationship” with the SBC and was first alerted to Mike Law’s campaign in 2022 when she received a “nasty email” from him that “chastised [her] for being a woman pastor.” Though the email was sent anonymously, Cole Smith was able to easily track it to his church based on the sending email address. Though she could respect that he held a different position on women in ministry, she felt alarmed by the “nasty tone and anonymous ‘bomb’ email”, and became concerned for Law’s own congregation (Cole Smith 2024).

Cole Smith learned of Law’s online list when she was contacted by a local reporter. She was surprised to learn about his claim that her church was affiliated with the SBC. She double-checked that it was, indeed, not affiliated and assured her church as such, though the church remained on sbc.net in June 2024 (Convergence at Fair-Park Baptist Church 2024). Cole Smith “didn’t really care” about being on the list because it did not affect her status or her congregation. Reflecting on the list, she acknowledged that it did affect other women in more traditional churches and, based on their reactions, she saw it as a “great spark to set off come pretty dry wood” that would “force people, churches and associations to get off of the fence” about an issue that their churches had long settled (Cole Smith 2024).

Melissa Fallen, Senior Pastor of Glen Allen Baptist Church, also grew up in the SBC, though when the Baptist Faith and Message was amended in 2000, she understood that she would no longer be welcome to serve in the denomination. Fallen learned that her name appeared on the list after a friend sent it to her. Though she knew the online document would not threaten her job and she largely ignored it, Fallen did feel that being put on a “hit list” was an “act that lacked any semblance of kindness”. Fallen lost more respect for the SBC through this experience because, to her, the list represented more than one rogue pastor but rather a denomination that not only failed to rebuke an “egregious” action but whose people “signed onto a document in support of it” (Fallen 2024).

In contrast to Cole Smith and Fallen, Rev. Danielle Bridgeforth grew up in Black Baptist churches and had no relationship with the SBC before being hired in 2017 as senior pastor of The Church at Clarendon. The church, originally called First Baptist Church of Clarendon, was founded and associated with the SBC in 1909, and, as Bridgeforth summarized, was characterized by “all the things that would go along with being a White Baptist Church at that time”. However, as the neighborhood around the church diversified, the church maintained a focus on meeting the needs of their community. When the church went about looking for a new senior pastor in 2017, they prioritized building a diverse congregation. As the first woman and first person of color to serve as senior pastor for the church, Rev. Bridgeforth sees her role as nurturing a congregation where “everybody feels like they can be valid and come in their authentic self” (Bridgeforth 2024).

Bridgeforth was surprised to receive an email from Mike Law in May 2022 that informed her that he was reporting their church to the SBC Credentials Committee because she occupied a senior pastor position. She forwarded the email to the church’s leadership team, who assured her that they would take care of clarifying their position with the SBC. They discovered that because of their involvement with their local and state Baptist association, the church was technically considered to be in the SBC, so that is why they appeared on sbc.net when Law began his campaign. Because of her church’s support, Bridgeforth chose to move on quickly from the incident as she deemed it not worth her attention or time (Bridgeforth 2024).

That feeling changed a year later when Bridgeforth discovered that she, along with hundreds of other women, had been named on a publicly circulated list. Seeing her name, photo, and other identifying information was “hurtful” and “disappointing” but mostly made her feel tired. It was difficult for her to reconcile Mike Law having time to compile such an extensive list while she went about pastoring by preparing sermons, ministering to families, consoling the dying, and all the other pressing life issues of her congregation. Moreover, she understood the list as creating a safety issue that “literally could have put our lives in danger” and revealed that Law was “not reading the room” of the increasing radicalization of some conservative circles where someone, in the name of biblical literalism, could commit a heinous act. Because of the safety issue, Bridgeforth did address the issue briefly from the pulpit but mostly remained focused on her work, inspired by a vision for her young congregants, both girls and boys, to have a “more well developed, well rounded faith and understanding of God and of the Gospel” (Bridgeforth 2024).

By the 2020s, these women and their churches had already settled the question of women’s role in ministry, were knowingly challenging assumptions of how a Baptist church in the South could function, and, in so doing, had moved to the fringes of the SBC. They also represented the key targets of Mike Law’s list and his attempt to unite the denomination by restricting their ability to pastor in its ranks. These churches were historically White, local, known to Law, and led by women who, though disappointed at being publicly targeted, were also okay with being officially declared “out” of the denomination they had, at least ideologically, long before left behind.

4.3. White Churches on the Fence

A third faction of listed churches, perhaps those that Cole Smith had in mind as being on the fence, anticipated the consequential vote on the Law Amendment as they affirmed women pastors while remaining in the SBC. All five churches were majority White—one had a woman senior pastor, and four were in Virginia. In the time period between the list’s 2023 publication and the 2024 annual meeting, these churches engaged with the topic of women in ministry through pastoral blogs, congregational meetings, newspaper articles, and podcasts.

In a March 2023 blog post titled “The List”, pastor Libby Grammer notified her congregation at First Baptist Church in Martinsville, Virginia, that their church had been included on a list compiled and circulated for the purposes of being ousted. She explained that First Baptist had long ago stopped contributing financially to the SBC or sending messengers to the annual meeting. Though she anticipated the church being ejected from the SBC, she assured congregants that neither their Baptist identity, their ministries, nor their commitment to the faith would be altered by this action (Grammer 2023). In a second blog post, published in June 2024 and titled “That List Again”, Grammer explained that the church only remained officially in cooperation with the SBC because of its “historic connections”. She described the church’s decision to “let it be”, but also detailed the various responses of other listed churches, including those who sent letters, formally withdrew from the denomination, or who “faced a real dilemma” of being dually aligned with the more moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) as well as the SBC. She provided many resources for her congregants to read further about the issue and described her own passively defiant stance toward the Law Amendment as akin to saying, “’Kick us out, fine. We aren’t in anyway’” (Grammer 2024).

Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, was one of those churches Grammer described as facing a dilemma. In October 2023, the church held a town hall meeting led by their interim pastor, Dr. John Upton, who described the situation at hand as a “sad and internal” issue in the denomination, noting that members of the Executive Committee did not endorse the Law Amendment but rather that “ultraconservative, doctrinally driven” Calvinists were its champions. Upton stressed that their church and denomination were facing a “bigger issue than just women”, and enumerated several consequences for the passage of the Law Amendment, including staff insurance, missionary support, and the church’s ongoing pastoral search (BABChurch 2023). In March and April 2024, Bon Air’s Church Council reviewed its history of employing women ministry leaders, conducted a church survey regarding the church’s relationship with the SBC, and approved twelve messengers, including six women, to send to the annual meeting (Cahill 2024a, 2024b).

Like Upton, Allen Jackson, Senior Pastor of Dunwoody Baptist Church in Dunwoody, Georgia, situated the Law Amendment as the latest iteration of the church’s long and checkered history with the SBC. In 1989 and 1990, Dunwoody’s Senior Pastor, Daniel Vestal, ran as the last moderate candidate for SBC president, losing both years to a more conservative candidate. Jackson described himself as a “soft complementarian” and saw the Law Amendment as politically, not theologically, motivated and a result of “fear that a militant feminism has influenced the life of the church” (Mwaura 2024).

These listed churches operated with a deep knowledge of denominational politics and tradition, communicated clear support for their women pastors, and emphasized their commitment to the autonomy of the local church. In the run-up to the 2024 annual meeting, as they waited for the messengers to determine the fate of their relationship with the SBC, leaders of these churches characterized the Law Amendment as a politically motivated action taken by a puritanical and ultra-conservative faction of the convention and remained compelled to remain in a denomination that they knew well.

4.4. White and Multi-Ethnic Churches Making Concessions

A small number of listed churches made changes to staff women’s titles in 2023 and 2024 that indicate they actively grappled with and anticipated the implications of the Law Amendment. By the fall of 2023, Kathie Haywood, the Children’s Pastor at Stone Ridge Church in Yuma, Arizona, was no longer on the church’s staff, and her replacement was called the “Children’s Coordinator” (Leadership and Staff 2024). Interestingly, by June 2024, all of the church’s leadership and titles included the term “director”, though three male directors also had “pastor” in their indicated roles online (Leadership and Staff 2024). In addition to these staff changes, Stone Ridge’s website contained a downloadable pdf titled “Debatable Matters” that recognized both egalitarian and complementarian views within its church. The document asked egalitarians to accept “Elders & Lead Pastor as male roles in the church” and complementarians to “consider women free to engage in all other capacities” (Belief Statement 2023).

The majority of churches that made changes to the roles and titles of women on their staff were multi-ethnic. For example, Lake Pointe Church, with several campuses throughout the Dallas, Texas metro area, no longer listed any woman pastors but rather only named the church’s (all male) campus pastors on its website, perhaps in a clever way to avoid denominational scrutiny from afar (Rockwall Campus 2024). Lake Pointe’s “En Español” page shows several women on its teaching rotation, including thirty-one sermons by Pamala Baltazar (Mensajes 2024).

It is unclear whether any of these changes to staff titles were directly influenced by the Law Amendment because none of these churches responded to it on their website. However, it is safe to say that these churches represent a faction of the SBC that was willing to make small concessions or strategic communications changes in order to keep in the good graces of the Southern Baptist Convention as it grappled with what to call women who ministered in its ranks.

4.5. Quiet Defiance across Racial Categories

In the face of the Law Amendment, a large contingent of listed SBC churches maintained quiet, indirect, and sometimes contradictory support for women in ministry. By June 2024, several listed White churches had more women with “pastor” in their title than originally appeared on Mike Law’s list, a subtle but sure indication that hiring decisions were not informed by his proposed amendment.4 Celebration Baptist Church in Hoschton, Georgia, had two additional women pastors listed on their ministry team, and its “What we value” website page contained a carefully worded statement affirming women in ministry (Values 2024).

Many listed churches that employed women pastors while remaining in the SBC were large, recently planted, and focused on building a diverse congregation. For example, Fielder Church in Arlington, Texas, is a bilingual church that is at once self-identified Southern Baptist, committed to cultural and generational diversity, and open to calling women “pastors”. Led by an all-male elder board, the church has eight women pastors across several campuses, though none of these women holds a senior pastor role (Fielder Church 2024). Some minor staff roles changed at Fielder between the list’s publication and the 2024 annual meeting, with one of the original nine named women no longer employed, another’s title changed to “worship leader”, and an additional worship pastor hired. Fielder’s website stated that the church “adheres to the beliefs outlined in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000” and identifies itself explicitly as a Southern Baptist Church. Showing its commitment to diversity, one of Fielder Church’s fourteen official goals to reach by 2026 is that “no one culture will make up more than 50% of our church” (14 Goals 2024). Despite (or because of) its size and influence, Fielder made no mention of the list or the Law Amendment on its website.

Other large, multi-ethnic, and metro-area churches on the list continued to have women pastors on staff while remaining discreet about their affiliation with the SBC. In fact, none of these churches had the word “Baptist” in their name. Grace Capital City Church, planted in Washington DC in 2016, communicated clear support for women in ministry on its website while making no reference to its affiliation with the SBC. Two women, a White Associate Pastor and a Black member of the church’s Leadership Council, helped to lead the church, and its website stated, “we value the God-given capacity of women to lead without limitation” (GCC Leaders 2024). At least one listed woman pastor in a large, multi-ethnic, and metro area church was unaware of both the list and the church’s relationship to the SBC. In a June 2024 email, Lindsey Lee, Community Pastor of Epic Church in San Francisco, California, wrote, “Epic Church is not in the SBC so I am not sure how we (or I) became a part of the list” (Lee 2024). Listed women pastors at large and recently planted multi-ethnic churches went about their work with little or no knowledge or public acknowledgment of the list or the Law Amendment.

In contrast to the variety of responses by their majority-White counterparts, no listed Black churches addressed either their inclusion on the list, the Baptist Faith and Message, or the Law Amendment on their website. Further, there was no online evidence of their affiliation with the SBC and little reference to affiliations of any kind. Of the thirteen Black churches named on the list, three had multiple women pastors, and six were co-led by women and men.5 Most of these listed churches detailed the personal call of their women pastors to ministry. New Canaan Baptist devoted a separate page on its website to its history, which chronicled the ordination of both women and men as pastors and elders without any qualification (History 2024). Likewise, the “brief history” page on Harvest Assembly’s website stated that, from its founding, senior pastor Johnnie Abram “boldly and publicly licensed women who were called by God to preach the gospel…when it was very unacceptable” (Brief History 2023). There was scant online evidence that women serving as a pastor was notable in any of the listed, Black-led churches.

Significantly, five out of the nineteen listed Black churches were pastored by husband and wife teams. One such pastor, Assistant Pastor Constance Cheeks of Shiloh Baptist Church, “yielded and accepted” a call to preach in 2009 and was the first woman to be licensed in the church in 2011. Like several other listed pastors’ wives, she led women’s and girls’ ministries for the church (Pastoral Team 2023). Though each of these churches bestows the title “pastor” to both their leading husband and wife, none addresses the Law Amendment on its website or indicates that the church discussed this issue or sent messengers to the 2024 annual meeting. The absence of online commentary or even subtle messaging about their stance on women in ministry indicates that gender roles in leadership were not a pressing issue for Black churches on the list and that they paid little attention to SBC politics and polity.

5. Conclusions

Studying the responses of the women and churches listed on “Churches with Female Pastors from churches.sbc.net”. provides a glimpse into the various ways women in ministry navigated the complex landscape of the Southern Baptist Convention in 2023 and 2024 and the discrepancy of church responses along racial lines. Majority White churches were, by far, the most likely to engage in public conversations on the topic of women in ministry in response to the proposed Law Amendment. Lead women pastors with only loose or historical connections to the SBC responded to being listed by focusing on their congregations, reassuring them that their Baptist identity would remain intact irrespective of the messengers’ decision on the Law Amendment. They generally felt sad and disappointed by their inclusion on the list but remained undeterred in following their call. Five White churches with women pastors made decisions to disassociate from the SBC or were found “not in friendly cooperation” after publicly and formally engaging the issue with denominational leadership.

Another small faction of White churches with historical connections to the SBC addressed the impending Law Amendment through blog posts, town hall meetings, and podcasts. The male pastors of these churches emphasized that the amendment threatened the autonomy of the local church and, though supportive, spoke on behalf of the women pastors on their staff. The fact that some of these churches expressed defiance and surprise in the face of the amendment shows the centrality of church autonomy in Baptist commitments but also may confound anyone familiar with the sequence of denominational decisions that increasingly restricted women’s ministerial roles over the previous fifty years. Still, most listed White churches responded to the controversy by quietly defying it and keeping women pastors on their staff without publicly addressing the issue.

Multi-ethnic churches with listed women pastors did not engage in public discussions about the list or the Law Amendment. However, their websites provided clues that these churches wrestled with adhering to the denomination’s strict provisions for women in ministry, as stated in the SBC Faith and Message 2000, and their congregation’s diversity-related values and goals. Some of these multi-ethnic churches made staff and title changes in the year between votes on the Law Amendment, though almost all continued to employ and call at least one woman on their staff “pastor”. Depending on how closely their congregants and staff paid attention to denominational politics, the Law Amendment could have threatened these churches’ attempts at fostering a culture of diversity. Many of these multi-ethnic churches were planted over the past three decades as a part of the SBC’s attempt to actualize its commitment to racial reconciliation. Even as they worked to redeem the denomination’s lamentable racial history by building multicultural congregations, these multi-ethnic churches became mired in attempts to enforce increasingly reactionary stances on gender roles.

The absence of publicly stated positions on women in ministry or even of their SBC affiliation indicates that Black churches were either unaware or undaunted by the list or potential changes to the SBC’s constitution. More often, listed Black churches celebrated the call of their women pastors to the ministry by including it as a part of the church’s history. Listed Black churches were also the most likely of any racial category to have women on their elder board. In July 2023, the National African American Fellowship, SBC (NAAF) sent a letter to the Executive Committee explaining that the Law Amendment would disproportionately affect their churches, which “often assign ‘pastor’ to women overseeing ministries within the church” (Perkins 2023). However, none of the listed Black churches made mention of this letter or their affiliation with the NAAF on their website. Whereas many prominent Black pastors broadcasted their decision to leave the SBC after the CRT controversy, the listed Black churches defied the Law Amendment by simply ignoring it.

The most striking commonality in these Black churches’ websites is the absence of any mention of their association with the SBC. This complete silence signals a contingent relationship between these churches and the SBC and also hints at a broader failure of the racial reconciliation movement within the denomination. When asked if appearing on Mike Law’s list changed her view of the SBC, one Black woman pastor responded, “No. This is who they have been for hundreds of years” (Bridgeforth 2024). This short phrase communicates the resignation and suspicion many Black church leaders maintained as they disengaged from the SBC’s chaotic climate in the early 2020s.

By June 2024, most of the churches that appeared on Mike Law’s list, including all of the Black churches that ignored it, remained in the SBC while defying the tightening restrictions placed on women pastors. While some listed churches maintained ambiguous positions on women in ministry, the vast majority stood behind their women pastors. An analysis of the list that centers these churches’ responses reveals an unexpected view into the complicated racial dynamics inside this large and unwieldy denomination. By 2024, even as the Law Amendment drew national news coverage and caused permanent changes to several White churches, many Black churches seemingly remained uninterested and unbothered by the uproar. Instead, these churches maintained a resolute focus on their local mission and community. Ironically, the Law Amendment, which was intended to unite the denomination via doctrinal uniformity, actually exposed the failure of previous attempts to unite the denomination through racial reconciliation.

Just hours after his namesake amendment failed to gain the required two-thirds vote at the 2024 annual meeting, Mike Law released a statement that urged disappointed supporters to “lean in, lead, and labor for Biblical faithfulness” (Law 2024). By no means did the amendment’s failure indicate an openness in the convention to a wider role for women in ministry. Rather, many opponents to the amendment simply believed that it was unnecessary and redundant, pointing to the successful ouster of Saddleback, Fern Creek, and First Baptist Alexandria as evidence that sufficient mechanisms were in place to guard against egalitarian practices (Camp 2024). It is worth noting that within two weeks of the Law Amendment vote, two other prominent conservative denominations also voted on ecclesial matters impacting women’s role in ministry (Turpin 2024). Given the divided national politics around women’s rights more broadly and the fact that Southern Baptists continue to comprise the largest Protestant group in the United States, it is safe to assume that internal efforts to police women pastors both reflect and fuel wider debates around women’s roles and rights beyond church walls.

As the SBC continues to grapple with compounding denominational crises, it remains unclear if or how the denomination might formally determine if women pastors “of any kind” contradict its stated complementarian beliefs. What is clear is that women pastors in the SBC across all racial categories will continue to minister in their churches and shape this debate as they simultaneously embody both female and pastoral roles.