Reverend Linda Barnes Popham no longer reads the Southern Baptist Convention digest. It reminds her of the family that ousted her.
Popham is head pastor at Louisville’s Fern Creek Baptist Church. It was one of the first churches formally removed last year by the SBC for having a woman pastor, Popham herself.
She could not attend the convention in Indianapolis this year. So, she learned about the narrow failure of a vote banning women pastors when a friend called to tell her.
The effort’s failure is hollow relief for Popham because Baptist doctrine still contends that only men can be pastors. Fern Creek Baptist, under Popham’s leadership, would potentially be let in if they changed the title of women pastors, but it’s not clear what that new title would be.
Popham anticipates the SBC’s stance could lead to more churches choosing to leave.
“I think churches are going to be so weary of dealing with the negativity and dealing with not being wanted that I think many will walk away if they don't first get kicked out,” she said.
Popham doesn’t think the SBC reflects the beliefs and priorities of most Southern Baptists. She said the convention is expensive to attend. When smaller churches can’t afford to go, the perspectives of the voting body are less varied, Popham said.
“So this group of people at the Southern Baptist Convention often consists of just the elite, those who call themselves the elite in Southern Baptist life,” she said.
Clergy sex abuse reform efforts ‘glacial’
Bans on women pastors is not a new topic of conversation for the SBC. Two years ago, there were similar debates at the convention. It was the same year a third-party firm released a report revealing Southern Baptist leaders had ignored clergy sex abuse and stonewalled survivors for years.
This year, a majority of attendees agreed that the church should condemn in vitro fertilization, a topic that’s been much in the news as many states have restricted access to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Discussion of reforms to address clergy sex abuse, however, have remained slow and inadequate, advocates said.
“They could be doing something more useful, especially examining the churches that are hiding sexual abusers,” Popham said.
The 2022 report showed the SBC’s Executive Committee had a previously-secret list of over 700 pastors who had committed sexual abuse over 19 years.
The church formed the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force the same year with three main objectives: provide resources to help churches deal with abuse, publish a database of abusive pastors and find permanent funding and long-term plans for abuse reforms.
The task force was assigned to carry all three objectives out over a period of two years. Thus far, it’s achieved one – a curriculum resource for church staff to address clergy sex abuse and help survivors.
Christa Brown is an author and retired lawyer who has advocated for reforms in the church to deal with clergy sex abuse for 20 years.
Brown, who grew up in Texas and lives in Colorado, said a youth pastor at her church sexually assaulted her when she was a child. She said reforms are moving at a “glacial pace.” Last year, the task force announced the launch of the MinistryCheck database of pastors convicted of sexual abuse. It was a step toward meeting a second objective, but the database isn’t live yet, and volunteers are responsible for the regular work that goes into making it a reality.
North Carolina pastor Josh Wester, who chairs the task force, said it had “done all the stuff” to get the database ready and prepared to launch it online but said progress stopped when insurance providers expressed concerns about liability.
The task force, which is entirely volunteer-run, is responsible for creating the database, and Brown said it was an impossible task within the time frame without more support from the church. She imagines many volunteers realized the magnitude of their task but chose not to say anything, instead trying to make it work.
“It would have been far kinder if they had said the truth about that and resigned in protest, rather than trailing this out for two years and pretending that they're doing something, and effectively for two years, serving the institutional image of this charade of doing something when they weren't,” Brown said.
This year, attendees voted in favor of the SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee to continue the task force’s work of implementing reforms including the creation of the database. The Executive Committee was the same group that had the list of 700 sexual abusers that was mentioned in the 2022 report.
Brown said Baptist leaders seem more concerned with protecting the denomination from lawsuits by survivors and pastors, than reconciling with survivors. A Baptist leader and seminary professor who ran for SBC president responded to the lawsuits, calling them “a distraction,” [from the gospel] and “a financial drain for the [executive committee].”
According to data from Lifeway, the SBC’s publishing and distribution wing, 58% of the churches that responded to the SBC’s 2024 Annual Church Profile survey said they require background checks for all staff and those who work with children and students. Only about a third of church staff are trained in preventing sex abuse, and 16% are trained to work with survivors.
Brown said the votes against IVF and women pastors devalues women and children in the SBC.
“When you start from that position, then, when women do indeed try to report abuse, their voices, they start from a position already where their voices are lesser. And so that makes it very difficult to report abuse,” she said.
The SBC’s political turn with IVF
With 50,000 churches, Southern Baptists form the largest Protestant denomination in the country. They’re also a major white evangelical Christian bloc that reliably vote Republican and played an important part in former President Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
The church’s condemnation of IVF comes after the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that frozen embryos share the rights children have. Many Southern Baptists consider embryos to be people and oppose abortion rights.
But some members at the convention spoke in favor of IVF and highlighted its positive impact on their lives.
Brown said she thinks it is ironic for a faith group that purports to be pro-family to take a position opposing IVF.
“I mean, for people who struggle with infertility, going to make it something even more painful for them is [they] now have to reckon with approbation from their safe community,” she said
Reverend Meredith Stone, who is the executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, said she sees the SBC’s embrace of ultra-conservatism as “reflective of what's happening in U.S. society as a whole.”
“With IVF, as well as with the female pastors, as well as with so many of the other things that we're talking about, I think women's bodies are the battleground for the ultraconservative groups to stake their power, both in this religious sphere of the SBC as well as in the political sphere,” she said.
Stone said she sees these recent moves as a backlash against the gains women have made in the church and otherwise over the last 50 years.
