BaptistLife.Com Forums.

Try and offer a cogent comment Stephen. If you could get in as a messenger to the convention next year (it's in Birmingham) you could nominate one of the CollInsville ladies.

Well said. If I read the BFM2000 correctly, the only role restricted to men only in an SBC church is that of "senior pastor." I can see a woman being nominated, though I don't see one being elected anytime soon.

Prior to 1979, there were a couple of women who held one of the vice-president spots in the SBC. One was Myra Bates, and I do not remember the other.

I wonder if the walkout might be my minimal if the woman elected were, say, Mrs Patterson, sort of a Southern Baptist Evita Peron?

Or would that make for a bigger, three-way split?

If you want to apply all of that stuff literally, then men should be lifting their hands in prayer, women should not be braiding their hair or wearing gold jewelry, and in another place, should have a covering over their head and not cut their hair. Worship services should not have a "sermon" (not mentioned anywhere) and try getting a church to abide by Acts 2:42-47, or Acts 5:12-17. When was the last time you opened your invitation to a healing?

Then there's that pesky Greek translation of the term "Guniakas" in I Timothy 3:11. Conservative Evangelicals automatically insist this translates "wives", though the term is generically used for "women" even by the same author elsewhere, along with the term diakonos, and applied to a female in both cases. Other Christians look at the term in I Timothy 3, translate it "likewise, women" and apply it to both Elders and Deacons in context, meaning " in the same way, women who serve [both of these offices of elder and deacon] must meet the same requirements as men do. Since these positions were modeled after Jesus' role as a servant of all, they don't violate the injunction of having authority over a man, because they don't have authority, they have gifts of spiritual leadership.

I don't see any of that applying to a non-Biblical office in a denominational structure that isn't the church.

Marie Griffith has a great piece about this likelihood up today at the easily googled site Religion and Politics. She starts off with a Molly Worthenesque bang I'm sure Thornton and Sandy will catch out of the gates.