by Sandy » Tue May 10, 2011 11:01 am
I don't see any value in rudeness, or in arrogance, when it comes to situations where members of churches with women pastors are part of a group or event with those who interpret the scripture in a way that they feel doesn't permit a woman to serve in that capacity. I wouldn't see the value in the SBC declaring a church with a female pastor to not be "in friendly cooperation", even though that would not be in accordance with the BFM 2000.
It seems, though, that as time has moved on, the issue of women pastors has become a litmus test of fellowship among moderate Baptists, and by golly, they're going to jam it down your throat whether you want it or not. Maybe, at some point in the struggle to control the SBC, moderate Baptist leadership thought that the SBC's position on women in the pastorate would cause the women of the SBC's churches to rise up in righteous indignation, depose the "fundamentalists" from their positions and invite the old, exclusive SBC royalty back into control. It sometimes even seems that they've attempted to turn the WMU into the feminist activists of the SBC. They just don't seem to get that the vast majority of women in SBC churches have no pastoral ambitions, and believe that the Biblical role of women in ministry in the church is a different one from that of the men. Most of the activists have left the denomination by now, and have discovered that the alternative Baptists aren't much more settled on the thought of having a female pastor than the Southern Baptists they left.
But you'll still have antagonists, like Ethics Daily or Bruce Prescott, or some board members here, jump up with the occasional attack on the SBC using this issue.