by Sandy » Tue Jul 31, 2018 12:16 pm
The "establishment" has no authority to tell a church who it can call as a pastor. If you do a search, you'll find that somewhere between 30-40 currently affiliated SBC congregations have women pastors. There'd be a lot more than that if favorability to the idea were more widespread among the current church leadership. If a church really had the will to call a female pastor, I don't think wanting to "buck" the establishment or not would be a factor. And even as the SBC appears to be emerging from the grip of the conservative resurgence leadership, and there was a spate of discussion about whether or not a woman could be elected president of the SBC, I don't see a lot to move it toward women serving as pastors.
CBF has had a female exec for more than half a decade, and has moved quite a bit to the left on LGBT issues, but with essentially no restrictions from anywhere on calling women as pastors, I don't see that there's been a rapid, widespread expansion of CBF congregations ordaining women or calling them as pastors. A few, mostly their core, spend a lot of time handing out certificates, but it doesn't seem that a large segment of the churches are all that open to the idea, at least, not enough to prevent a long line of ordained women from forming, and mostly moving out of denominational circles.