Today’s article is a little late. I was celebrating my 14th wedding anniversary and to be honest, my self imposed deadline slipped my mind. But I’m glad it did, because I wrote a whole new essay as penance.
Is This a Supporting Wall?
When Male Identity Takes Over the Church
by Daniel L. Bacon
One side of attending a super conservative two year Bible College and surviving with my faith intact is that I have a good insight into their thinking and a constant flow of articles from friends who still swing that direction. Through one of my contacts I’ve just become aware of a two year old article on the website AmericanReformer.org called How Many Female Pastors are in the SBC? by Kevin McClure a PhD student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The article is what you would expect. An effort to raise the hairs on our arms at the prospect of how deep the feminisation of our beloved institutions go. To save you the time, it’s a statistical essay by non-statisticians. A group of 40 volunteers1 sampled the websites of all available SBC churches and found out that the projected numbers of women pastors were massively underreported by male led SBC churches when asked.2 In short, our good brothers under reported3 instances of non-compliance to the Baptist Faith and Message to prop up their State’s mojo at the meeting of the messengers.
To round off the article, McClure hits us with a Grudemism. He cites Wayne Grudem’s projection from his book Evangelical Feminism (2006) that churches who ordain women start down the slippery slope of liberalism which ends in LGBTQ+ inclusion. If you’ve been around the block with conservatives, this is the icing on the cake we knew was coming—even an article about women in leadership isn’t about women in leadership, it’s about the gays using women in leadership the way men have used women in leadership for centuries; it’s a projection of the way we have used women who do the dirty work of the church onto our ideological enemies. But we’re good right? No woman, no cry?
No, according to Dr
’s Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, the SBC only officially stopped ordaining women in 1984, which means that if the so-called “women pastors to homosexual inclusion pipeline” were real, inevitable danger Grudem and McClure suggest, the SBC would already have been Allies. It’s also worth mentioning that the Catholic Church has been ordaining women to ministry (teaching included) since shortly after Vatican II4—changing that rule in the mid-1960s for similar reasons—and they haven’t extended that to homosexual inclusion either. Conservatives don’t magically give up their bêtes noires just because one more person gets into the He-Man-Woman-Haters Club. They generally stick by their guns.5 literally.So yes, there are women pastors in SBC churches. But the SBC isn’t really a denomination; it has no jurisdiction or true spiritual authority over its members. So what? At this point, it’s a self-made gang of good ol’ boys clinging to the club they hijacked in ’84. They’re lucky to have made it forty years without burning the whole place down—except, of course, for the women who’ve quietly been painting the back sides of their buildings, patching the holes, holding it all together.
I grew up in these kinds of churches. And if justice were to be done, every church—and every believer—who holds in good conscience to the High Priesthood of Christ, the Priesthood of All Believers, and the grave offense it is to regard one another according to the flesh rather than the Spirit—should leave. Let these men mutilate themselves into oblivion over the women they’ve spent decades trying to silence—women who answer to God and not to them, women who refuse to obey the contortions of Scripture twisted out of fear, women who serve in pastoral roles every single day without title, without recognition, and without pay.
These are the ones who, across the history of the church, have been its spiritual backbone—the prophetic witnesses who stood when men repeatedly ran the church into the ground with their extra-biblical rules, rituals, and systems of control.6
Dr Mary Malone reminds us of something the church has tried very hard to forget, but which the gospel of Mark reminds us; that the men whom Christ chose to lead ran away in fear, while the women stood and watched from a distance. Uninvited to the fear-fest but unwavering in presence, it was they who became the first witnesses of the resurrection. It was they who testified to the disciples and brought them to faith. And in what can only be called a staggering truth, Dr Malone names them plainly: they were the established Church. There was no one more faithful. No one more constant. No one more established than those women.
They were the literal elders of the Church.
And now? We want to run them out of town.
God help us.
Our institutions are so rootbound in the pot of male identity that if all the women in the church stopped showing up, nothing would change—at first. The sermons would still be preached. Budgets would still be balanced. Committees would still meet. But the pulse would fade. The living witness would wither. And there would be no one left to save us from our own self-annihilation.
Because it is women who carry the heart of Christ into the room.
Across church history, when men have sought power, created hierarchies, and fashioned laws to guard what they believed was divine order, it has been women who bore quiet witness to a higher truth. In the spirit of the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh, the women who stood at the foot of the cross, and the ones who first proclaimed the resurrection, they have preserved the gospel when those entrusted with it distorted it for control.
The irony is staggering: we who have been repeatedly entrusted with the gospel have just as repeatedly mistrusted others with it—especially women. We’ve created doctrinal barricades and theological justifications for side-lining the very people who have most consistently demonstrated what it means to be Christlike: to serve, to heal, to bear witness, to remain.
The so-called “priesthood of all believers”—a radical idea reclaimed during the Reformation—has too often been reserved in practice for men, while women have been treated not as fellow heirs of grace, but as liabilities to be managed.
And yet, throughout every era, women have carried the spiritual backbone of the church—not with titles, but with faithfulness. Not with authority, but with anointing. Not from the pulpit, but from the margins.
So if they left? If they finally refused to keep propping up a gospel stripped of its justice, its tenderness, and its power?
They would be fine.
Because they have held onto the heart of Christ, even when the institution lost sight of Him.
But we—the ones who built the stage and forgot the altar—we would be left alone with our hollow structures, our inherited systems, and our empty certainties.
And there would be no one left to save us from ourselves.
Unstated but probably all or mostly men.
If the numbers are correct it’s something like 10x the number of women in official pastoral roles. The extrapolated number is 1,844 women pastors in 1,225 churches.
*coughliedcough*
See Mary T. Malone’s Women & Christianity (2000)
Literally and figuratively.
See Dr Malone’s lecture: How Women Founded Christianity