Southern Baptists Will Fight Again About Women Preachers

The Southern Baptist Convention will hold its huge annual gathering this coming week. On the agenda is kicking out a few churches who have women pastors. The SBC, Catholics and some other denominations, are the throwback to the old world of men running things. They are almost doing a parody of Christianity. Atheists or "nones" do not need to recruit Christians to leave the faith. People simply decide they do not want to be in a group with such peculiar ideas. 

I've heard of several women who make a living putting on conferences and writing books about women who have left the Southern Baptist Convention. A big name is Beth Moore.

The SBC is not a denomination like the Catholics or Methodists where the "home office" sometimes owns the real estate and employs the clergy. It is instead rather an association of "like minded" Baptists who can disaffiliate themselves or be cut at the annual convention. This makes it curious as to why there is such dog-eat-dog fighting about what seems like a small issue.

I think the explanation is the denomination is so large, it is the largest Protestant denomination, there is a lot of money at stake. This money is used to crank out religious propaganda and to train preachers. Training preachers is a way to impose rules of a minority onto the majority. The preachers come to the annual conference and, perhaps, help decide who in their own congregation attends. 

What the future holds we cannot know. To me it seems like for both the SBC and the Catholic Church it is more likely the institutions just continue to decline indefinitely rather than address shortcomings such as the prohibition of women clergy. It baffles the mind as to why this issue is so important as to risk the future of institutions. Why not just let local people decide this and move on?

Of course, any number of people will tell me I am uninformed about this. That is, it is terribly important whether the person standing behind the pulpit (or pacing back and forth on the platform) is a man or a woman. Is it that if it is a man what is being said means one thing but if a woman it means something else entirely? 

So SBC convention goers, have dozens of votes with lots of prayers in between. No one hears your prayers and you are slowly but surely killing your denomination.