March Out of Southern Baptists is Led by Women Preachers


A year or so ago a multi church group in California founded by famous author, Rick Warren, left the Southern Baptist Convention over women behind the pulpit. Now another multi church group in South Carolina with 33,000 people is doing the same. How does any denomination or denomination-like group of churches think it can discriminate against women and survive? Beats me.

The Southern Baptist Convention, Catholic Church and Missouri Synod Lutherans are three denominations that do not ordain women as clergy. Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination and are an association that churches join rather than one run by a denomination's home office as are the Catholics and Missouri Synod. The membership in all three is falling rapidly. 

It is also true denominations that include women as clergy are falling also. The economics of churches, however, gives those who include women as pastors a fighting chance of hanging on. The larger the pool of people available to pastor churches the higher the probability a group in the pews and a clergy will find each other and link. For tiny churches there needs to be a part time or volunteer preacher. Catholics have no such position so they are worse off. 

We all know there are a host of ways to disagree about Christianity. Lots of those disagreements do not have an economic component as does the gender of the clergy. This makes the no female priests/preachers the most harmful of all issues to the survival of the faith. 

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