Women Pastors are Not Our Biggest Problem (Bonus Post)

The biblical qualifications for pastors matter. But gender is not the most important one on the list.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Last summer our family, like many Southern Baptist families, loaded up our van and headed to the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting. It’s what some call one giant family reunion—and the extrovert and FOMO in me loves it. We saw friends from seminary days. We ate lunch with people we once served with in the local church. We rejoiced over the gospel going forward both in the nations and in the congregations represented by so many people we love and pray for. Even one of our sons, who loves a good meeting about serious matters (and shares my extroversion and FOMO), asked if we could go back every year. It was his first time sitting in the sessions and he took it all in. Some people do Disney for their summer vacations—the Reissigs do the Annual Meeting. Or so we thought.

But this year, we won’t be there. And it’s unlikely we’ll be there again (for other reasons unrelated to this post).

While we left last year’s meeting encouraged by the work God is doing among Southern Baptists—the flesh and blood kind and not just what you read online by some cantankerous Southern Baptists—we also left discouraged.

There were some hard matters to discuss at last year’s meeting. And I’ve spent the better part of a year trying to process it all. I’ve had these thoughts swirling in my head and this article half written for months. This is my attempt to process it all for others who may feel the same way about our “family matters” in the SBC.

Of course, it was hard and grieving to disfellowship three churches. Daniel and I voted in favor of the disfellowship, but none of it felt good. Breaking fellowship with anyone—person or congregation—should feel like you’re severing a limb. Or divorcing a beloved spouse. We mourned those decisions, but they weren’t made by us. They were made by the ones who chose to go a path different than our shared statement for cooperation.

But there were additional steps taken surrounding cooperation that left us feeling uneasy. At the time, I was serving on staff in my local church. I didn’t have the title pastor, but my work and leadership spanned both men and women. I never preached or taught the Bible to mixed gender groups (though I led Sunday School teachers—male and female— who sometimes taught mixed groups), but I did write and develop curriculum and training materials for men and women. It was freeing and beautiful to see the body of Christ work in a way that men and women could work together for shared flourishing and biblical literacy.

During one discussion and called vote on the floor, our sons were in the room (because the childcare cut off earlier than the meeting did). After much discussion about the role of pastor and what women were allowed to do in the church, a vote was called for an amendment. One of my sons turned to me and said “mom, are you going to lose your job?” We hadn’t talked to him about the discussions surrounding what women do or don’t do in the SBC. But the way people were talking, it made him wonder. He heard people talking about the office of pastor. He heard people talking about women leading in the church. He knew I wasn’t a pastor, but he’d been in enough Sunday School teacher meetings to know that I led people—men and women included. If a child hears us talk about men and women in the church, and he comes to that conclusion, it should give us pause. Or it should at least lead us to want greater clarity.

But that’s not the point of this article. We spend a lot of time talking about women and their place in the convention and in our churches, but we spend less time talking about an even bigger crisis in our denomination. One that can’t seem to stay out of the news, both in my local context, and in our national conversation.

The conversation about women pastors in the SBC (which is a very small number of women comparatively) is a distraction from the real need to talk about our sexual abuse crisis—and if we want to take it a step farther, the number of male pastors who fail to meet the biblical qualifications for pastor.

I left New Orleans last June with one thought—if we spent half as much time trying to root out the sex abuse debacle in our churches as we do locating the very few female pastors in our churches, maybe we wouldn’t have a new abuse scandal every month?

Let’s just consider the qualifications for elder/bishop for a moment. The main text for this is in 1 Timothy 3:1-7.

This saying is trustworthy: “If anyone aspires to be an overseer, he desires a noble work.” An overseer, therefore, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not an excessive drinker, not a bully but gentle, not quarrelsome, not greedy. He must manage his own household competently and have his children under control with all dignity. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a new convert, or he might become conceited and incur the same condemnation as the devil. Furthermore, he must have a good reputation among outsiders, so that he does not fall into disgrace and the devil’s trap.

What do you notice? Of course, the assumption here is that he is male. The male pronoun “he” is used—so if you land on a different interpretation, that’s another post for another day (that is worth discussing!) But maleness is not the predominant characteristic. His ability to preach is not the lead. His leadership strengths and how he works a crowd—this is not important to Paul.

It’s his character that is of utmost importance. It’s how he behaves that gets the most attention. To put it in one phrase—his witness matters.

Here’s just a few of the things Paul mentions. He’s supposed to be above reproach—no one should be able to bring a charge against him. He’s supposed to be gentle—no one should call him a bully (in person or online). He’s supposed to be faithful to his wife—no one should call him out for sexual sin or abuse. He’s supposed to be content—no one should say he’s in this for the money or the power. There’s a lot more, but the one that stands out to me the most is the last one—he must have a good reputation among outsiders. Why? So he’s not ensnared by the devil or publicly disgraced.

That is the fruit of failing to meet these qualifications. You either fall to the temptation of the devil, and we all have seen what that looks like. Or you fall in the court of public opinion, making a mockery of the gospel. Instead of focusing on character, we focus on maleness and preaching. As a result, we get men who love to give speeches on a Sunday morning, but who don’t know how to shepherd God’s people or care for them in crisis. We get men, who when pushed against the wall in stress, explode either to their congregation or in showing their true colors. Only character will keep a pastor in good times and in bad.

What does this have to do with our sexual abuse crisis in the SBC? Everything. Some of our biggest offenders fail to meet nearly every one of these qualifications, and yet we remain silent while publicly condemning biblically faithful women for simply opening the Bible to a mixed crowd. We know of men who abuse for years, or cover up abuse for years, or bully people into remaining silent, or distrust survivors, or let money and power dictate their decisions—but we say, “let’s see what happens” or “we can’t speak into that because of local church autonomy.” And yet, we try to find every woman with pastor in her name in local churches in our convention—even if her role involves working with women and children, the very thing we believe women can and should do.

The world is watching us. And we aren’t above reproach. They see our hypocrisy. And rightly call us on it. We’ve spent more time on minor matters, while the most vulnerable in our congregations have been abused, doubted, and cast out. What message are we telling women when we launch a concerted effort to remove a church for having a women’s pastor, but we are silent on a church that keeps an unqualified pastor in the pulpit?

It’s not just our pastors who are being called out by a watching world—it’s us. Our whole denomination is being called to the carpet for failing to practice what we preach on the very things we hold dear—the trustworthiness of God’s word. The media isn’t our problem. We are our own problem. And we’re at a crossroads. We can either uphold inerrancy—the very thing that defines us—in every part of these qualifications. Or we can keep fighting fake battles, while the real one rages on and leaves countless innocent victims on the battlefield.

The biblical qualifications matter. I believe it, and I know many of my Southern Baptist friends do too. I just think we need to hold to every verse in the qualifications. And women are not our biggest problem.

Let’s uphold the biblical qualifications for elders. I’m all for that. But let’s uphold all of them—not just the ones that are easy (like kicking women out).