After overwhelmingly voting to finalize the expulsion of two churches with female pastors, Southern Baptists voted on Wednesday to further expand restrictions on women in church leadership, potentially opening up hundreds of new churches to investigation and expulsions.
Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in New Orleans approved an amendment to their constitution that their churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
Until now, the fight was limited to pastoral leadership and was included in theological statements, not the group’s official legal documents. The amendment must be passed again next year for it to go into effect.