This year at the Southern Baptist Annual Meeting (nicknamed SBC26 by the flocks), the faithful attendees got quite an interesting eyeful along the road: A billboard offering Bible verses that support women’s ordination to church leadership positions over both men and other women.
Nothing is funnier than Christians dueling about doctrines, but this one adds the special flavor pouch of using Southern Baptists’ literalism against them. Today, let’s check out their fight and explore what it tells us about Christianity itself.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 6/9/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! PS: In the recording, I accidentally said “1977” as the year of the CLC’s name change. It’s 1997.)
SITUATION REPORT: A defiant billboard greets Southern Baptists attending SBC26
The Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) takes place this week in Orlando. Nicknamed SBC26, it’s where attendees will socialize, network, and vote on denominational business.
This year’s meeting promises to be extremely dramatic because their hardliners have been itching for years to have a second conservative schism within the denomination. Their chosen battlefield is, as it’s always been, about women’s ordination to pastor positions within churches. They don’t think women should ever be general pastors, as that would have them leading men. (Quelle horreur!) Instead, they want to allow women to lead only children and other women.
However, that fight has landed in the public eye in quite an interesting way: as a defiant billboard those attendees will see on their way to SBC26. Placed at a key intersection on the route from the city’s major airport to the convention center, this billboard asserts that their god totally does too call women to leadership positions, including over men. It reads:
God calls women to pastor, preach, and minister.
[smaller text] Matthew 28:8, Acts 2:17-18
[still smaller text] Paid for by Baptist Women in Ministry www.bwim.info
We’ll get into those Bible verses in a minute, as well as outlining the history of the group Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM). These women and their billboard represent a raised middle finger to SBC’s patriarchy-loving hardliners, and importantly, they always have.
Today, I want to show you how this fight figures into the concept of the Doctrinal Yardstick: the subjective means by which Christians construct their chosen beliefs, and how they change their minds (or—more often—don’t).
Billboard wars are always funny, and this one’s the best so far
I’ve written before about evangelical billboard wars. They involve a Christian group that wants to assert that its doctrines are the most correct of all, often to send a pointed message to disagreeing Christians. In the Deep South in the early 2000s, I often saw “Saturday Sabbath” billboards that claimed that Yahweh hates Sunday church services. But there are plenty of others that assert the reality of Hell, the need for repentance, etc.
It’s unlikely that these billboards change many minds, but this splatter-attack form of evangelism appeals to a lot of true believers. One guy who sponsored 25 such billboards around 2013 said only that he’d “had some good results from people,” which sounds like next to no recruitment success. (The rule in evangelicalism holds true: If they don’t report any specific successes, there weren’t any to report. Corollary: They never shut up about successes.)
Billboard wars have always been dear to my heart. They’re so visible and so expensive, yet so ineffective. Sometimes, I see a dueling-doctrines billboard that tickles me pink—and this one from BWIM is definitely my favorite right now. I like seeing evangelicals throw down Bible verses like Magic cards, and since my sympathies definitely rest with one specific side here, it’s extra fun to imagine evangelical hardliners getting seriously angry about this billboard.
In this case, BWIM exists specifically because of the anti-women’s-ordination fight the SBC had 40+ years ago. So their sponsoring of a billboard about their cause is an extra thwap to hardliners’ noses.
Women pastors as the spark of the Conservative Resurgence in the SBC
Back in the 1970s, SBC hardliners hijacked the SBC through a clever, well-coordinated scheme. They called their movement “the Conservative Resurgence.” It ran through the 1990s, with the schemers scoring complete success by 2000. Afterward, the denomination no longer entertained moderate political views. It was solidly literalist and inerrant, rather than having a large percentage of pastors who took a more progressive/metaphorical view of the Bible.
And most importantly, the men of this movement rejected the entire idea of women as pastors.
That was the actual reason why the SBC’s hardliners sparked a schism. They didn’t want women to have any formal power whatsoever over men. A pastor could order around any man within an SBC church, and they didn’t want to see that happen, ever. Women, in their opinion, could only hold power over women and children.
In other words, women could be Sunday School teachers and ministry leaders there. They could be worship ministers over female singers. They could of course also be specifically employed as Women’s Ministry leaders, since by definition no men would ever be there! But nope, they could never be pastors over both men and women!
And yet, women were becoming pastors even in the SBC in the 1970s and 1980s. Their incursion had to be stopped.
With the power of literalism and inerrancy, Southern Baptists could deny women that powerful role. These doctrines require the interpretation of the Bible as literally true and without error in every way. So by interpreting various Bible verses as prohibitions against female pastors, the SBC’s hardliners won that culture war.
For a while. In recent years, the issue has arisen again. Al Mohler, who once supported women pastors while in seminary, has written many times about why it’s so important for SBC hardliners to hold this line without wavering. He and his fellow hardliners have made women pastors the cause beyond all causes. SBC26 is expected to focus intently on the issue.
BWIM as the anti-Conservative Resurgence
In the mid-1970s, the SBC’s Christian Life Commission (CLC) took a major interest in women’s rights. (The SBC renamed it in 1997 to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, or ERLC.) Led at the time by Foy Valentine, a civil rights supporter, put on some events in favor of female pastors. It definitely got some attention from the hardliners, but they couldn’t do much about that support. Yet. They hadn’t adopted literalism and inerrancy yet, and they hadn’t gotten enough support.
The schemers I mentioned put their takeover plan into action in 1979. Even at the time and into the early 1980s, though, the plan wasn’t fully in place yet. So women continued to make inroads to pastoral power. As the BWIM history page shows, women in the SBC hosted a number of events in support of female ministers in general. During these years, the CLC extended full support to these efforts and held their own events as well. Eventually, these supporters became Southern Baptist Women in Ministry (SBWIM).
Starting in 1984, though, SBC hardliners hit back. They won almost all the battles of that culture war. By 1995, SBWIM withdrew from the SBC to become simply BWIM: Baptist Women in Ministry. A few years later, SBC voters approved the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which firmly condemned the idea of female pastors.
In a very real way, BWIM wouldn’t even exist if hardliners hadn’t taken over the SBC. So this billboard represents not just a dissenting voice to the SBC’s current literalism and inerrancy belief, but also a reminder that BWIM is still there, its members still pastoring evangelical churches, and there’s nothing the SBC can do about it but die mad.
SBC26: Dueling doctrines yet again
BWIM’s billboard also represents a strong reminder that two evangelicals can have the same desire to hold correct beliefs, the same desire to follow Jesus, and the same fervor, and yet interpret the Bible in dramatically different ways.
I first ran into this strange situation in college. There, evangelicals constantly argued with me and my Pentecostal peers over key doctrines like the Trinity (putting their position in parentheses here: yes), women’s ordination (yes), speaking in tongues (absolutely no), literalism (no; evangelicals weren’t literalists yet), and more.
We could all literally look at the exact same Bible verses, like Acts 2:38, and come out with completely differing ideas about what it meant. And we’d all use the same techniques to prove our points: “the original Greek and Hebrew” meanings of the words, cross-referencing other Bible verses, even praying for Jesus to show us the right interpretation. In the end, we’d all come away convinced we were right, they were wrong, and we were so very very sad that they were deluded about the real meaning of those verses.
Needless to say, not one of those arguments resulted in a changed mind. It really bothered me, too, though it’d be years before I figured out why: None of us had any objective reason to think our conclusion was the correct one, so we all relied on identical subjective means of evaluating other beliefs. Eventually, I’d call this subjective evaluation of one’s beliefs the Doctrinal Yardstick, because we all measured each other’s level of Jesus-ness by our own beliefs’ example.
That’s what BWIM’s running up against here. They have a Doctrinal Yardstick that says women pastors are A-OK. But these SBC hardliners have one that says women pastors are not okay at all.
Sidebar: How the SBC26 hardliners will likely respond to the Bible verses
Unfortunately for BWIM, I doubt that SBC hardliners will agree with BWIM about the meaning of their two Bible verses. Here they are in their entirety (in the New International Version, or NIV):
So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. [Matthew 28:8]
In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. [Acts 2:17-18, Peter preaching to a crowd]
As much as I sympathize with them, these verses aren’t the slam-dunk they’re hoping for. You can probably already see that neither verse actually permits female pastors. In Matthew, the women are witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. After seeing an angel saying he was gone, they ran away to tell the (male) disciples what they encountered. And in Acts, women only receive prophecy as a named spiritual gift. Both verses position women as parts of Yahweh’s following and the bearer of gifts, but not quite as egalitarian as BWIM has asserted.
And yes, complementarians have already addressed those verses. Here, for example, is Gavin Ortlund conceding exactly what we’ve seen already in Acts 2:17-18:
[M]any women throughout the Old Testament were prophets (Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and so on), and in the New Testament the gift of prophecy is clearly given to both men and women (Acts 2:17-18, 21:9, 1 Corinthians 11:5).
And at the top of page 2 of this Summit Church paper, we find both sets of verses addressed and dismissed as not being about women leading mixed-sex groups.
How Christians change their minds (isn’t pretty and won’t happen often at SBC26)
Remember I mentioned Al Mohler once supported women pastors in seminary? I brought that up for a reason. The way he changed his mind is how authoritarian Christians do: He encountered a powerful manipulative force that brought him to his emotional knees. In this case, this force was his evangelical hero, Carl Henry, who explicitly shamed him for thinking that way:
As I was walking him along, he brought up the issue of women in the pastorate. He asked me my position on the issue. With the insouciance of youth and the stupidity of speaking more quickly than one ought, I gave him my position. He looked at me with a look that surprised me and said to me, “One day, this will be a matter of great embarrassment to you.” That’s actually all he said. When Carl Henry tells you that on the seminary lawn, the effect of that embarrassment was instantaneous… The shock on his face was enough to arrest me. [. . .]
What do you do when Carl Henry tells you, “One day this is going to be a matter of great embarrassment to you?”
Well, we know exactly what you do if you’re young Al Mohler. First, you head to the seminary’s library. You find nothing there but complementarian books condemning women pastors, the same as have been there for years and that you once dismissed using Bible verses aplenty. But this visit, you’re keenly motivated to give their arguments much more credence.
After that show of earnest research, you come away thinking that your hero is right—and you’re wrong. Your only alternative is to conclude that your hero is wrong about something big, which is unthinkable to you. So you drill down on your hero’s position.
And then you never question or examine that belief ever again.
That’s how Doctrinal Yardstick users change their minds. Someone with greater authority pulls rank on them, or they’re shamed, or they’re manipulated with fancy wordplay.
In the high-stakes environment of SBC26, I don’t think any of that’ll happen very often. The voters attending it are loaded with yardstick notches supporting their own beliefs, whatever they are. Antiprocess takes care of the rest.
NEXT UP: SBC26 heats up! See you soon! <3
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