From its towering white steeple and red-brick facade to its Sunday services filled with rousing gospel hymns and evangelistic sermons, First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia, bears many of the classic hallmarks of a Southern Baptist church.
On a recent Sunday, its pastor for women and children, Kim Eskridge, urged members to invite friends and neighbors to an upcoming vacation Bible school — a perennial Baptist activity — to help “reach families in the community with the gospel.”
But because that pastor is a woman, First Baptist’s days in the Southern Baptist Convention may be numbered.
At the SBC’s annual meeting June 11-12 in Indianapolis, representatives will vote on whether to amend the denomination’s constitution to essentially ban churches with any women pastors — and not just in the top job. That measure received overwhelming approval in a preliminary vote last year.
They’ll probably succeed in kicking out Churches that are too liberal but all the Southern Baptist Convention will accomplish is accelerating their speed run into irrelevancy.
I do want to point out that this isn’t universal among the Southern Baptist Churches and many of them are fighting it. This is coming from the Southern Baptist Convention which is a sort of supra-Church steering body.
The Southern Baptist convention is the largest protestant denomination, they’re hardly irrelevant.
As they continue to boot what they see as overly liberal Churches it won’t be long and neither of those statements will be true.
The run towards irrelevancy is already in progress anyway.