At the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting, held in Dallas, a measure to permanently ban women from preaching and senior pastor roles failed. This year, with the convention in Orlando, a similar measure passed. Above, SBC President Clint Pressley bows his head in prayer during the final day of last year’s meeting at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, June 11, 2025.
Women swept the 1995 preaching awards at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky — one week after the seminary declared new faculty hires must agree that only men should serve as senior pastors. The winning preachers, chosen anonymously by an all-male panel of judges, were divinity students and the top two, Mary Beth McCloy and Kimberly Baker, preached their winning sermons to the assembled congregation of the seminary chapel.
Isn’t it ironic that McCloy and Baker preached from the same pulpit that seminary President R. Albert Mohler now uses to preach against female preachers and pastors?
On June 9, at the 2026 Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Orlando, Mohler presented his “Truth and Unity Amendment” that would limit preaching and pastoring to men once and for all in the Southern Baptist world. “A cooperating Southern Baptist church,” said Mohler from microphone 2 on the convention floor, should not “affirm, appoint or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.”
Article continues below this ad
Mohler appealed to 400 years of Baptist history (starting before the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention), arguing that his proposal to exclude women preaching and pastoring has always been the Baptist way.
Mohler is right. Throughout Baptist history male leaders have attempted to claim pastoral authority for themselves. The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, which Mohler cited, is an example of this, as is the 1984 SBC resolution that declared women unfit for pastoral leadership because of the sin of Eve and the 2000 SBC Baptist Faith and Message “different but equal” declaration that reserved the office of pastor for men.
But Mohler is wrong, too. Throughout Baptist history women have served as preachers and pastors, supported at local and national levels, even receiving ordination from Southern Baptist churches.
In 1993, the year Mohler became president of SBTS, James R. Lynch produced a 45-page document titled, “A Preliminary Checklist of Baptist Women in Ministry Through 1920.” Consulting annuals of state Baptist conventions since 1884, he verified women serving as pastors throughout the U.S., such as Mrs. Louisa Fenner who pastored East Putnam Free Will Baptist Church in Connecticut in 1884.
Article continues below this ad
Southern Baptists, who historically have been more hostile to women’s leadership, are not included in Lynch’s checklist. Yet their own archives show women preaching and pastoring long before Mohler was born, as confirmed by James T. Draper, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1982 to 1984. He wrote in a 1983 letter to a Mrs. Ray of Illinois that, “I personally do not believe it is scriptural for us to ordain women to the ministry or to the deaconship. However, there are Southern Baptist churches, on the east coast particularly, who have ordained women for over 100 years. While I personally disagree, each local congregation has a right to determine its own policy.”
Even evidence from my home of Waco testifies to the long history of women preaching in Baptist pulpits, including Willie Dawson, a pastor’s wife at First Baptist Church Waco, who preached internationally in the 1940s and 50s, and was nominated for the vice presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Mrs. Lewis Ball who preached in the 1930s at Elm Mott First Baptist Church and became known as a great “soul-winner.”
Far from being anomalous, the preaching example set by McCloy, who became a Baptist pastor in Virginia after graduating from SBTS, and Baker, who earned her PhD and became a seminary professor after her SBTS graduation, is an established aspect of Baptist (including Southern Baptist) history.
Mohler convinced this year’s Southern Baptist convention that banning women from preaching is a Baptist distinctive, as 75% of the convention messengers voted in support of his amendment.
But Mohler has only told a partial truth. Neither he, nor the Southern Baptist Convention, can escape the preaching women who will never stop haunting their past.
Article continues below this ad
Beth Allison Barr is the James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University, and New York Times bestselling author of “Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry.”
Have thoughts about this? Send a letter to the editor using our letters form or email letters@dallasnews.com. Letters should be no more than 200 words and include the first and last name of the writer and city of residence.