I am a graduate of a Southern Baptist Seminary, but I am not a member of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). So my thoughts come from an outsider perspective, but an adjacent one.
The SBC has once again moved to canonize its position that women should not be called pastors and should not teach men in gathered church settings. While many within the SBC view this as a necessary defense of biblical faithfulness, I find myself drawn to a broader concern than the specific conclusion.
My concern here is not primarily about where one lands on women serving as pastors, though I do have a primary interest in that bigger question. My concern is what happens when a denomination takes a debated question and attempts to permanently settle it for future generations through constitutional force.
History suggests that rarely ends well. Trust me, I have been on the receiving end of canonized denominational dogma.
The reality is that theology is not static. The Scriptures do not change, but our understanding of them often does. Christians today understand many passages differently than believers did centuries ago. We have access to ancient documents, inscriptions, papyri, and linguistic discoveries that previous generations never possessed. Scholars continue to sharpen our understanding of Greek grammar, Hebrew idioms, ancient cultural practices, and the meaning of words within their original contexts.
In my own three decades of studying the Scriptures, I have watched discoveries in linguistics and the ancient world overturn interpretations that many Christians once considered permanently settled. Some understandings stood virtually unquestioned for centuries, only to be reconsidered when new evidence, better lexical data, or broader manuscript discoveries provided a clearer picture of how words and phrases were actually being used in the first century. What was once presented as certainty are now shown to hang there with a level of ambiguity. What was once considered obvious sometimes became more nuanced.
That does not mean the text changes. It means our understanding improves. The history of biblical scholarship is filled with examples of interpreters revisiting long-held conclusions in light of better information. Humility requires us to acknowledge that future generations may see things more clearly than we do, just as we sometimes see things more clearly than those who came before us. It is nothing less than hubris to believe that our generation, in one small nook of the historic and universal Church, stuck the landing for all time on a theological topic.
The church has always been learning.
This should not frighten us. It should humble us.
Every generation inherits the responsibility of wrestling honestly with the Scriptures. Every generation must ask whether long-held interpretations accurately reflect what the biblical authors intended to communicate.
But when a denomination effectively declares that future generations may not revisit a question, it risks forcing tomorrow’s church into yesterday’s debates. Instead of preserving unity, such actions often guarantee future division. The fact that the SBC has disaffiliated churches over this one issue while remaining aligned on virtually every other major theological conviction reveals just how elevated a traditionally secondary issue has become.
Yet, tragically, church history is full of examples.
And, the irony is that many of the people who now insist that the question is settled belong to traditions that were themselves born from challenging settled interpretations.
What especially concerns me is the way this conversation is often framed. Increasingly, the debate is presented as a choice between being conservative or liberal, faithful or progressive, biblical or compromised. It’s loaded as a clear and present danger, with dog-whistle nomenclature, before it’s openly and sincerely investigated.
However, many conservative scholars, pastors, and churches affirm the authority of the Scriptures, reject progressive theology, and still reach different conclusions regarding women serving in leadership roles, holding ecclesial titles, teaching in church services, and influencing the direction of the church alongside men. They do not see their position as a concession to culture. They see it as an attempt to faithfully interpret the relevant texts.
One may disagree with their conclusions. One may even strongly disagree. But to reduce the discussion to “conservative versus liberal” is to replace exegesis with tribalism.
What makes this framing especially dangerous is that it creates a false measuring stick for future generations since the question quietly shifts from “What do the Scriptures teach?” to “What kind of church are you?”
Once that happens, the debate is no longer merely about interpretation. It becomes about identity. And yes, identity politics is as much, if not more, a feature of evangelicalism as any left-wing social group.
Tragically, then, if a church appoints a woman as a pastor or elder, many will no longer ask how that church arrived at its conclusion. They will simply assume the church has become compromised. The label arrives before curiosity or conversation ever begins.
But reality is even far more complicated than that.
One may disagree with those conclusions. But it is simply inaccurate to suggest that every church with women pastors or elders has abandoned a conservative hermeneutic. Many churches arrive at different conclusions while still approaching Scripture with a high view of its authority and a serious commitment to careful exegesis.1
When the labels “liberal” vs. “conservative” become the framework (did you know those words are not in the Scriptures as virtues or vices), the issue becomes a case of the tail wagging the dog.
Instead of allowing the Scriptures to drive the discussion, we let political and tribal categories determine which conclusions are permissible before the study even begins. The category becomes the argument.
The result is a dismissive “or” where there may actually be room for an “and.”
Conservative and open to women serving in leadership.
Committed to the authority of the Scriptures and persuaded by a different interpretation of several contested passages.
Whether one agrees with those positions is not the point. The point is that these combinations exist. Once we deny that reality, we stop evaluating interpretations on their biblical merits and start evaluating them according to which tribe they appear to strengthen or threaten.
That is not theological discernment. It is boundary maintenance.
And history suggests that whenever tribal identity takes precedence over careful interpretation, the church inevitably pays a price.
The moment a position is declared invalid simply because it falls on the wrong side of a doctrinal, political, or cultural binary, the discussion has ceased to be primarily about the Scriptures.
Ironically, this is its own form of undermining the very Scriptures groups claim to protect. Whereas liberalism tends to extract texts from the Scriptures, legalism tends to inject more than is there. Yet, legalism is not merely adding rules. It is also the tendency to create boundaries that prevent faithful believers from honestly wrestling with the text. It occurs whenever institutional certainty begins to outrun biblical debate.
The issue becomes even more complicated when we remember how rarely the word “pastor ” actually appears in the New Testament. The term is surprisingly rare. The vast majority of leadership discussions focus on elders, overseers, shepherds, teachers, apostles, prophets, and deacons.
Yet modern church structures often import assumptions about the pastoral office that would have been foreign to the first century. To make the title pastor the defining line of orthodoxy seems particularly precarious when the New Testament itself places so little emphasis on the title.
This is one reason I worry that the SBC’s decision reflects something larger than careful interpretation. It may also reflect the cultural moment. Dog, meet your already wagging tail.
We are living through an era shaped by reactions against wokeness, identity politics, and broader cultural shifts regarding gender. Some of those reactions are understandable. Some are even necessary.
But every generation has blind spots.
Every generation is tempted to mistake its cultural battles for biblical battles.
The church should always ask whether it is defending the Scriptures or simply baptizing the anxieties of its own age.
Future generations will inevitably revisit these questions. They always do. The question is not whether future generations will revisit this issue. The question is whether we will leave them room to do so. Will they inherit a framework that encourages careful study and humble dialogue, or one that forces them into another painful denominational fight?
At Redemption Church, we are currently investigating this question ourselves. We have not treated the matter as settled merely because others have. Nor have we assumed that newer conclusions are necessarily better than older ones.
When I drafted our founding documents fifteen years ago, I can guarantee that I was shaped by a host of factors. Some were reactive. We were coming out of a four-year challenge within an egalitarian denomination. Some were dogmatic. At the time, I was becoming decidedly more Calvinistic, due in no small part to my reaction against that same dastardly Arminian denomination. And some influences, in hindsight, have proven far less healthy than I recognized at the time. The cool cowboy Calvinism and complementarianism of the era—Acts 29, James MacDonald, Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll, and others—shaped my perspectives then, as they did for many evangelical leaders of my generation. Perspectives that we are all now critiquing.
The reality is that none of us interpret Scripture or formulate theology in a vacuum. We are all shaped, to varying degrees, by our experiences, our reactions, our cultural climate, and the zeitgeist of our age. That does not mean our conclusions are necessarily wrong. It simply means we should approach them with a measure of humility. And it is precisely why there should always be room to wrestle, revisit, and reexamine our assumptions in the light of Scripture.
So, like my sophomore algebra teacher always said, it’s time to check our work. And as I’ve done that, I’ve found things I said and wrote years ago that I no longer believe are as clear or in alignment with the Scriptures as I once thought.
Thus, we are attempting to listen carefully to the Scriptures, to church history, to the best scholarship available, and to one another.
Where that process ultimately leads remains to be seen.
But I am convinced of this:
The church is healthiest when it approaches difficult questions with humility rather than certainty, with curiosity rather than fear, and with confidence that truth has nothing to fear from honest investigation.
The Scriptures have survived every generation’s questions.
They do not need protection from careful study.
They need people willing to study them carefully.
The Everyday Missionary 