Kentucky church among churches ousted by Southern Baptist Convention for having woman pastor
At meeting in Nashville, SBC Executive Committee approves ouster of four churches for abuse-related reports and one church in which a woman serves as a senior minister.
Nashville Tennessean
The Southern Baptist Convention has ousted churches for having a woman pastor and over abuse-related reports, solidifying a trend in the recent reasons churches involuntary exit from the denomination.
The churches — Immanuel Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky; Grove Road Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina; West Hendersonville Baptist Church in Hendersonville, North Carolina; and New Hope Baptist Church in Gastonia, North Carolina — are the newest addition to 14 other churches the Nashville-based denomination disfellowshipped since the reformulation of an SBC group to review reports against churches.
Recommendations from that SBC group, called the SBC Credentials Committee, have now led to the ouster of six churches for abuse-related reports and six churches in which a woman is a senior or lead pastor. The figures point to the increasing influence of a debate over the status of women pastors in the SBC versus the denomination's response to clergy abuse, an issue that largely fueled the credentials committee’s reform five years ago.