FBC Alexandria ‘no longer in friendly cooperation’ with SBC over views on female pastors


 By David Roach - Posted at Baptist Press:

INDIANAPOLIS (BP) – The SBC voted June 11 to discontinue its cooperative relationship with a Virginia church that has a female associate pastor. The church has ordained at least three women as pastors over more than four decades and told the SBC Credentials Committee it would consider a female as senior pastor.

Messengers voted to declare First Baptist Church in Alexandria, Va., not in friendly cooperation with the Convention by a ballot vote of 6,759 to 563 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. The vote came in response to a recommendation by the SBC Credentials Committee, which followed a motion by Wisconsin messenger Aaron Decker to unseat the church’s messengers “on the grounds of their public endorsement of egalitarianism,” a theological viewpoint that argues both men and women are biblically eligible to serve as pastors.

Credentials Committee chairman Jonathan Sams confirmed that the committee previously had asked First Baptist about their beliefs on women in ministry and received a reply contrary to the Baptist Faith and Message. He asked the SBC to “discontinue its cooperative relationship” with First Baptist and deem it “no longer in friendly cooperation with the Convention.”

The Baptist Faith and Message, Article VI, states, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”



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