Leaders of the National African American Fellowship of the Southern Baptist Convention gathered at Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina July 17–21 for the Black Church Leadership and Family Conference, where one topic of discussion was how recent SBC votes could affect women in ministry in Black churches.
The Rev. Gregory Perkins, the fellowship’s president, wrote to SBC President Bart Barber in early June, asking for more discussion on the topic. In a letter sent to Barber and posted on the NAAF website, Perkins pointed out that many of his organization’s churches “assign the title ‘pastor’ to women who oversee ministries of the church under the authority of a male Senior Pastor, i.e., Children’s Pastor, Worship Pastor, Discipleship Pastor, etc.”
In a video posted Wednesday (July 19) on the fellowship’s Facebook page, Perkins and Barber appeared with fellowship vice president Jerome Coleman, briefly discussing their meeting during the conference.
“We have spent the last day and a half in intensive conversation and dialogue,” Perkins said in the video. “Here is our single goal: to ensure that the SBC family remains unified. We are one family. We have all kinds of different aspects of our family but we’re one family.”
‘Helpful’ discussions
Barber noted in the video that he is not the “doctrinal czar” of the convention but strives to aid Baptists in fostering helpful discussions with each other on and off the convention floor.
“I think the meeting goes best when we’re talking to each other and working toward making good decisions in all the months leading up to the meeting,” he said. “And anything that I can do to help different folks within the Southern Baptist Convention come together and have reasonable, healthy dialogue to help us make God-honoring decisions, I’m down with that.”
Barber, who noted he was attending the conference of Black church leaders and visiting the North Carolina retreat center in Ridgecrest for the first time, also spoke to the conference attendees during their meeting.
Other actions
In Texas, the Baptist General Convention of Texas adopted a statement on Tuesday (July 18) urging its staff to continue to affirm women in “ministerial and leadership roles.”
The more progressive of Texas’ two state Baptist conventions, BGCT became the first state convention of Southern Baptists to weigh in on the issue since the annual meeting of the national Southern Baptist Convention in June, when two churches with women pastors, including California’s Saddleback Church, lost appeals to be reinstated and messengers took the first step toward amending the SBC constitution to state that only men can be pastors. A second vote to adopt the amendment is required at the 2024 meeting for the change to take effect.
Read the full article posted at Religion News Service here.
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