Release your women, Southern Baptists

Christian Church president Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins will in a week be the first woman to give the sermon at the National Day of Prayer service capping the inauguration of the first black president in U.S. history.

Thus Pastor Wade Burleson’s timing was exactly right when in his blog this week he hinted at the value of a change in the Southern Baptist Convention’s view of women in the pulpit.

Officially, they despise the idea, and the SBC’s drive to subjugate women is costing the huge but shrinking denomination in lost churches and member anger.

With introductory hints, Burleson merely reprinted a blog post by Mimi Haddad which appeared at Sojourners.

Haddad recounts how a South Korean megachurch grew to 830,000 members by giving “gifted women teachers” places of leadership. The church’s pastor is quoted as responding to the “small size” of churches in another country he visited:

I told them to release their women, but they insist that’s not the problem. They ask me, “What’s the key to your church?” I tell them again, “release your women … . “

The reform-minded Oklahoma pastor does not directly challenge SBC policy but is certainly aware of addressing himself to a church which is foundering on growth problems when he writes:

I have two questions: What fault, if any, do you find in Mimi’s biblical reasoning? Has Beth Moore been released within the Southern Baptist Convention?

Might Southern Baptists reasonably ask, without being cursed as apostate, if their fundamentalist leaders were misguided when they generated the self-crippling theologies which bar women from their pulpits?