Local reaction to SBC rule on women pastors

TYLER — The nation’s largest evangelical community, the Southern Baptist Convention, ended a two-year fight on Wednesday night rejecting a proposal that would ban women from becoming pastors in the church. Our news partners at KETK report that Lindale’s First Baptist Church Pastor Tom Buck said the 20 year doctrine is true to scripture, that women can lead ministry but not hold the pastoral office in any capacity.

“First Timothy 2:12 makes it clear that that women are not to teach or have authority over men in the church,” Buck said.

Buck said the topic to define roles in the church is not over and hopes the topic will be brought back up at next year’s convention in Dallas, starting the two-year process again.

However in Lufkin, the First Baptist Church has ordained women as ministers for years.
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“We’re just agreeing with what God’s already done. God has paid women and men and God gifts. Women and men with different spiritual gifts. And so God’s been calling women his ministers for a long time,” Lufkin’s First Baptist Church Pastor Mark Newton said.

Newton said over the decades the convention left them while the church remained the same. Now, the First Baptist Church in Lufkin is no longer associated with the SBC.

“Leaders began moving the SBC to the far, far right fundamentalist mentality,” Newton said.

Newton is now aligned with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.