My heart laments the SBC’s decision on women serving in pastoral roles, as unsurprising as this decision is. It was 13 years ago, almost to the day, that my employment as a church planter was discontinued because the association leader of my former Baptist denomination gave me an ultimatum: be quiet and toe the party line on complementarianism or find yourself without funding. I said I would not stay silent about what God had convicted me about. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe this sensibility—the sacred liberty and responsibility of the soul and souls covenanting together where two or three are gathered to relate to God without external mediation or compulsion—lies at the heart of what it means to follow Christ in the Baptist tradition.

As I pleaded with that leader then, and what I hope to impress on fellow Baptists today: the travail of discerning truth in community is so much messier than what any denominational polity can secure, and more often than not, the use of denominational polity mechanisms to end a theological debate almost always is the wrong move.

Not that I am averse to doctrinal positions. If anything, having doctrinal positions is something of an occupational hazard of mine. Perhaps that is why I’d like to think I know better. At any rate, I happily recite the Apostles’ Creed and acknowledge the wisdom of the Great Tradition. However, I am always humbled at how minimal the convictions necessary for fellowship were for the early church: the confession that God is one, Christ is lord, come in the flesh, crucified for the forgiveness of sin, alive, risen, and coming again. While I for one see a theology systematically fleshed out to be virtuous, it is always within the caution that dogmas are to be held with open palms. Baptists in the Atlantic came together and formed a Basis of Union—a rather clumsy and dated document by today’s standards, for anyone foolish and obtuse enough to think it holds the place of a creed—and its intentions are probably more significant than its content: not out of need for strict doctrinal uniformity and enforcement (for neither existed), but out of a need to hold agreement on the Gospel despite deep differences. For them, it was between Calvinists and Free Will Baptists, which today is not our situation—again, for those so foolish as to think somehow that apostolic advice that “the letter killeth” only pertains to scriptural axioms and not the interpretation of scriptural axioms. If our predecessors held to a Christ-centred unity on matters of no small importance, such as whether salvation is eternally secure, surely we can do the same on other matters.

That experience of leaving my denominational home has formed my convictions on the meaning of doctrine ever since. I believe a doctrine that needs enforcement is usually a doctrine held inauthentically and unthoughtfully. When doctrinal statements stop being tools for conversation and become instruments of adherence, the question shifts from “Do I believe this sincerely to be true?” to, more subtly, “Do I go along with this because I am told this is the right answer?” or “Do I agree to this so that I can belong or have a job?” When this happens, the sacred process of sifting the conscience is short-circuited in the name of brute loyalty.

It is so easy to finger-wave at the SBC and its denial of women’s equality, but then support the same kind of exercise of power that creates the problem in the first place. Baptist polity is not majoritarian rule. Any situation where 75% can rule over the 25% is a potential catastrophe for the body of Christ. A body that can afford to neglect a quarter of itself is simply not healthy. Surely any mechanism that could be used to rule out such a portion speaks to the irony that Baptists, a tradition of religious dissenters, is so out of touch with itself that it is no longer capable of productively welcoming dissent. I believe in congregational polity as a faithful reflection of the practice of non-hierarchical communal discernment in scripture. Surely there are matters that should be decided as necessary to the ongoing association and partnership of the church, for which there is space to decide and potentially not get your way. But it would be a fatal error to believe that a majority vote is consensus, much less to confuse a successful vote with the kind of spiritual discernment in community the New Testament calls disciples to.

Every doctrinal decision implies a decision on the nature of the church and the nature of the Gospel. It is obvious that the SBC is a body that sees male power and uniform submission to that power at the heart of what Christianity is, so much so that it is willing to scapegoat and suppress victims of abuse. It is sad that folks can’t see that for what it is, yet I know plenty of complementarians who hold their views out of sincere conviction in scripture, as I did at one point. Every time a complementarian says something that to me now seems so utterly sexist, I usually have to stop and ask, “Am I angry with this person because they remind me so much of who I used to be?”

The question I continually ask myself as I lament the brokenness of God’s household is, “What would denominational politics look like if they actually treated the members of God’s family as family?” Good families are neither collectivist nor individualist, neither tyrannical nor anarchy, allowing a person to be themselves while also being who they are together. The church should be one of those few spaces left where diversity is not treated ipso facto as dangerous, where fellowship is not dispensed on the condition of agreement. This is not to say that the denominations cannot make decisions on important issues, but the perennial tendency is to use these powers to say, “I no longer need or want to deal with you.” Yet, family contends for family, and that difficult travail of fallibility and deliberation cuts both ways in spaces that welcome anyone to be there as long as they commit to being family, seeking to understand more fully what this means, pledging to see another as deserving the same understanding, respect, and liberty as they have.

If there is one thing that my stance on egalitarianism has convinced me of, it is this: Equality means equality for all, and the measure of this is always how we treat those least advantaged to us. I have so often seen folks tote what I can only call “convenient causes.” If equality is based on God’s dignity in people, we do not get to choose who is our equal, much less the form of equality that benefits us the most or what aspect or intersection that impacts equality as the only one that matters. Some would see this as complicity, but given the chance, as I often have, I would plead with any fellow Christian, hoping that they would see how their convictions are held at the expense of another, assuming they really do care about loving God and others as I do. Some have accused me of tolerating the intolerable: why affirm someone as family that refuses to see that fully in another? It is so easy to tighten the threshold of permissible diversity to chastise those that fail to grasp the inequality implicit in their own convictions or the wounds their views have caused the family, but the question is rather this: what is a way of convincing family in a way that honours them as family? In my experience, the only conscionable solution is also, in the long run, the only effective one: persistent acts of empathy, patience, gentleness, and generosity. 

Also, the only solution is the one that permitted the prophetic voice that first challenged the status quo without the status quo expelling it in the first place. Ecclesial spaces must be places where different views can be shared without the threat of exclusion or coercion, recognizing that sincere believers can often reach vastly different conclusions about the same text, and that difference is not necessarily an indication of ill will or ignorance. I often find that the folks most eager to use denominational power to secure a position are the ones with the flimsiest arguments and the least aware of other people’s views. As a person who was an ardent complementarian but came to hold an egalitarian perspective, the only thing that convinced me was deep wrestling with the details of the text in study and prayer and discussion with friends and teachers. I was welcomed into spaces where the condition of that space was to listen and understand another, as I would want to be listened to and understood. It is those kinds of spaces—risky and uncomfortable—that allow for the best voices to rise. While nothing would make me happier than seeing my denomination take a clear stance that all its churches and pastors support women in ministry, I just can’t bring myself to treat a complementarian pastor the same way the complementarian association leader treated me all those years ago. God’s Spirit is doing good things: patriarchy is declining in our denomination, despite it being so persistent in the SBC. I believe this is happening because our churches have done the work of listening, learning, and dialoguing. My hope is that it will fade, convinced by good arguments, won over by a theology that invites one to freely see the truths of life and Spirit, dying from being well-tolerated without any claim to persecution. It would be an ironic and sad error to attempt to end patriarchy by acting patriarchal.