Southern Baptists finalized the expulsion of two churches with female pastors on Wednesday, after a dramatic clash at their annual convention over moves by an ultraconservative wing on multiple fronts to reverse what it sees as a liberal drift.
The ousted congregations are the Saddleback Church in Southern California, one of the denomination’s largest, and the Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. They were expelled in February, but were given the opportunity to appeal the decision at the church’s annual meeting in New Orleans, which ends Wednesday.
Impassioned appeals by the two churches’ leaders were resoundingly rejected by the more than 10,000 delegates. The results, announced Wednesday, were not close. More than 90 percent of the delegates voted in favor of Fern Creek’s expulsion, and almost as many voted to confirm the removal of Saddleback, which was founded by the prominent preacher and author Rick Warren. Delegates also affirmed the expulsion of a church in Florida that the denomination said had failed to cooperate in a sexual abuse investigation.
The convention is scheduled to vote later Wednesday on a proposal to amend its constitution to more clearly and strictly ban women from leadership roles.
Rain pounded the convention hall’s metal roof in New Orleans on Tuesday, with some rain dripping through onto some delegates, as the leaders of the two expelled churches drew on oratory powers honed in the pulpit. Each had three minutes to make their appeals from the convention floor to be allowed to stay in the denomination, to which each church had belonged for decades.
Linda Barnes Popham, the pastor at Fern Creek, and the tiny group of supporters who traveled with her — including her husband, a church intern, and an 89-year-old congregant using a walker — prayed before Ms. Popham began speaking.
At the microphone, she related how she had dedicated her life to Jesus when she was 8. She spoke of being taught “to follow to the ends of the earth” whatever Jesus called her to do, and of how her church shares the gospel.
When Mr. Warren’s turn came, he noted that Billy Graham had once said his daughter, Anne, was “the best preacher” in the Graham family.
“No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology,” Mr. Warren said. “I am not asking you to agree with our church. I am asking you to act like Southern Baptists who have historically ‘agreed to disagree’ on dozens of doctrines in order to share a common mission.”
He noted that the denomination’s theological statement is 4,032 words long. “Saddleback disagrees with one word,” he said. “That’s 99.99999999 percent in agreement! Isn’t that close enough?”
The crowd shouted back at him, “No!”
He found Ms. Barnes Popham on his way out of the hall, and gave her a hug.
The vote was another stunning rebuke of Mr. Warren, one of the most prominent evangelical figures in the country, who built Saddleback into the denomination’s largest church. Mr. Warren prayed at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration and wrote best-selling books including “The Purpose Driven Life.”
After announcing his retirement in 2021, Mr. Warren named a husband and wife as his joint successors. The church ordained three women as ministers the same year; in May, the church announced that one of those women, Katie Edwards, would become campus pastor of the church’s flagship location in Lake Forest, Calif.
Some conservatives in the denomination saw it as a provocation, done in open defiance of the Southern Baptist Convention’s statement of beliefs, which says, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Though most Southern Baptists believe in that principle, they were content for many years to allow individual Baptist churches to make their own leadership decisions. In recent years, though, a more conservative faction rising within the denomination has been unwilling to look the other way, and has pressed to enforce the standard more uniformly. They see the acceptance of female pastors as the first step in a denomination’s slide toward liberalism on matters including theology and sexuality.
Some of the conservatives saw the issue as an opportunity to press for ideological purity in a denomination that has long been a bellwether for American evangelicalism writ large.
Mike Law, a Virginia pastor, proposed amending the S.B.C. constitution to further restrict women’s roles, by stating that a church can be Southern Baptist only if it “does not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.” A website that has been promoting his proposal in the months leading up to the meeting in Louisiana warned that “this issue has been a canary in the coal mine for many denominations.”
Mr. Law compiled a list of more than 170 women who are pastors in Southern Baptist churches, including women serving in roles like “children’s pastor” and “women’s pastor.” His list, and another published last weekend, have circulated widely.
The notion that the office of pastor should be reserved for men has been enshrined in various Southern Baptist statements since the 1980s, and is not a topic of controversy in most of its churches. But Southern Baptists have also historically revered the principle of congregational autonomy, seeing their denomination as an association bound together by cooperation rather than by hierarchies and creeds.
The ousted churches will continue to function as churches, but lose their association with the denomination and the ability to participate in its programs, including its robust missionary and disaster relief programs. Like many larger Southern Baptist churches, Saddleback does not include the word “Baptist” in its name, and for most of its history it has not emphasized the connection.
Three other churches that were expelled in February for having female pastors chose not to appeal the decision. Minnie R. McGee Washington, the pastor of one of them ‚ St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist Church in Baltimore — said that she called on anyone who is a member of “such a judgmental convention” to remember the leadership of women in the Bible, including prophets Deborah and Huldah in the Old Testament, and Priscilla and the four daughters of Philip in the New Testament, and for members to “remember that their first preacher/teacher was their mother.”
In the line for Starbucks at a hotel near the convention hall on Wednesday morning, a group of young female delegates hurried to get coffee in time to be in the convention hall to hear the vote results. Kristan Pounders, 30, from Big Level Baptist Church in Wiggins, Miss., said she thought the pastors appealing the expulsions had well-presented arguments, but they were not in agreement with what Southern Baptists believe. Her church does not have women in pastoral roles, including youth ministry, she said.
“We are not telling that church what to do, but we can no longer be in fellowship,” she said, adding that she supports a decision to remove the churches.
As Ms. Barnes Popham waited to hear the results of the vote, a young pastor came to give her a hug. Benjamin Bauer, who leads First Baptist Church in Brighton, Mich., wanted her to know that “the way she interprets theology has nothing to do with the way that Christ has called us to love her as our neighbor.”
But he voted to keep her church out. He believed she interpreted the Bible incorrectly, and that churches that allow women pastors eventually “allow the marriage of homosexuals to and then even allowing homosexuals to serve as pastors,” he said.
Critics of the aggressive approach to expelling churches warned that the more significant implications would be felt by the denomination itself.
“One of my biggest concerns here is that we will alienate women, who will be less inclined to serve because we have turned them into a battleground,” J.D. Greear, a pastor in North Carolina and a former president of the denomination, wrote in a blog post last week questioning the proposed change to the constitution.
When the appeals were over on Tuesday, a woman from Texas pushed through the crowd to find Ms. Barnes Popham. The woman had brought her daughter, 14, who was weeping. Her daughter wanted to be a pastor one day, she said, and wanted to meet Ms. Barnes Popham, who she said gave her hope for the future.
“It is not a sin to be a woman,” said the girl, Lottie Baird. “Why can’t we be shepherds to lead the flock of God’s people?”