Liberal Church Leaves SBC Ahead Of Vote To Ban Female Pastors

First Baptist Church Richmond, Virginia is an OG Southern Baptist Church, a fact that they flex in pastor Jim Somerville’s goodbye article announcing that his church voted to leave the Southern Baptist Convention over the upcoming vote to amend the SBC constitution to state that churches with female pastors are not in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention.

In the Baptist News Global, Somerville wrote:

There were no cheers, no shouts of celebration, and if there were tears I didn’t see them. What I felt from the room was a mixture of quiet grief and gratitude, along with a sense that we had done the right thing. Because we affirm the cherished principle of congregational autonomy.

We believe every Baptist church has the right to determine its own mission and ministry and to ordain whomever it perceives to be gifted for ministry, whether male or female. The Southern Baptist Convention can’t tell us what to do, but it can tell us that it doesn’t want to have anything to do with churches like ours, and it has.

And on Sunday we accepted that.

Stories like this prove why the Mike Law Amendment is necessary. It sends a message that liberal churches are not welcome, and more of these churches are likely to virtue signal their way out than fight being disfellowshipped. From there, the composition of the messengers will shift in a more orthodox direction, where more necessary reforms can be made to save the Southern Baptist Convention.