LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville is appealing its ouster from the Southern Baptist Convention for having a female pastor on staff, according to the denomination.

The move to dismiss the church comes from the Executive Committee, the governing body for the denomination when it is not in its annual meeting. The committee voted to oust several churches in February, including Saddleback Church, a prominent Southern California megachurch, for having women pastors on staff.

Saddleback’s decision to ordain women in the church in 2021 sent shockwaves through the SBC, reigniting a decades-old battle over the role of women in the church. The SBC’s statement of faith, “The Baptist Faith and Message,” says that men should be in authority in families and churches. “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” the statement says.

The SBC claims it is not a hierarchy, and can’t tell a member congregation what to do, but it can deem a church to be “not in friendly cooperation with the Convention,” the verbal formulation for ouster.

Under SBC bylaws, churches can appeal a dismissal by the Executive Committee to the full SBC annual meeting. May 15 was the deadline for filing appeals.

Fern Creek Baptist Church sent a formal notice to the SBC that it would appeal the decision to oust the congregation. The Rev. Linda Barnes Popham has served as Fern Creek’s pastor since 1993.

“We obviously interpret scripture referring to women in ministry differently than some others in Baptist life,” the church said in an earlier response to the SBC’s Credentials Committee, which reviews churches’ qualifications and can recommend their dismissal to the Executive Committee. “We are happy to meet with you to further discuss how we feel Jesus has led us to this interpretation.”

Fern Creek said the question of women in ministry should be a “second or third-tier issue” on which Baptists can disagree.

Saddleback, with multiple campuses across Southern California, had 54,000 members as of 2021, according to its annual membership report to the SBC. It averaged attendance of 28,000 people.

The church was founded in 1980 by best-selling author Rick Warren, whose “Purpose Driven Life” books captured a generation of churchgoers.

The standoff with the SBC began in 2021 when Saddleback announced it was ordaining three women as pastors. After founding pastor Warren retired in 2022, he was succeeded as lead pastor by Andy Wood, whose wife, Stacie Wood, then assumed a role as teaching pastor.

And earlier in May, Saddleback announced that Katie Edwards, one of the three women ordained in 2021, would assume the role of pastor of its flagship Lake Forest campus.

In justifying the expulsion, the Executive Committee said Saddleback “has a faith and practice that does not closely identify with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith, as demonstrated by the church having a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor.”

Saddleback did not issue a statement on the appeal this week.

But in a video statement released in March after the Executive Committee vote, Andy Wood said that the church’s leaders do interpret the Bible to say that men should be in authority over a church — but that they can authorize women to be pastors. All of the elders at Saddleback are men, he said.

“A man who is an elder can empower women and mobilize women to use their spiritual gifts in the local church,” he said, saying there are examples of this occurring in the Bible.

The appeal extends the standoff between the nation’s second largest Christian denomination and one of its largest, most successful churches.

Appeals will now go to the annual meeting this summer. Member churches of the denomination send representatives, called “Messengers” who each get a vote on matters before the convention.

Other churches that were ousted in February, and which are not appealing, said they would continue to operate with women as pastors.

They include Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi; New Faith Mission Ministry in Griffin, Georgia; and St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist Church in Baltimore.

Also appealing its dismissal is Freedom Church in Vero Beach, Florida. The church was dismissed by the Executive Committee “based on a lack of intent to cooperate in resolving concerns regarding a sexual abuse allegation.” The denomination has been roiled by allegations in recent years of sexual abusers remaining in ministry, prompting the convention to vote for stricter policies.

Women as pastors became a focal point of a theological and political schism that upended the SBC in the 1970s and 1980s. On one side of the contentious episode was a group of conservative Baptist leaders and churches who believed women could not be ordained to ministry or hold the office of pastor. On the other side, a group of moderate to liberal Baptist leaders and churches believed ordination that decisions were up to individual churches.

The struggle reached a fever pitch in 1989, with the conservative group gaining control of the denomination. Much of the moderate to liberal faction left to form two other Baptist groups, the Alliance of Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

In 2000, the convention officially adopted revised language in its Baptist Faith and Message, limiting the role of pastor to men only. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.