Everybody Wants to Rule Their Churches

By John Roy

It’s the year of our Lord, 2026

The timeless impulse is to control. From wars to families, the desire to control appears nearly universal. A person develops a vision, and rarely is it confined to their own life — it extends to others as well. Self-mastery is not enough; the project becomes shaping those around them. While scripture promotes “self-control” most people read scripture with someone other than themselves in mind. They use scripture to control---you!

Yet the tragedy of power is that those who seek to control things often discover they cannot. The project is too large, or the opposition too strong. So, they revise the strategy: shrinking the world. They narrow who belongs, who speaks, who leads, and who matters. If they cannot rule the whole world, they will make the world small enough to manage — or at the very least silence the voices that might compete with their own.

This dynamic appeared recently in the 2026 Southern Baptist Convention's decision to continue excluding churches that allow women to serve as pastors. It is worth noting the scale: there are over 40,000 Southern Baptist churches, and it is likely that fewer than one percent employ women in any pastoral role, with female lead pastors representing only a handful. The policy, in practice, addresses a situation that is already quite rare.

Defenders of the policy argue that it reflects biblical faithfulness. Critics, however, see something additional at work: an attempt to preserve institutional authority by limiting who can exercise it. These two things — theological conviction and the exercise of power — are not always easy to separate.

There is also a deep irony worth naming. It was women — Mary Magdalene and the other women at the tomb — who were the first to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus. In a culture where women's legal testimony was routinely dismissed, women were the first witnesses and heralds of the central announcement of the Christian faith. If women were entrusted to carry that news, the question is worth asking: what changed?

The Southern Baptist Convention is no stranger to opposing things that scare them. Its origins are inseparable from the defense of slavery. The denomination was founded in 1845 following a split over whether slaveholders could serve as missionaries. Later, many Southern Baptist leaders defended racial segregation and were slow to embrace the Civil Rights Movement. At the time those were wrong decisions and unfaithful to the Gospel preached by Jesus. Now the SBC itself recognizes these positions — as unfaithful to the very scripture they sought to uphold.

In 1995, the Convention passed a historic confessional resolution acknowledging its defense of slavery, its protection of systemic racism, and its support for white supremacy. It was a remarkable act of institutional self-examination. Critics will rightly note that it came late, and that criticism is not unfounded. But it also demonstrates something important: given time and changed circumstances, it is possible to hear scripture more clearly. What once seemed like faithful tradition was gradually recognized as the defense of social arrangements that had little to do with the gospel. I pray a similar clarity will emerge for Southern Baptist regarding the roles of women. I sure hope it doesn’t take a 100 years.

This pattern is not limited to one denomination or religion. Across history, institutions — religious, civic, and political — have tended to respond to social change by drawing tighter boundaries rather than expanding participation. The instinct is understandable, even if the results are often damaging. Control feels like stability. Exclusion feels like order. But the appearance of order and genuine strength are not the same thing.

Around the world, governments suppress journalists, imprison dissidents, and silence opposition. Authoritarian leaders frequently frame diversity of thought as a threat to unity. The methods vary — sometimes the control is physical, through force and persecution; sometimes it is structural, through exclusion from leadership or the quiet denial of opportunity. But the underlying logic is consistent: limiting who can speak is a way of limiting who can challenge.

The irony is that such efforts tend to diminish the institutions that practice them. Communities flourish when they draw upon the full range of gifts within them. Excluding women from leadership does not make a church stronger; it narrows what the church has to offer and to draw from. Silencing dissent does not make a nation more resilient; it allows problems to go unaddressed until they become crises. What looks like protection is often, in the long run, a form of self-impoverishment.

The deeper lesson of history is that shrinking the world is far easier than leading it well. Inclusion is difficult. Shared power requires trust. Listening to voices that challenge our assumptions takes humility and patience. Exclusion, by contrast, offers the comfort of certainty — a smaller world, populated only by those who think and speak in familiar ways. Such worlds are easier to manage. They are also, almost without exception, poorer and less just.

The temptation to dominate is not unique to the powerful — it lives in most of us in one form or another. But the measure of a society, a church, or a leader is not how effectively they control others. It is how willing they are to share power, expand participation, and trust the larger community. Whenever exclusion becomes the primary tool — whether through theology or force — it tends to reveal the same underlying anxiety. The world feels unmanageable, and the solution is to make it smaller.

The New Testament offers a different approach--

Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. (Acts 10:34-35)

Sounds like God’s for inclusion.

²⁶ So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, ²⁷ for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus

Sounds like inclusion to me.

The better path, historically and humanly, has always been the harder one: opening the circle rather than tightening it.