When you picture the person who first carried the news of the resurrection, who do you see?
Is it a woman?
Mary Magdalene ran from an empty tomb with the most important sermon in human history burning in her chest, and she preached it to the men who would later be called the apostles.
The first preacher of the risen Christ was a woman.
Yet here we are, two millennia later, and we’re only one month into a year in which Southern Baptist women get to imagine a future in their denomination where they are effectively silenced.
And if you think that impulse stops with women, you haven’t been paying attention.
From the empty tomb — to a church amendment?
The so-called “Truth and Unity Amendment” passed at the last Southern Baptist Convention, and therefore scheduled for ratification at the next, is neither truthful nor unifying. It bans churches that dare to call a woman pastor. It goes further still, forbidding women from “preaching to the assembled congregation” at all — effectively banning not just the title, and not just the office, but the voice itself.
Think about what that means. A woman cannot stand before God’s people and open the scriptures. She cannot share what the Spirit has placed on her heart. She can, however, teach children, sing in the choir, bring the casseroles, and clean the fellowship hall. But the moment she opens her mouth to declare the Word of God to grown adults, she’s out of bounds.
Is this the gospel of liberation that Jesus imagined? Or is it something older, smaller, and far more frightening?
Here’s what amendments like this really do: They don’t just draw a line around women. They establish a theology of exclusion. They send a message that some bodies, some identities, some callings are simply too inconvenient or odd for the institution to hold.
Once a denomination decides it has the authority to define who is acceptable before God based on gender, it has handed itself a template. And that template never stays narrow for long. LGBTQ+ people — already targets of Southern Baptist policy — know exactly where that template leads, because it has already been pointed at them for years.
Let’s not pretend this is abstract theology debated in carpeted boardrooms. This has real teeth.
The SBC expelled Saddleback Church — one of the largest congregations in America — because it ordained women. A church reaching thousands, feeding the hungry, and baptizing the seeking, was shown the door over a matter of gender. Not heresy. Not cruelty. Gender.
And the women who do serve in ministry? Advocacy groups tell us harassment against female ministers is already rising. Real women, with real callings, are being mocked, threatened and pushed out. This amendment does not float harmlessly in the air. It lands on people. It destroys them.
When the church votes to silence women, guess who’s next
Now consider that LGBTQ+ people — who have long been told their very existence is incompatible with Christian community — are watching this unfold in real time. Every expulsion of an affirming church, every constitutional tightening, every woman shamed for preaching, confirms what so many queer believers have quietly feared: that the institution has decided they don’t belong either.
The psychological and spiritual toll of that message is immeasurable. Research consistently shows that religious rejection is one of the single greatest risk factors for depression, self-harm, and suicidality among LGBTQ+ youth. This is not a culture war abstraction. It is a matter of life and death. They are killing people’s souls.
I keep wondering: What kind of fruit is this? Jesus told us we would know a tree by what it grows. When a doctrine produces fear, harassment and the silencing of the gifted — when it drives queer teenagers out of the only spiritual community they’ve ever known — what does that tell us about its roots?
Here’s the part that should keep every honest person of faith up at night: The case for women in ministry isn’t fringe. It’s woven right through the pages they claim to defend.
Deborah judged a nation. Huldah the prophet interpreted God’s word for kings. Phoebe carried Paul’s letter to the Romans and was called a deacon. Junia was named among the apostles. Priscilla taught Apollos, a gifted preacher, and made him better. And Paul — yes, that Paul — wrote that in Christ there is no male and female, for we are all one.
The Spirit poured out at Pentecost fell on sons and daughters alike. Joel prophesied it. Peter quoted it. “Your daughters shall prophesy.” That’s not a loophole. That’s the plan.
So when someone tells you the Bible compel’s women’s silence, ask them why it keeps handing women the microphone.
And then ask this: If the same interpretive tradition that silences women also drive the Southern Baptist church’s hostility toward LGBTQ+ people, shouldn’t we interrogate both with equal honesty?
The same rigid, fear-driven reading of Scripture that refuses to see Deborah or Junia is the same one that refuses to see the full humanity of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer image-bearers. The hermeneutic that excludes women rarely stops there. It tends to keep building walls.
Picture the Body of Christ as Paul described it — many parts, each one needed. Now imagine cutting off half of it and calling that obedience.
When we silence women, we don’t just wound them. We rob the whole church. We lose the sermons we’ll never hear. We lose the wisdom of women who have wrestled with God and come away limping and blessed. We lose daughters who grow up believing their calling is a mistake. We teach little girls that the Spirit speaks through everyone in the room except them.
And when we push LGBTQ+ people out of the congregation — or make them feel so unwelcome they leave on their own — we lose just as much.
We lose their testimonies, their gifts, their perspectives on grace and struggle and survival. We lose the bisexual worship leader who has carried her community through its darkest seasons.
We lose the transgender man whose journey through death and resurrection is the most visceral lived theology in the pew. We lose the gay couple whose decades of faithfulness to each other and to God could teach the whole church something about covenant love.
That is not protection. That is theft. And it is spiritually dangerous, because it asks us to trust a tradition over the clear movement of the Spirit who calls whom God calls — regardless of gender, regardless of sexuality, regardless of what makes the institution uncomfortable.
If the Bible hands women the microphone, why is the SBC taking it away?
Here is what many people miss when they focus only on the women’s ordination debate: The so-called “Truth and Unity Amendment” is not an isolated policy. It is a signal. It tells every LGBTQ+ person in or near the Southern Baptist church exactly where they stand.
The SBC has already voted to condemn same-sex marriage, already aligned with political movements targeting transgender people, and already made its position on queer identity explicitly unwelcoming. This amendment tightens the same ideological framework. It says: We define the boundaries of belonging, and we enforce them constitutionally.
The logic that expels a church for having a woman preach is the same logic that would expel a church for welcoming a gay couple to the communion table. These are not separate battles. They are the same battle, fought on adjacent ground. Homophobia is a weapon of sexism.
The Southern Baptist church: A place of danger, not refuge
For LGBTQ+ Christians — especially youth who are still finding their faith and their identity at the same time — every headline about Southern Baptist enforcement is another message that the church is a place of danger, not refuge. That is a theological catastrophe. The church is supposed to be the one place where every wounded, wandering soul could come home. This amendment slams the door and calls it doctrine.
I refuse to believe that God’s kingdom got smaller this year. I refuse to believe that the God who raised the dead is suddenly worried about who’s holding the pulpit — or who’s sitting in the pew holding hands with someone of the same gender.
The Southern Baptist amendment is ridiculous because it answers a question Jesus already settled. It is offensive because it treats half of God’s image-bearers as a liability. It is dangerous — profoundly, measurably dangerous — because it muffles the Spirit and sends vulnerable LGBTQ+ people the message that God’s house has no room for them. And it is a theological disaster because it builds a fence where Christ tore down a wall.
So let this be our clarion call— not a polite suggestion, not a carefully worded request — but a declaration. The Spirit of God does not ask for institutional approval before calling someone to preach. The image of God does not come in approved genders only. The table of Christ has no velvet rope, no doctrinal bouncer, no constitutional amendment deciding who is worthy to taste the bread and cup.
To every woman whose calling has been dismissed as confusion: You heard right. Preach.
To every LGBTQ+ believer who has been handed a list of conditions for your own belonging: You were never the problem. Come home.
And to every institution that has confused its own fear with the voice of God — that has dressed up exclusion in the language of faithfulness and called that smaller kingdom holy — history is watching. And so is the God whose first resurrection sermon was preached by a woman, whose Spirit falls on all flesh, and whose love has never once required a constitutional majority to be true.
The tomb was empty. The first preacher was a woman. The Spirit fell on all flesh — not some flesh, not approved flesh, not flesh that passed a constitutional vote. All flesh. That was always the promise. That has always been the plan. And no amendment, no expulsion, no fear dressed up as faithfulness can undo what God already declared on the morning death lost.
The church doesn’t get to vote on what God already declared. The microphone was never theirs to take.
Editor-in-Chief of Whosoever and Founding and Senior Pastor of Gentle Spirit Christian Church of Atlanta, Rev. Paul M. Turner (he/him) grew up in suburban Chicago and was ordained by the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in 1989. He and his husband Bill have lived in metro Atlanta since 1994, have been in a committed partnership since the early 1980s and have been legally married since 2015.