06/16/2026
This post by Chris Tomlinson is SPOT ON! 🗣️🔥🗣️🔥👇
This week the Southern Baptist Convention voted to tighten its ban on women serving as pastors. I've read the arguments and I understand the passages they lean on, but every time this conversation comes back around, I find myself thinking about the women God never banned. Because when you actually walk through Scripture, you don't find God
hesitating to use women. You find Him doing it over and over again, in some of the most important moments in the whole story.
When God needed someone to lead Israel, He raised up Deborah, and not as a backup plan. Judges 4 says she was already judging Israel when the story opens.
When King Josiah found the lost Book of the Law and needed a prophet to interpret it, Jeremiah was alive and Zephaniah was alive, and the priests still went to Huldah.
When Apollos, a gifted and powerful preacher, had incomplete theology, Acts 18 says Priscilla and her husband took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately. A woman taught a preacher how to preach, and the Holy Spirit put her name first when He recorded it.
It keeps going in the New Testament. When Paul sent the most important theological document ever written, the book of Romans, he placed it in the hands of a woman named Phoebe, and he calls her a diakonos, the same Greek word he uses for his own ministry.
In that same chapter he greets Junia, who he says was outstanding among the apostles and was in Christ before he was. These aren't footnotes. These are women doing real ministry in the pages of Scripture, and the Bible never apologizes for any of it.
And then there's the empty tomb. When Jesus rose from the dead and the most important announcement in human history needed to be made for the very first time, He didn't appear to Peter. He appeared to Mary Magdalene and told her to go and tell. The first lips to ever proclaim that He is risen belonged to a woman, and Jesus picked her on
purpose.
A few weeks later Peter stood up at Pentecost and declared that this was what Joel had promised all along, that your sons and your daughters will prophesy. That wasn't a slip of the tongue. That was the birth announcement of the Church.
So to every woman called by God who woke up this week wondering if there's still room for her voice, hear me on this. A denomination can take a vote, but it cannot take your calling, because committees don't commission you. Jesus does. Keep preaching. Heaven has never once been confused about whether God uses women. He always has, and He's not going to stop now.
