Note: This article has been researched and written with the help of AI.

The SBC Backdrop: Mohler's Truth and Unity Amendment

The Southern Baptist Convention has been fighting this battle for several years, and it is coming to a head in Orlando this June.

At the centre of the controversy is Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler's proposed constitutional change, widely known as the "Truth and Unity Amendment," which would bar any cooperating SBC church from affirming, appointing, or endorsing a woman serving in the office or function of pastor, elder, or overseer, including preaching. The proposed motion calls on SBC messengers to add an enumerated sixth item under Article 3, Paragraph 1 of the SBC constitution, stating that a cooperating church "does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation."

The proposal is not coming out of nowhere. A similar proposal — the Law Amendment — passed by majority vote in both 2023 and 2024 but failed to reach the required two-thirds threshold. Last year's attempt received just over 60 percent, short of the supermajority needed. Mohler has also announced his intention to suspend Standing Rule 6, which normally requires constitutional amendments to be referred to the Executive Committee for a year before debate, meaning that if messengers agree, the amendment could be debated and voted on immediately.

Mohler frames the stakes plainly. He says "the need for this is made abundantly clear," adding that the SBC "has always risen to the occasion and met the need of this kind of challenge with a statement of conviction." He has compared this moment to the SBC's earlier stand on LGBTQ issues, arguing that a clear constitutional statement would settle the matter rather than relitigate it at every annual meeting.

This is the context in which N.T. Wright's recurring comments on women in ministry have gained fresh attention.

What N.T. Wright Has Been Saying

Wright has held this position for decades, laying out his full argument in a 2004 paper, "Women's Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis," and returning to it regularly since. As recently as March 2026, he appeared on the Ask NT Wright Anything podcast with Mike Bird, addressing whether Christians can remain in a church that disagrees about women in leadership. In a Premier Christianity column from the same month, Wright argued that Paul's first instinct in his letters is not to divide but to work patiently towards unity, and that Ephesians 4:3 calls believers to be "eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

His exegetical case rests on two main passages. First, Romans 16. Wright calls Romans 16 "explosive" — Paul greeting women who are church leaders in their own right, including Junia, whom Wright reads as a female apostle who had seen the risen Jesus and was thereby commissioned as an authorised representative. He dismisses attempts to render the name as "Junius" (male), saying "the scholarship is quite clear."

Second, John 20, where Mary Magdalene is the first to witness and proclaim the resurrection. Wright treats this as an apostolic commissioning of a woman by Christ himself.

From these two passages, Wright draws a sweeping conclusion. He argues that many American churches that deny women opportunities to lead do so from a "highly selective reading of Scripture" that misses the bigger context. In one interview he said that in Britain the question "would elicit a yawn — we settled this one years ago," and closed with: "Get used to it, guys."

Wright acknowledges the difficult passages — 1 Timothy 2 in particular — but argues that the Greek vocabulary there is too obscure and contested to carry the weight complementarians place on it, and that the clearer narrative of Romans 16 and John 20 should govern how we read the harder texts.

The Complementarian Response

Wright is a formidable scholar. His confidence is appealing. But conservative evangelical scholars have found his argument to be seriously wanting at the very points where it counts most.

Burk: Wright Never Shows Up to the Actual Debate

Denny Burk, President of CBMW and Professor at Boyce College, has engaged Wright most directly. His core charge is that Wright sidesteps the real question entirely.

The dispute between egalitarians and complementarians has never been about whether women can share the gospel with men. It is about headship and teaching authority within the church — an issue Wright chooses to dodge rather than engage. Wright celebrates Mary Magdalene as a witness to the resurrection. Complementarians celebrate her too. That is not the disputed question. The question is whether the office of pastor-elder — which carries teaching and governing authority over the gathered congregation — is limited to qualified men. Wright's appeal to John 20 simply does not touch it.

On Romans 16 and Junia: Wright presents John 20 and Romans 16 as if they somehow close down all debate about women in ministry, as if Christians everywhere should just get in line with the British Anglicans and start ordaining women as pastors. But even granting his reading of Junia, the argument collapses once you look carefully at what "apostle" actually means.

What Acts 1 Actually Says About Apostles

This is where Wright's argument is at its weakest, and where the biblical text is at its clearest.

When Judas died, the eleven gathered to choose a replacement. Peter laid down the criteria with precision. The replacement had to have been with Jesus' followers from John's baptism through the ascension, and to have witnessed the resurrection. The candidate was required to have seen Jesus after his resurrection, and to have been appointed by the Lord Jesus himself. This was not a general description of anyone who had followed Jesus. The apostles who comprised the Twelve were an exclusive group according to the criteria denoted by Peter. Whereas a Christian might speak of an apostle as a missionary, church planter, or a leader among leaders, the apostles fulfilling the vacant position among the Twelve were a strictly defined category.

That matters enormously for Wright's argument. The New Testament uses the word "apostle" in more than one way. Paul calls Epaphroditus an "apostle" in Philippians 2:25 — but he clearly means "messenger" or "sent one," not a member of the Twelve. When Paul lists qualifications for the Twelve in Acts 1, personal presence with Jesus from his baptism to his ascension is required. Junia almost certainly did not meet that standard. She was not among the Twelve. She was not among the 120 in the upper room. She may well have been an "apostle" in the broader, looser sense of a commissioned messenger — which is honourable and significant — but to extrapolate from that to "therefore women may hold the office of pastor-elder in the local church" is a very long jump, and it is one Wright never adequately defends. It is, frankly, disingenuous to blur the distinction between these two uses of the word in order to win a debate about church office.

Schreiner and the Creation Order Argument

Thomas Schreiner, Professor of New Testament at Southern Seminary and co-editor of Women in the Church, makes the more foundational exegetical case.

Schreiner's central point is that Paul, in rooting male-female roles in the creation order, is exhorting men and women to live in light of those roles in their churches. In 1 Timothy 2:12, Paul writes: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man." He immediately grounds this in Genesis: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve." This is not a cultural accommodation. Paul does not appeal to the situation in Ephesus. He reaches behind culture, behind the fall, all the way to creation. The argument from primogeniture — that Adam's being formed first carries covenantal and authoritative significance — is a theological claim about the created order, not a concession to ancient social norms.

Paul's words in 1 Timothy 2:12 address not just the title of pastor but the two functions that distinguish elders from deacons: teaching and exercising authority. Women are prohibited from doing the two activities that define the pastoral office. This is why the SBC's proposed amendment includes the phrase "office or function." A church cannot sidestep the issue by saying "she doesn't have the title pastor" when she does everything a pastor does.

As Schreiner himself puts it: "Our problem with the text is in the main not exegetical but practical. What Paul says here is contrary to the thinking of the modern world."

That last sentence is worth pausing on. The difficulty is not that the text is obscure. The difficulty is that the text is clear, and the modern world does not like it. Wright's move — treating 1 Timothy 2 as too murky to rely on, while treating Romans 16 as crystal clear — is precisely backwards. The normal rule of interpretation is to read ambiguous texts in the light of clear ones, not the reverse. 1 Timothy 2:12 is the passage where the issue of women serving as pastors is addressed more directly and explicitly than any other text in Scripture. It is the clear text. Romans 16, on the question of church office, is the one that requires inference and extrapolation.

A Pastoral Word

Some will read this debate and feel that what is really at stake is justice. They will say that keeping women from the pastorate is a matter of equity, fairness, or dignity — that the church has historically oppressed women, iced them out of leadership, and treated them as second-class believers. And because they feel this way, they will be drawn to Wright's argument, not primarily because of its exegesis, but because it offers a way to align the church with the moral instincts of the modern world.

That instinct needs to be named carefully, because it performs a sleight of hand. The implied accusation is that the complementarian church is one where women are marginalised, silenced, and diminished — and that only by embracing egalitarianism can the church treat women as fully human. This is a false picture, and a serious one. The complementarian conviction, held faithfully, is not a demotion of women. It is a conviction that God has ordered the church in a way that honours both men and women, assigns them distinct and weighty responsibilities, and calls them both into full flourishing — not in spite of their difference, but through it. Women teach, disciple, lead, serve, prophesy, pray, and shape the life of the church in ways that are irreplaceable. What they do not do, in the complementarian understanding, is hold the specific office of pastor-elder with its authority to teach and govern the congregation. That is not oppression. It is order.

The progressive instinct wants to frame the rejection of that order as a courageous act of inclusion — the church finally catching up with justice. But the church that abandons its biblical moorings on this question does not thereby become more just. It becomes more like the world. And a church that is more like the world has less to offer it.

We live in a moment of profound confusion about what men and women are — about the meaning of sex, the nature of gender, and where human dignity comes from. That confusion is not merely academic. It shapes how people understand their own bodies, their relationships, and their worth. In that world, the church that holds its biblical ground is not being repressive. It is being prophetic.

Clarity about God's design for men and women in the church is one of the places where the people of God get to say to a watching world: there is a better story, a truer account of who we are and why we matter, and it comes not from the shifting currents of culture but from the God who made us and knows us and loves us. A church that lives out that design — fully, vibrantly, without apology — does not diminish women. It bears witness to something the world desperately needs to see: that human worth is not earned by holding an office, that service and authority are not the only measures of significance, and that the ordered, differentiated love between men and women in the body of Christ can be a sign of the kingdom of God.

That is what is at stake. And that is worth defending.