After many years of viewing church newsletters and media releases, along with firsthand experiences, it has become obvious that congregations with current or former ties to the Southern Baptist Convention are increasingly calling or calling out women for leadership roles once held exclusively by men.

Names like Rebecca, Lisa and Susan are listed among the newly elected and ordained deacons even in conservative small-town or rural congregations. More often female ministers — with confessed callings and superb training — are being recognized and ordained as fully adequate ministers who do not have to bear the title of “director” of something.

Some say the pace is too slow and the proportion too small. Others say it should never happen at all. A few are fighting it tooth-and-nail.

But the treasured Baptist principle of congregational autonomy means each and every church — alone — is responsible for choosing its leaders. Whom a congregation calls to positions of pastoral leadership is not the business of any ecclesiastical body or individual outside of the church’s membership.

That, of course, has not stopped the current fundamentalist leadership of the SBC from trying.

With its narrow revision of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the SBC charged into the sacred decision making of churches by declaring that the role of pastor is restricted to men. Interestingly, and a clear sign of the slow but sure movement toward including women in church leadership, the handpicked committee of loyal SBC fundamentalists did not mention deacons or ordination — issues earlier considered out of bounds.

Defense of their codified position that “men only” are to hold authority in the church and home is being ramped up in the face of weakening acceptance even among many conservatives.

The official SBC doctrinal study for 2008 — written by three men who helped draft the revised 2000 statement of faith — will teach the exclusion of women from pastoral roles along with other positions detailed in the BF&M.

One of those men, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is very vocal about this issue. His seminary campus houses the Center for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and courses on gender and family advocate a so-called “complementarian” position that claims to see women as equals, but defines their roles as complementing that of their husbands and other men in charge.

The issue of women as pastors is “a non-negotiable” according to Mohler, the leading candidate for the SBC presidency this year. Last June, he condemned the decision of the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., to call Julie Pennington-Russell as pastor.

The Decatur church is a vibrant congregation with ties to both the SBC and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF). Church leaders insist they were not out to make a statement, but rather through the pastoral search process were convincingly led to their new pastor who happened to be female.

Because it is not a liberal, smaller or alternative-type church, the good Baptists in Decatur might cause similar congregations to look wider in their future pastoral searches. That gives cause for concern for Mohler and other SBC leaders who overstate and overvalue their doctrinal position against women — and apparently distrust local congregational decision-making.

This fall the First Baptist Church of Madison, Ala., an exclusively Southern Baptist congregation, ordained longtime associate minister Mary Jo Gessner. When criticized by some fellow Baptists, David Tew, pastor of the conservative church, told The Huntsville Times: “First Baptist has been a middle-of-the-road congregation. But over the years, the road sort of shifted …”

Indeed the Southern Baptist road has taken a hard right in recent years and, for some strange reason, these manly SBC leaders have chosen to make gender restrictions a doctrinal position of ultimate importance. Now they are fortifying and defending their eroding doctrinal stance with study materials and seminary-based programs for women such as the new one for undergraduates at Southwestern Seminary.

Yet even SBC leaders, who claim the Bible is crystal clear on this matter, are inconsistent in its application. Following the Decatur church’s decision last June, Mohler wrote in his blog: “The Bible clearly calls for male leadership in the church — and particularly in the pulpit.”

However, the SBC North American Mission Board applies the restrictions to chaplains and Southwestern President Paige Patterson fired a conservative and competent Hebrew professor because of her gender. And we are to believe the Bible is so clear on this matter to the point that we would violate the long-held principle of congregational autonomy?

When, like racial equality, the issue of gender runs its course and fundamentalism catches up, there will be no way to reframe their position. It is unnecessarily codified in a doctrinal statement and bolstered by multiple defenses.

However, there is a slow but sure change coming. And it is something a narrow creed, charges of liberalism, intrusion into church autonomy, multiple manhood councils and Dorothy Patterson’s theological casserole-cooking classes cannot stop.

It is inevitable because — like the battle for racial equality — it is right.