“Do’s and Don’ts of Church Reform”: Things to avoid in “leading change” include: “Don’t try to change everything in the first year. Or five years,” “Don’t pursue major changes until you’ve cleaned up the church’s membership rolls (so that membership reflects actual attendance and participation)” and “Don’t change something that costs a lot of pastoral capital before you’ve built up that capital.”

A North Carolina pastor shares his decade-old story of getting rid of women deacons and instituting elder rule at his Southern Baptist congregation in an on-line journal issue devoted to “revitalize” and “reform” of declining churches.

The lead article of the November-December eJournal of 9Marks Ministries begins with Andrew Davis’ recollection of the Sunday morning of Aug. 19, 2001, when he called on members of First Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., to “repent” for electing their first-ever woman deacon. [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

Davis said that while finishing up his Ph.D. at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and preparing to assume the role of senior pastor at First Baptist Church in 1998, “I knew there was a significant flaw in the polity of the church that I would have to address: the issue of gender and authority.”

Davis said First Baptist in 1998 was “a church in need of reform.” It was the oldest church in Durham, founded in 1845, took pride in its heritage and was the place where anyone who wanted to be anyone in Durham would have attended. To him, however, there was a “flawed church polity” where key deacons were allowed to run the church and the congregation typically voted to go along with whatever they recommended.

Davis said he naively assumed the first issue could be resolved by simply changing the church’s bylaws back to what they read before they were changed in 1988 to permit women deacons. Ironically, no woman had been elected to serve as a deacon in the decade after the vote, but that changed after Davis began expressing his views on the subject. Two years into his pastorate his opponents began to force the issue.

On the Sunday in August of 2001, when cards with results from a deacon election were distributed to the congregation, Davis said he stood up and called the church to repent, because one of the new deacons was a woman.

In October he moved to change the bylaws so that only men could be nominated, elected and serve as deacons. His side lost 172-125. His opponents mistakenly thought he would leave. A year later enough old members had left and new ones joined that it was essentially a different congregation. Davis reintroduced the issue and it passed easily.

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