In today’s Wall Street Journal there’s an essay titled “The Competition for Believers in Africa is Transforming Christianity and Islam.”

Here’s how it begins:

“On a recent Sunday morning in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, members of the faithful clutched their hymn books and chanted God’s praises as they danced to the beat of tambourines. A preacher led the congregation in praying for the health of their children and success at work.

The service resembled Pentecostal Christianity, a movement that originated in the U.S. and has swept Africa in the last few decades. But the participants weren’t Christians. They were Muslims, practicing an ecstatic style of worship that has developed in response to the challenge posed by Pentecostalism. Across sub-Saharan Africa, religion today is in ferment as different versions of Christianity and Islam vie for believers—a contest that is transforming both faiths and disrupting long-established terms of coexistence.”

If one accepts the premise that world religions are in a competition of sorts, maybe it also makes sense to think of Christian denominations as being in a type of competition. If you’re a pastor, how do you get people to attend your church and not those that are closer?

And if you’re Southern Baptist, how do you get people who believe men and women are created equal, are of equal intellect, work equally hard, and are at least as good leaders, to attend your church when your denomination explicitly excludes women from leadership?

A quick google search for “What do Baptist believe about women’s role?” produces this gem:

“Southern Baptists believe that God created man first, then woman; consequently, this sequence renders women subordinate to men, and undeserving of authority or leadership over them.”

How convenient for the patriarchy.

Banking their future on gender inequality, the Southern Baptist Convention is long on misogyny. Imagine the New York Times trying to compete against the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times with only male reporters. Or imagine Microsoft trying to compete against Meta and Apple with only male software engineers. Or imagine an all-male publishing house or independent bookstore competing against ones with equal numbers of smart, capable, hardworking women. Similarly, fill in the blanks for any public sector organization seeking to maximize their contribution to the common good.

I understand why so many SBC men buy into and promote the male superiority paradigm, but I don’t understand at all how so many SBC women passively accept the related conclusion, that they are inferior.

Rise up SBC women. The future of your denomination depends upon it.