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The Southern Baptist Convention voted Wednesday to tighten the denomination’s restrictions on women serving in church leadership—a controversial move that comes just hours after a separate vote to expel two churches with female pastors. The decision to expand statutes governing who can be a Baptist pastor may open up thousands of churches in the United States to similar expulsions, The New York Times reported. The new amendment to the denomination’s constitution states that churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture”—a decision that one preacher likened to a “pogrom.” “Some people want to take it back to the 1950s,” said Rick Warren, who founded Saddleback, one of the congregations that was expelled from the Convention. “That is their golden age for the church, the 1950s, when basically white men rule supreme, and the woman’s place is in the home, and there is not a lot of diversity.”
