Mimi Walker and her husband Graham serve as co-pastors of Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta. However, Graham professes that Mimi is the lead pastor due to his full-time administrative and professorial duties at McAfee School of Theology.

The church, located at 1085 Ponce De Leon Avenue, is autonomous and has the right and privilege of choosing whomever they wish to provide pastoral leadership in the church.

While the Georgia Baptist Convention has no desire to dictate to the church whom it may call as pastor, the GBC is also autonomous and has the right and privilege of deciding which churches will and will not be accepted as affiliated members.

Almost a decade ago the GBC voted to embrace the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message as its confessional statement. The BF&M states in Article VI concerning the church: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

Furthermore, according to Article II, Section 1 of the GBC Constitution the Druid Hills church is not a cooperating church, because a woman is serving as co-pastor.

The Bible is clear on this issue to any objective student of the Word of God. I Timothy 2:11-14 tells us why women should not teach or have authority over men. Many women excel in gifts of hospitality, mercy, teaching, and helps. Much of the ministry of the local church depends on women. Women, just as much as men, are called to minister to others, to demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit, and to witness to the lost.

However, God has ordained that only men are to serve as pastor of the local church, not because the man is superior intellectually, physically, or spiritually, but because the assignment for headship is divinely prescribed for men only. The role of headship has everything to do with functional roles and nothing to do with intrinsic worth.

So, when the Executive Committee of the GBC became aware that Druid Hills has a woman as co-pastor they were faced with a difficult decision: uphold the biblical and spiritual principles to which they were bound or cave in to the mindset of accommodation and tolerance.

Dr. White, the GBC executive director, asked Danny Watters and me to go with him to inform the pastors of the Druid Hills church of the Executive Committee’s proposed recommendation to break ties with the church, founded in 1914.

For me personally it was painful to bear the news that a recommendation was forthcoming to break ties with DHBC. I had the privilege of preaching a student led-revival at Druid Hills in the summer of 1961 as a Mercer University student. Dr. Louie D. Newton, who had served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention and was known as Mr. Baptist, was the pastor at that time and I had the privilege of staying in the Newton home. It was an incredible experience for a fledgling ministerial student.

During the weekend I was at Druid Hills Dr. Newton gave me his book, “Why I Am A Baptist.” That book includes the words, “We do not think that men are at liberty to think of the Bible or not, to obey it or not, just as they please. But we think that they are bound to use their judgment, and to govern it, by the facts and truths of the Bible.

“The liberty that we claim is not to follow our own fancies, or predilections, in investigating the Bible, not merely to speculate upon it, and then diverge from its teachings if we choose to do so, because that would be criminal trifling. The right to investigate the truth does not carry with it the right to disobey it, or to doubt it, – that would convert the doctrine into rebellion against its Author, which is an evil, and cannot become a right.”

In the same year that I spent a memorable weekend at Druid Hills Dr. Newton led the church to give almost seven times more than his annual salary – 19.6 percent of the church’s undesignated gifts – to the Cooperative Program.

Last year, under the Walkers’ leadership, the church did not turn in their Annual Church Profile (statistical information) to the GBC, but the Convention did receive $356 for Cooperative Program gifts, which is .005 percent of what the church gave to the CP in 1961 under Dr. Newton’s leadership.

Although the Walkers seemed to have distanced themselves from GBC life and identified themselves with partners like the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, and Georgia Interfaith Power and Light, the secular news media has portrayed Mimi Walker as being aggrieved over the Executive Committee’s proposed recommendation to break ties with Druid Hills.

Having a history with Druid Hills myself, although brief in duration and decades in the past, I find it personally painful to part ways with a longtime family member, but I have never believed that we should adjust our sails to catch the wind of popular opinion. Neither should our interpretation of Scripture become so accommodating to our secular society that every assumption and concept fits snuggly into our humanly-devised system of theology.

Vance Havner said, “We are not to be thermometers registering the temperature of the times, but thermostats regulating the temperature of the times.”

The final decision regarding Druid Hills will be made at the GBC’s annual meeting in November. ABC News has reported that the Walkers plan to attend that meeting in Albany. The national news agency reported Mimi Walker as saying, “It’s not that we want to fight it as much as we are supposed to have a right … to speak to it.”

According to our GBC Constitution “Each cooperating church, having contributed through the Convention for the Cooperative Program and Convention causes during the preceding year, shall be entitled to two messengers and to one additional messenger for each $800 contributed through this Convention for the Cooperative Program and Convention causes.”

Interestingly, if the Walkers want to attend the November Convention their church will have to give no more than a penny to the Cooperative Program in the 2009-2010 church year to qualify as messengers and that will also give them access to the microphone, but unless the church gives more to the Cooperative Program than it did in 2009 the rest of the church will have to come as guests rather than messengers.

However, in a society that has become known for its “rights” and “entitlements,” Walker will be happy to know that her “right” to speak at the Georgia Baptist Convention can be granted for a penny.