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When Southern Baptists gather Tuesday in Florida for their annual meeting, they’ll debate for the fourth year in a row whether to formally ban churches with a woman serving in any role resembling that of pastor — not just the top job.

One thing they are unlikely to debate is the politics of many Southern Baptists, the vanguard of broader white conservative evangelical support for President Donald Trump.

Officials for the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, say more than 11,000 church representatives have preregistered for the two-day meeting in Orlando.

Revisiting a ban on churches with women pastors

In the previous three annual meetings, a majority of representatives voted to amend the SBC constitution to ban churches with women in any pastoral role. But the measures failed to get a two-thirds supermajority in two consecutive years that is required to pass an amendment.

The denomination’s statement of belief, the Baptist Faith and Message, declares that the office of pastor is limited to men. While nonbinding on churches, this has prompted the SBC to expel some churches with women in leading pastoral roles. Now the focus is those who preach or serve in subordinate pastoral roles.

This year, an amendment proposed by Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, would exclude any church that acts “to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.”

Mohler noted the debate has consumed too much time and attention. “Clarity in the constitution would settle that,” he said.

The outgoing SBC president, Clint Pressley, supports the amendment, as do both candidates running to succeed him.

Another nonbinding resolution with similar language will be considered. It requires only a simple majority to pass.

As an association of independent congregations, the SBC can’t tell them what to do. But it can expel any church deemed not to be in “friendly cooperation.” The convention has ousted churches in recent years that appointed women to top pastoral positions or asserted the right to do so. But the status of churches with female assistant pastors is still debated.

On his own podcast, Mohler recently said it would even be a “problem” for a church podcast to include a woman answering questions about that week’s sermon.

Array of issues queued up for debate

That view drew pushback online, including from prominent Bible teacher Beth Moore, who left the SBC after she faced criticism for advocating for victims of sexual abuse and criticizing evangelical support for Trump despite such things as his crude sexual boasts.

“How in heaven’s name a woman discussing a sermon on a podcast could be objectionable to some is beyond me and what I believe to be beyond scripture,” she posted on X.

She added later: “Which has been the greater problem: women trying to become your senior pastors or pastors misusing or abusing women?”

Amy Sims, associate pastor of preschool and children at Sugarland Baptist Church in Sugarland, Texas, described a now-yearly contrast of preparing for vacation Bible school just as Southern Baptists are debating women’s ministry.

“I preach. I teach. I disciple children and families,” she wrote on the independent site Baptist News Global. “I walk with parents through crises. I visit hospitals. I help lead people to faith in Christ. I perform baptisms. … I serve now at a church that is beautifully supportive of my work and calling as a woman and pastor.”

Every June, Sims added, “there are those who seem determined to remind me they do not believe God could have called me to do the very work I am doing.”

Even as the convention’s membership shrinks, the annual meeting serves as a bellwether for religious and political trends among evangelicals. And as is typical, the biggest attention will be on whether the already-conservative SBC decides to move further rightward.

The upcoming meeting follows the release of internal statistics showing a continuation of a nearly two-decade-long decline in membership. It’s down to 12.3 million, the lowest since 1973.

Southern Baptists have, however, seen a bump in baptisms. They consider this a key spiritual vital sign because it measures conversions, though the increase is not enough to stem the overall decline.

Southern Baptists will consider other policy statements. One proposed resolution calls for humane treatment of immigrants and rejecting nativistic and dehumanizing rhetoric while also affirming the government’s responsibility for immigration enforcement.

Another denounces antisemitic violence and conspiracy theories, notably those arising since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. At the same time, the resolution affirms Southern Baptists’ hope for Jews’ conversion to Christianity.

In 1996, an SBC resolution called for the evangelization of Jews, prompting major Jewish leaders to call it a setback for interfaith relations.

Baptists’ long ties to conservative politics

Beyond denominational politics, the majority-white SBC is a core part of the wider, predominately white evangelical constituency that has coalesced behind Trump. Prominent Southern Baptists say they see little change in that.

They like Trump’s official policy recognizing only two, biologically determined genders, though they worry about his administration’s moderation on abortion. Baptist leaders have largely supported his war against Iran, but were quick to move on from Trump’s posting in April of a social media meme they deemed to be blasphemous.

Trump won the support of about 8 in 10 white evangelical Christian voters in 2020 and 2024, according to AP VoteCast, a large voter survey.

About two-thirds of white born-again Protestants approved of Trump’s overall performance in April, compared to about one-third of U.S. adults overall. That’s according to survey findings from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Mohler said evangelicals were widely appalled at the Trump social-media meme depicting himself as a healing savior.

“You had the vast majority of evangelicals saying this is fundamentally wrong,” Mohler said. But that’s “within the context of the fact that overwhelmingly evangelicals supported President Trump as president.”

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the large First Baptist Church in Dallas and a longtime Trump supporter, said he appreciated that the president “had enough sensitivity to remove” the meme after the backlash.

Emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not his church or the SBC, Jeffress added that he supported Trump’s creation of a Religious Liberty Commission, where Jeffress testified about what he contended was unfair scrutiny of his church by the IRS.

Jeffress also supported Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, saying a president has “not only the right but the God-given duty to protect our nation.”

Mohler agreed, but sought to temper expectations. He said he supported past wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but now realizes that some of their objectives, such as nation-building, were not realistic. A just war needs “limited and honest aims,” he said.

Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, has criticized fellow Southern Baptist leaders for both their political slant and their gender focus.

The Black pastor posted on X that the SBC and its theologians have been wrong about issues ranging from slavery and segregation to the mistreatment of sexual-abuse survivors.

“And now they expect us to just blindly trust them on gender theology and women in ministry issues?” McKissic wrote.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Two corporations bid on a handful of leases during the latest oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Friday, a showing critics described as tepid but one that further opens the door to possible development in the pristine region.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state corporation that already has leases in the refuge’s coastal plain, had the winning bid on three tracts and Hex Energy LLC on two, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced. The tracts cover about 72,000 acres. Nearly 690,000 acres had been offered. Winning bids totaled $3.7 million.

The federal agency’s state director, Kevin Pendergast, said a “new era of active leasing and exploration is just beginning to unfold.”

While there is no active drilling underway, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s board last month authorized additional spending for efforts including a seismic survey program aimed at locating oil formations, as well as lease purchases in this latest sale. A message seeking comment from Hex Energy was not immediately returned.

Opponents of drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain have pointed to a lack of industry interest in the prior two sales held there and ongoing changes in Alaska’s arctic region due to climate change as proof the region should be off-limits to drilling. There is pending litigation over the leasing program, dating to President Donald Trump’s first term.

The Gwich’in consider the coastal plain sacred because the caribou herd they rely upon calve there. The Gwich’in people’s reliance on the coastal plain “will be irreversibly damaged if it is disturbed,” Karlas Norman, first chief of the Venetie Village Council, said in a statement. “Even though we saw minimal bids, we will not rest until this sacred place is permanently protected for our children and for generations yet to come.”

But supporters of development see the coastal plain, which is roughly the size of Delaware, as a potential untapped resource that could boost U.S. oil production and generate new revenue and jobs. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, an advocacy group whose members include leaders from Alaska Native communities on the North Slope, hailed the sale a success.

A statement from the group said the sale represented “the culmination of decades of advocacy by North Slope Iñupiat leaders, in particular leaders from Kaktovik, for their right to self-determination on their homelands, including responsible exploration and development.” Kaktovik is the only community within the refuge.

“The Trump-Vance administration is doing the right thing by advancing policies, including those that permitted the sale, supported by our community,” Kaktovik Mayor Nathan Gordon Jr. said in the statement.

The Trump administration has taken a keen interest in Alaska, and his tax and spending bill passed by Congress last year included provisions mandating lease sales in three regions of the state. In addition to the refuge’s coastal plain, leases have also been offered in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and in Cook Inlet, an aging basin that has provided natural gas for Alaska’s most populous region for decades.

There were no takers in the Cook Inlet auction in March. But there were hundreds of bids, including from major oil companies, for what was the first sale since 2019 in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska — despite pending litigation challenging the leasing program. The Trump administration has moved to open more lands to drilling in the reserve and rolled back protections there. The petroleum reserve is where ConocoPhillips Alaska is developing the large Willow oil project.

On Alaska’s vast, petroleum-rich North Slope, the major oil fields of Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk lie between the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Bill Groffy, principal deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management, in an interview said Alaska has “some major resources.”

“The ability to go and utilize those resources is something the president wants us to look at, and the secretary wants us to looks at,” he said, referring to U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

The arctic refuge’s coastal plain could contain 4.25 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, but there is limited information about the amount and quality of oil.

The coastal plain, bordering the Beaufort Sea in northeast Alaska, features rolling hills and tundra and provides habitat for wildlife including musk oxen and migratory birds.

NEW YORK (AP) — As if Scott Pelley’s years in a glamorous, globetrotting, seven-figure dream job weren’t enough, he’s pulled off one more thing to stir your envy: a cutting takedown of his boss that went loudly public.

The “60 Minutes” correspondent’s searing rebuke of CBS management this week, in which he questioned his bosses’ credentials and motives, may have ended in his firing, but amounted to the sort of mouthing-off that workplace peons typically only fantasize about.

“That’s the American dream — to be able to tell off your boss and walk out the door,” says Zach Tyra, a 40-year-old data analyst from Jones, Oklahoma, who found a kindred spirit in the newsman, recalling his own experience with a former boss he said was clueless. “I couldn’t do what Scott Pelley did because I didn’t have the safety net or the resources or the network that he has. I couldn’t tell my boss to stick it. I just had to sit there and eat it.”

Pelley’s message may have been delivered in the measured baritone of someone polished by decades on the airwaves. But his backtalk stirred many who’ve felt the simmering rage of feeling a clueless boss was turning their days into a nightmare.

“It’s also kind of weird, like, Pelley isn’t some blue-collar hero. There’s a wide gap between, like, Pelley and your local everyday guy down at the hardware store,” Tyra says. “But I think everyone can relate to standing up for what they believe.”

A staff meeting that went deeply awry

Pelley’s dressing-down came in a Monday staff meeting with the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Nick Bilton, brought aboard by Bari Weiss, who became CBS News’ editor-in-chief in October. The correspondent reportedly grilled Bilton about the firings last week of Bilton’s predecessor, Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, accusing management of “murdering” the program, a revered cornerstone of TV journalism and a mainstay of Sunday nights for nearly six decades.

“She has no qualifications for her job,” Pelley said of Weiss, according to the media news site Status, which reported he then turned his ire at Bilton. “You have slender qualifications for this job.”

In firing Pelley, Bilton called his outburst an “ambush” of “remarkable incivility and contempt.” But, with Pelley becoming a proxy for the American worker, others cheered.

Parry Headrick, who runs a public relations firm in Boston, was immediately transported to his days as a young reporter at a small newspaper, where he had been carefully chronicling the trials of people who fell ill from what was believed to be exposure to toxic waste.

He had earned the trust of one family only to find editors plastered a headline on the story that reduced the sick child to a “toxic boy” and caused Headrick to lose all faith in his bosses. He screamed at the paper’s publisher and editor-in-chief before quitting.

“I lost my goddamn mind when they did that. And the story with Pelley resonated so hard specifically because of that,” says 57-year-old Headrick, who thinks many people can see Pelley’s point of view. “There exists in most Americans the desire to speak truth to power.”

That such an outburst arose in the news business may be no surprise; journalists pride themselves as a truth-to-power, voice-for-the-voiceless bunch. Staff meetings with reporters sassing editors are common, and in newsrooms everywhere, managers have been subjected to the type of tough questions they pay their people to ask others.

The threshold for dismissal varies from place to place

The line separating acceptable discourse with fireable offense is as different in each workplace as the settings themselves, whether a dive bar or diocesan chancery.

“In the real world, there are layers of politeness and cordiality that don’t really exist in journalism,” says Headrick, who cheered Pelley “pushing back on something larger.”

Clare Haynes had a middle-management role at a nonprofit when she had her Pelley moment two decades ago. She was three weeks into a job where she thought she’d been brought aboard to institute changes that would achieve an innovative work culture. But every suggestion she made was dismissed. Her boss said his boss wouldn’t buy the idea.

“Are you saying you’re too weak to ask?” she snapped. His mouth fell open. He stared at her silently for a full minute.

Haynes survived, lasting three more years at the firm, but things were never the same.

“I didn’t lose my job, but I paid the price, being seen as maverick,” says 55-year-old Haynes, of Royal Leamington Spa, England, who now runs a coaching firm that trains executives how to handle difficult workplace conversations.

Johan Konst was working at a Swedish media company when he felt pushed to the limit seven years ago. After years of high-stress, hard-selling days pushing advertising he didn’t believe in, he finally said his piece, delivering a blunt, profanity-dotted message to his boss.

He was promptly shown the door.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” says 34-year-old Konst, of Amsterdam, who walked away with a nice severance check. “At some point, this had to happen.”

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Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky