By Aaron Weaver
ATLANTA – At the Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM) annual gathering at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church, Executive Director Rev. Dr. Meredith Stone delivered a hopeful and challenging report on women in Baptist life.
She presented findings from newly-released 2025 State of Women in Baptist Life report on November 7. Stone’s message was focused on new milestones for women in ministry within Baptist denominations, including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the work still ahead for Baptist churches.
Stone revisited a persistent gender gap identified in BWIM’s previous study.
“In the 2021 State of Women in Baptist Life report, BWIM named a significant disconnect…there is a gap between perceived support of women in ministry and the lived realities of women who are serving in ministry among Baptists,” Stone said, adding that while many Baptist congregations profess to affirm women in ministry, that affirmation often has not translated into practice. 
Stone noted that “86 percent of the women in ministry among Baptists surveyed for the 2021 report disclosed that they experience obstacles to their ministry because of their gender, even though 87 percent of respondents claimed their congregation had expressed some level of affirmation for women in ministry.” These “disparate statistics demonstrate the disconnect between the affirmation of women in ministry professed by some Baptist congregations and congregational practices which continue to create obstacles for women in ministry,” she explained.
This gap between belief and practice underscores a core theme of the report: “Affirming women in ministry solely in principle is not enough,” Stone said. “Affirmation must also be embedded into a congregation’s culture or environment, which is found in the daily rhythms, decisions and structures of the congregation.”
Congregational culture, she stressed, “is where theology meets practice, and thus is where Baptist women in ministry are either empowered or undermined.” For women ministers to truly thrive, Stone added, “Baptist congregations must create empowering environments for women where every woman has the opportunity and freedom to use all of her gifts in service to the church”.
One of the report’s key insights is that change for women requires both institutional action and cultural shifts.
“While many congregations might assume they are doing enough by calling women to pastoral and ministerial roles or by expressing support from the pulpit, our research reveals that true empowerment emerges from the ‘ground-up,’ as well as from the ‘top-down,’” Stone said.
“‘Ground-up’ transformation is when change is made so that every woman in a congregation experiences an empowering environment,” which then shapes decisions about who leads, she noted. This bottom-up change must accompany the visible, “top-down” progress of placing women in leadership, “in order for the experiences of women in ministry and women in the church to match professions of affirmation”.
To explore how congregations can move from mere affirmation to action, BWIM shifted its questions. Rather than asking how women ministers can cope in unsupportive churches, Stone said BWIM began asking, “What are the markers of Baptist congregations where women in ministry thrive?”
In pursuit of answers, BWIM partnered with researcher Dr. Heather Deal, assistant professor of social work at Binghamton University, in a study to identify traits of churches that empower women. Deal interviewed 15 female ministers serving in Baptist congregations known for fully supporting women clergy.
“The identified congregations are not perfect; however, each has engaged, and continues to engage, intentional actions which promote the thriving of women in ministry in their midst,” Deal said.
Despite differences in size and geography, “the churches shared several commonalities which served as markers of the empowering environments they had created for women,” according to Deal.
Deal outlined for annual gathering attendees six core commitments and practices shared by these healthy-church environments. Those markers include:
- Affirmation of women in various leadership roles (often after a gradual, decades-long journey toward fully including women)
- Intentionality toward gender in the work of the church (making gender equity a deliberate focus in all aspects of ministry)
- Non-Hierarchical organizational structures (flattening church leadership models to value collaboration over top-down authority)
- Support networks for women (fostering mentoring and peer support for women ministers)
- Addressing gender issues (such as confronting sexist language, expectations and biases in church life)
- Creating egalitarian staff policies (ensuring fair hiring, parental leave and safe workplace standards for all genders).
These shared practices, Deal said, help close the gap between a congregation’s stated beliefs and its daily actions, creating a culture where women leaders can truly thrive.
After Deal shared these qualitative findings, Stone turned to the hard numbers that gauge women’s status in Baptist life today. The 2025 report includes updated data on women’s ordinations, pastoral leadership, chaplaincy and seminary enrollment. There are “many reasons for celebration…as well as painful reminders of the disparity that women in ministry face among Baptists,” Stone emphasized.
BWIM’s records show at least 2,856 Baptist women have been ordained to the gospel ministry since 1964, including 134 newly-ordained women from 2022 through 2024. The number of women serving as pastors is also rising.
For the first time, 10 percent of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregations are now led by women as senior pastors or co-pastors, Stone reported. That represents 142 CBF churches—up from 105 in 2021—a roughly 35% increase in the count of female pastors over the past four years.
Similarly, in the chaplaincy arena, nearly 40% of CBF’s active endorsed chaplains are women (369 out of 928)—a slight gain from 38% in 2021 and a reflection of many women finding ministry opportunities in healthcare, military and institutional chaplaincy.
Meanwhile, in theological education, women have become a slight majority of Baptist seminary students at the master’s level. Stone noted that women now account for about 52% of enrollment in the master’s programs tracked by BWIM, indicating a strong pipeline of women preparing for ministry. (By contrast, women comprise 36.7% of Baptists enrolled in Doctor of Ministry programs—a substantial jump from 26% in 2021, though still a minority in those advanced pastoral degrees.
Even with such encouraging trends, Stone reminded the BWIM gathering that full equality remains a work in progress.
“Baptist siblings: we are not there yet. But our gains demonstrate that more progress is possible!” she emphasized.
She urged churches to take the “next best steps” toward BWIM’s vision of every woman thriving in ministry, moving beyond affirming words to truly inclusive actions.
This mix of celebration and challenge was echoed by CBF Executive Coordinator Paul Baxley, whose remarks were included in the 2025 State of Women in Baptist Life Report. Baxley praised the strides made in recent years while calling Cooperative Baptists to press further.
“The findings of the 2025 State of Women in Baptist Life are both a profound encouragement for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and also an unavoidable call to more growth and transformation,” Baxley said. “The fact that 10 percent of our congregations are now served by women senior pastors or co-pastors is a measurable step forward from the last study, not only in percentage but in actual number of congregations being led by women.
“At the same time, we still have far to go to reach the point where there are equal numbers of congregations led by women and men in CBF,” Baxley continued. “Because we believe deeply that women and men are equally called to all forms of leadership in the church, and that congregations only fully flourish in faithfulness when the gifts of women can be unleashed as freely and powerfully as the gifts of men, we obviously still have work to do in our Fellowship and in our congregations.”
Looking ahead, Stone expressed hope that the progress charted in this report will spur Baptists to imagine a future with no barriers for women in the church.
“Women have, and will always be, crucial to the church’s ability to further God’s grace and redemption in the world,” she affirmed. With the progress this report portrays, Stone said, “We hope you will be able to catch a glimpse of a world in which there are no limits or barriers to how women can participate in furthering God’s work, and therefore also no limits to how God might work among us.”
Read the 2025 State of Women in Baptist Life Report here.