Thread by @bethallisonbarr

I know I shouldn’t tweet when I’m angry, but I’m going to break that rule. Because this matters. The SBC needs to realize how much this matters—a 🧵

I haven’t been on Twitter much lately. Not because I’m tired of criticism, but because I was tired of how self-centered it was making me.

I was focusing too much on what people thought about my book when I really didn’t write the book for me.

I wrote it to help women.

And every time I have jumped on lately, I have seen something else about the corruption inside the SBC.

Racism. Sexism. Angry men accusing each other. Calling victims of sexual assault whore and Potiphar’s wife…

Is there anything of this that looks like Jesus?

I think the problem with the SBC is the problem that I have with too much social media—-it has become self-centered. All it can think about is who gets to be in power, and who is right, and who controls the seminaries and colleges….

I know not everyone in the SBC is this way. I know a lot of folk who are trying to work for change…but their voices are not the dominant ones. Their voices are not in power.

And many of them are just leaving….

A former SBC member told me that an SBC church wouldn’t hold the funeral service of his mother bc a woman was reading scripture. They had to hold the service in a different church.

Can you just hear Paul? Can you hear him say, what?! Does the word of God originate with you?

Why are we arguing about women preaching and praying and who is on power? Does this look anything like Jesus?

Are we really so self focused that we cannot see how teaching that some people belong in power over other people hurts real people?…

I remember once hearing that in seven years all the cells on a person’s body would be replaced. A new body essentially.

I clung to that once because it meant that my body would once never have. been touched by him….

Ideas matter. Ideas that teach women are less than men lead men to treat women as less.

Why cannot we not see this?

I am begging the SBC to realize how their theologies of race and gender hurt the lives of real people….

Maybe they still won’t end up at the same place as me, but the evidence that is spilling out of the internal workings of the SBC show how corrupt it is.

It is time for change. It is time to put the victims of sex abuse above concerns about power…..

It is time to listen to women and change what we are doing.

Jesus listened to women.
It is time for the SBC to do too.

#prayingforchange