As I read your excellent story, I thought about press reports covering the SBC's latest national conference. I read that when ultra-conservative convention president Albert Mohler stood up to condemn the churches with women pastors, the crowd interrupted him over and over with applause and cheers.

I found it really discouraging until I reminded myself that the crowd consists of "messengers" (SBC speak for delegates) who are themselves all men, mostly pastors. In other words, the people doing the cheering were themselves men who benefit from a men's club leadership policy.

I guess it's important to remember that the SBC conference is not democratic. It just wears boasts of the trappings of democratic debate while excluding all women from meaningful participation.

It's kind of hard to believe the SBC is focusing on this issue, of all things, while they are embroiled in their very serious child-sex-abuse coverup scandal.

Leaders of the denomination hushed up credible and even thoroughly substantiated reports of abuse for decades, on purpose, valuing the denomination's reputation over the health and safety of children.

Would those leaders have been able to do that if women had counted significantly in their ranks? Nobody can answer that question for sure, but intuition suggests that women would have been far less tolerant of child sex abuse.

I bring this up because rumblings suggest that ordinary Southern Baptists are becoming more than a little discontent with their all male leadership.

Congregations are going to be watching footage of Mohler's speech, listening to all the cheers and applause in favor of male supremacy.

I'm thinking that a good number of those people will feel repelled. That doesn't mean change will come quickly, or even at all. But it does give me hope.