America’s largest Baptist organization has ousted a West Baltimore church from its ranks over the issue of female pastors.

The executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention voted Tuesday to remove St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist Church, a congregation in the West Arlington neighborhood, from membership because its senior pastor is a woman — and because its leadership has failed to address the matter with convention officials.

Southern Baptists updated their official statement of belief — The Baptist Faith and Message — in 2000 with this clause: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

St. Timothy’s officials did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment, and its building was closed during office hours, but a female minister, the Rev. Dr. Minnie Washington, has served as senior pastor for nearly three years, according to its website.

Washington assumed leadership of St. Timothy’s after her husband, the Rev. Dr. Carl Washington Sr., the founding pastor, died in 2020. The church lists two other women, the Rev. Carmi Washington Flood and Minister Etta Renee Johnson, on its website as staff members. The site describes Flood as an ordained minister and reports that the late Rev. Washington licensed Johnson as a minister in 2019.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s credentials committee recommended Tuesday that St. Timothy’s “be deemed not in friendly cooperation with the convention, based on a lack of intent to cooperate in resolving a question of faith and practice regarding the church having a female senior pastor functioning in the office of pastor,” according to a statement shared with The Baltimore Sun by Jon Wilke, a spokesman for the Baptist convention’s executive committee.

Wilke said he was not privy to further specifics about St. Timothy’s, but added that the convention only separates a congregation after the credentials committee has attempted to contact a church several times via phone, email or on-site visits.

The Southern Baptist Convention lacks a governing hierarchy and has no formal disciplinary procedures.

Instead, Wilke said, the convention is a loose affiliation of autonomous churches that agree to support certain values that derive from Scripture. The credentials committee monitors whether individual congregations are “in alignment” with those values and initiates dialogue to determine whether congregations and the convention remain a good match.

St. Timothy’s was one of five churches the organization removed Tuesday from its roster of more than 47,000 congregations in the United States over the issue of female pastors.

The most prominent was Saddleback Church, a Southern California megachurch made famous by evangelical pastor Rick Warren, the bestselling author of the book and study series “The Purpose-Driven Life.” The committee cited Saddleback’s having “a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor,” an allusion to Stacie Wood, wife of the current lead pastor, Andy Wood.

The others are Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky; New Faith Mission Ministry in Griffin, Georgia; and Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi.

The chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention, Jared Wellman, said in a statement Wednesday that it had found the five churches “to be not in friendly cooperation with the convention due to the churches continuing to have a female functioning in the office of pastor.”

“These churches have been valued, cooperating churches for many years, and this decision was not made lightly,” he said. “However, we remain committed to upholding the theological convictions of the SBC and maintaining unity among its cooperating churches.”

St. Timothy’s functioned in cooperation with both the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Baptist Missionary Convention of Maryland before the decision, according to the church website.

According to Southern Baptist Convention bylaws, the congregation can appeal in writing before the organization holds its annual meeting in New Orleans in July.

The Southern Baptist Convention claims 13.7 million members, but it has seen net declines over more than a decade in members and baptisms, its key metric for spiritual vitality.

Associated Press contributed to this article.