By PETER SMITH (Associated Press)

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — More than 10,000 voting representatives gathered Tuesday for the opening of the Southern Baptist Convention’s two-day annual meeting, where they will vote on whether to ban churches with women pastors and deliberate yet again on how to respond to sexual abuse within churches.

Some 10,553 messengers, as delegates are known, are meeting in Indianapolis.

On Wednesday, they are expected to debate whether to amend their constitution to ban churches with any women pastors — from lead to associate roles. The measure received preliminary approval last year.

Early Tuesday, a small group of women stood outside the Indiana Convention Center in a low-key demonstration in support of women in ministry.

“I hope that people know women have equal value and can be pastors,” said the Rev. Meredith Stone, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, an organization that originated within the SBC in the 1980s, but it now works with women in a variety of Baptist denominations.

Participants said that of the hundreds of messengers filing by, reactions ranged from sneers to subtle thumbs-up signs to a few voicing “thank you” out loud.

Joining them was Christa Brown, who has long advocated for fellow survivors of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches and criticized the denomination’s resistance to reforms, an effort she has chronicled in a new memoir, “Baptistland.”

She said there’s a direct connection between issues of abuse and the equality of women in ministry.

“When you squash some people, it sets up a lot more people to be squashed,” she said.

The SBC’s statement of faith says that while women and men are both “gifted for service” in the church, the office of pastor is reserved for men alone. Some interpret that to mean only senior pastors, but the amendment would also apply to women in associate roles even if the senior pastor is male.

The SBC can’t tell its independent churches what to do, but it can decide whether they are in or out. Since 2023, it has ousted some churches with women in pastoral positions, including Saddleback Church, a California megachurch.

Politics is also a factor in sideline events. On Monday, former President Donald Trump appeared in a videotaped message to attendees of a staunchly anti-abortion conservative group that met Monday next door to the convention center. Trump appealed to the attendees for their votes.

Later Tuesday, former Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to speak at another sideline event hosted by the denomination’s policy agency, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

An Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force recently concluded its work. While it has provided a curriculum for training churches on preventing and responding to abuse, it has not achieved the mandate of previous annual meetings to establish a database of offenders, which could help churches avoid hiring them.

Abuse survivor and advocate Megan Lively on Tuesday morning moved that the convention task the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission with raising awareness about abuse and providing resources on preventing and responding to it. She is a delegate from Peace Church in Wilson, North Carolina.

Though some have advocated for reforms for the past two decades, the convention has particularly struggled to respond to sexual abuse in its churches since a 2019 report by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News. It said that roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers faced allegations of sexual misconduct in the previous two decades.

The denomination subsequently commissioned a report from a consulting firm, Guidepost Solutions. It concluded that leaders of the convention’s Executive Committee intimidated and mistreated survivors who sought help. The committee handles day-to-day business of the convention.

Jeff Iorg, the new president of the Executive Committee, told its members in a meeting Monday that the committee is facing a “financial crisis” because it indemnified Guidepost Solutions from any legal repercussions from the study. The convention is paying for the legal defense against two defamation lawsuits filed by two men named in the report.

“We have spent more than $2 million so far on that indemnification, and there is no end in sight,” Iorg said.

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Writer, director, and actor Jake Allyn grew up in Dallas, a city whose professional football team (as well as my nearby high school) proudly flies the banner of the cowboy, one of the most enduring, and caricatured, symbols of Texas identity. 

Allyn’s new feature film, Ride—which follows multiple generations of bull riders in Stephenville, long known as the “Cowboy Capital of Texas”—offers a nuanced portrayal of “cowboy culture,” one that puts the oft-heralded values of stoicism and pride in conflict with societal issues such as addiction, financial stress, and contact with the criminal justice system. 

The film got some early buzz, winning the audience award for best feature at the Dallas International Film Festival before its wider release on June 14. It stars real-life rodeo stars C. Thomas Howell and Forrie J. Smith, who brought a level of authenticity to their roles. 

Howell plays John Hawkins, who’s married to the local sheriff Monica Hawkins (played by Annabeth Gish), and Allyn, the director, portrays their troubled son Peter. The movie follows the family as John and Monica struggle with the price tag of the life-saving treatment necessary for their sick daughter (played by Zia Carlock) and the disruption that happens when their estranged son Peter is released from prison after four years. Having run out of legal ways to pay the medical bills, John and Peter decide to go around the law, and every member of the Hawkins family must grapple with the consequences. 

Here’s where I admit a certain level of trepidation on my part. In the film’s preview, and in promotional material, things like “western culture”, “cowboy heritage”, and “American values” are invoked. I was prepared for a one-note love letter to aspects of the Texas identity I have real problems with. But what the audience got was fairly nuanced—as Allyn later told me was his primary goal. 

“I hope that I told a story about the good and the bad that comes with that way of life,” he told me. “I really wanted to hold up a mirror to the cowboy, to honor the cowboy hat, if you will, but also shine a light on some of the issues in that world.”

C. Thomas Howell, Forrie J. Smith, and Jake Allyn (Fab Fernandez, Courtesy of Well Go USA)

What might have been taboos in cowboy flicks of decades past are immediately broken in this movie. In an early scene, John tells his other son Noah (portrayed by Josh Plasse) that he loves him. The characters aren’t unflinchingly stoic—they’re angry, they’re sad, they’re hopeless, they’re conflicted, and they’re tender, silly, and loving with the people they love. Early on, the characters are shown with their masks down: The sheriff brushes her teeth in her daughter’s hospital room; the world-weary father wakes up alone in his daughter’s bed, cradling her rainbow unicorn stuffed animal. 

The movie attempts to be an authentic representation of rodeo life. Allyn told me he wanted to make a Friday Night Lights for rodeo. Parts of the movie were filmed on location at actual rodeos, where real cowboys can be seen competing. Some scenes show Allyn’s character practicing bull-riding techniques, furiously thrusting his hips and waving his hands as if he were on a bucking bronco. These appear to be real exercises, as they aren’t particularly elegant or cinematic. 

Howell, the son of a professional bull-rider and an award-winning cowboy in his own right, said he is sensitive to the tropes and mischaracterizations of the rodeo life he sees in film. He told me he was firm that the movie had to avoid falling into those traps. 

“My goal from the beginning to the end was to make sure it was as authentic as possible,” he said. “That goes along with everything from wardrobe right on down to the way cowboys talk, the way they walk, the way they carry themselves.”

The film was well-made, with good sound and visual quality. (The scenery was beautiful—even though the end-credits reveal the movie was filmed not in Texas but in far-off Tennessee.) The editing moved the story along seamlessly. 

But what was most striking about the film was its unflinching look at a family in the midst of multiple crises. Relationship dynamics strain under the weight of it all—husband-wife, brother-sister, father-son. Through the family’s splintering, the audience can see the ways social pressures lead so many Texans to lose their grip. 

Peter, the troubled son, leaves prison with six months of sobriety under his belt, but it isn’t long until he relapses and the audience watches his quick decline into heavy drug use. His addiction is met with empathy and understanding from his grizzled grandfather (Smith’s character). The damage of Peter’s substance use is clearly shown throughout the film, but he isn’t vilified for it. Addiction is a rampant problem in Texas—opioid addiction is increasing rapidly in urban and rural areas—but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Notably, the movie depicts all three generations of Hawkins men struggling with substance abuse. 

Texas’ criminal justice system is also portrayed without moral grandstanding. People on either side of the law are humanized, portrayed as flawed people reacting to the circumstances they’re in. The effects of incarceration on individuals and their families takes center-stage, as the Hawkins family comes together after years of estrangement and Peter struggles to re-acclimate to his community.

The central conflict of the film comes from the family’s inability to keep up with the financial burdens imposed by the modern U.S. medical system. Desperation arises when survival comes down to a question of payment. Alongside this is the financial distress of modern cowboys and the towns in which they live. 

Allyn recalled the moment he decided the film should be set in Stephenville. He had been driving around Texas, scouting locations, and he saw that the “Welcome to Stephenvlle” sign at the city limits was bent over, “like a tornado had come by or something.”

“It was literally barely holding on, and the second I saw that sign, I was like, ‘That looks like a bull-rider halfway off his bull, about to get tossed, and desperately holding on for dear life,’” Allyn told me. “That immediately became a metaphor for the whole movie. … Stephenville, the world that the movie takes place in, is barely holding on, and every one of the characters, in their own way, is barely holding on.”