Retelling a painful period when conservative Southern Baptist thinkers accused her of being a "false teacher," she wrote that she "inquired whether or not they'd researched any of my Bible studies to reach those conclusions over my doctrine, especially the studies in recent years."

"The answer was no," she wrote. "Why? They refused to study what a woman had taught."

Moore said she accepted the church's complementarian philosophies, pointing to the same chapter of Timothy that's behind the church's policy. But by 2016, she wrote, she had become fed up with the attitudes of key leaders that "smacked of misogyny, objectification and astonishing disesteem of women."

Those attitudes are still growing, Moore said, with disastrous consequences for Southern Baptist women.

"Being any part of shaping misogynistic attitudes, whether or not they result in criminal behaviors, is sinful and harmful and produces terrible fruit," she said.

Mary Burbrink, a former student at Southwestern Bible Theological Seminary, said she was one of those women, and "for every one of me there are probably dozens more suffering in silence to afraid to speak up."

In a letter last month to the seminary's trustees, Burbrink, a former Marine and corrections officer who entered the seminary in 2013, described working as a campus patrol officer to help pay for her classes. She wrote that her experiences as the "token woman" on the security team "sent me into a two-year struggle with depression and severe anxiety I have only recently began to work through."

Burbrink told the trustees that she was ostracized because she is a woman and that supervisors refused to make accommodations in her schedule to allow her to teach preschoolers at a local church, accommodations she said were made for any of her male colleagues who asked.

She said that she was never allowed to be alone with a man, even when she was on duty and in uniform.

Burbrink quit the force in May 2016, staying on campus to continue her studies. But "I am a woman, so my gender and interpretations of the Bible were held against me," she said, describing chapel services at which women were told that they were "harlots" responsible for enticing men into sin.

At the end of the year, Burbrink withdrew from the seminary and "stopped going to church for two years, stopped reading the Bible and praying, and was angry at God for putting me through what I felt was entirely unjust," she told the trustees.

"It has taken me until as recently as January 2018 to even [be] able to set foot in a church again, due to my distrust of church, seminary, and denominational leaders," she wrote.

The seminary said last month that it "denounces all abusive behavior, any behavior that enables abuse, any failure to protect the abused and any failure to safeguard those who are vulnerable to abuse."

The seminary didn't immediately reply to a request for comment on the letter.

Burbrink's words would sound familiar to Lesley Wexler, a law professor at the University of Illinois who, with two colleagues, is researching a paper for publication late this year or early next year examining how large institutions can reform to address the concerns of the #MeToo movement in ways that are fair to victims and perpetrators alike.

"There do seem to be some problems in that churches often feel like, when they uncover a problem that is both a sin and a crime, the church often focuses on the sin part — individual repentance, individual forgiveness," Wexler said in an interview. "But sometimes, something can be both, and just because you want to handle it within the church doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed in the legal system."

To Wexler, one way to tackle the issue would be to "get rid of complementarianism entirely." But that is far more difficult than it sounds, she said.

The draft thesis of the Illinois paper argues that "to change institutions, there must first be recognition that change is needed."

The problem for the Southern Baptist Convention, however, is that "there are some people who are just strongly resistant, just as there are people who are responsive to the #MeToo movement," Wexler said. Others, she said, "want to be responsive but are struggling with their assumptions."

In any event, the policy isn't going anywhere, said Stetzer, the Wheaton scholar.

That's partly because, as the convention's leadership has become more conservative over the last 40 years, forces that could resist have withdrawn to create their own denominations. Former President Jimmy Carter famously left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, citing its "increasingly rigid" doctrines in general and its ban on female pastors in particular, to join a congregation in the more liberal Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

The headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention is shown, in Nashville on Dec. 7, 2011. Mark Humphrey / AP file

Stetzer expects complementarianism to remain part of modern Southern Baptist philosophy. The problem isn't necessarily with the policy — the problem is when the policy "is mixed with misogyny," he said.

"If the church founded by Jesus Christ is not the safest place [for women], we're doing it wrong," Stetzer said.

Stetzer said statements like the sexual abuse resolution to be voted on next week illustrate that the church has learned a lot from the #MeToo movement — and that it can learn even more.

"It has led to a reckoning in the Southern Baptist Convention," he said. "We're at a moment of reckoning, and I think Southern Baptists need to take a good, hard look at what is it in this movement" that speaks to people.

At the same time, Stetzer said, the church's response could help to fuel the broader secular movement.

"If the Southern Baptist Convention, as a large conservative denomination, can address some very real issues that have brought harm to women and survivors of abuse, that would be a good thing," he said. "It would bring hope to women even in hard places that change can come."