Southern Baptists are meeting in New Orleans for their annual convention this week. Megachurch Pastor Rick Warren, author of the bestselling book The Purpose-Driven Life, is waging war with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), hoping to push the denomination to the left on the issue of female pastors.
Warren, now “retired” but still listed as the Founding Pastor on Saddleback Church’s website, is pressuring the SBC to allow female pastors, contrary to clear biblical teaching that pastoral roles are reserved for men.
Warren has been all over Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube this past week, viciously attacking his opponents (while calling for love and reconciliation). He’s become increasingly combative, calling his opponents “angry fundamentalists,” “angry fighters,” and “legalist showmen.” (I’ll leave it up to readers to determine who’s playing the role of “showman” in this debate.)
Warren also issued a veiled threat to leaders who oppose him. During a recent podcast with Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief Russell Moore, he warned, “We [Saddleback churches] don’t need the Southern Baptist Convention. They need the 6,000 purpose-driven churches that are in the Southern Baptist Convention in our fellowship, but we don’t need the Convention. It would be for the benefit of others, not for us.” In other words, if he doesn’t get his way on liberalizing the doctrine of the SBC, he’ll take his churches and go home.
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As background, in June of last year, the SBC Credentials Committee determined that Saddleback Church was “not in friendly cooperation with the Convention,” essentially disfellowshipping the church for having a female “teaching pastor.” Southern Baptist churches are officially self-governing, but blatant violations of the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M — the SBC’s statement of faith) can be cause for removing a church from membership.
The committee ruled that the megachurch “has a faith and practice that does not closely identify with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith, as demonstrated by the church having a female teaching pastor functioning in the office of pastor.”
Saddleback is expected to appeal the ruling at the convention this week, and Warren is expected to issue an emotional plea for the group to liberalize on the issue. While he claims that his goal is not to force other churches to allow female pastors, allowing Saddleback back into the SBC would open the floodgates to other churches following his lead.
As an aside, Warren’s views on egalitarianism are less troubling than some of the other statements he’s made:
A study released on Sunday by American Reformer found that there are currently 1,844 female pastors in Southern Baptist churches — many more than previously estimated.
STUDY: 1,844 Female Pastors in 1,225 Southern Baptist Churches.
Kevin McClure: “This is a staggering number, and it dwarfs the previously known information about female pastors by a factor of ten.” https://t.co/OXIuxi8AzW
— American Reformer (@AmReformer) June 11, 2023
That’s a problem because it conflicts with the BF&M.
Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Arlington, Va., offered up an amendment to the SBC constitution that would clarify the issue, stipulating that “a church [is] in friendly cooperation with the Convention… which… Does not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind,” and “Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
He explains the need for the amendment and reviews the biblical case for the office of pastor to be limited to men here:
It’s worth your time to watch the entire eight-minute video. Megan Basham also wrote a terrific article at American Reformer about the challenges that Law and others who wish to maintain biblical fidelity within the SBC have faced as pressure grows to bow to the culture on female pastors and other contentious issues.
The Executive Committee voted today to allow a vote on the amendment but doesn’t seem happy about it.
The Executive Committee of the SBC has voted to allow messengers to vote on an amendment to the Constitution. The proposed amendment says that cooperating churches should not allow women to serve as pastors.’
The Executive Committee also express their disapproval of the… pic.twitter.com/OFPlIOPnMY
— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) June 12, 2023
The American Reformer report also found that allowing female pastors tends to trigger a slippery slope:
- The American Baptist Churches USA allowed female pastors in 1985 and failed to uphold discipline for churches with homosexual members in 1999.
- The ELCA ordained women in 1970 and practicing homosexual pastors in 2009.
- The Episcopal Church USA allowed female pastors in 1976 and homosexual bishops in 2003.
- The PCUSA allowed female pastors in 1956 and then openly homosexual pastors in 2011.
- The United Methodist Church allowed female pastors in 1956, allowed for homosexual unions by failure to discipline in 2014, and there is currently a conservative exodus from the denomination that is expected to change its policy to allow homosexual ordination in 2024.
Indeed, Saddleback, now led by Pastor Andy Wood, is already partnering with a pro-LGBT organization. Sadly, it’s likely only a matter of time before Saddleback follows the culture down the road of LGBT pastors.
At the 2022 SBC convention, Warren was allowed to address the Messengers (representatives from SBC churches). True to form, he bragged that he’d trained 1.1 million pastors, more than all the seminaries put together — a fabulist claim that Gabriel Hughes, associate pastor of Discipleship and Education for First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas, called “egotistical nonsense.” He tweeted that Warren would have to train more than 70 pastors daily, or 25,000 pastors a year, to reach his 1.1 million number. (Strangely, Hughes’s account has been suspended from Twitter.)
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Earlier this year, Warren boasted that he’s been more successful at baptizing than anyone in history — including the early church:
“I’m the only pastor our people have ever known. Seventy-something percent of the church, I baptized in the 43 years that I was pastor,” he said. “I baptized 57,000 believers in the 43 years I’ve pastored. I don’t know any church that’s ever done that. In Acts it says, the Lord added daily to the church. That would mean 365 a year, at minimum. One a day. Well, in the 43 years I’ve pastored, we baptized five people every day for 43 years. That’s unheard of.”
(That’s six uses of the words “I” or “I’ve” if you’re keeping score.)
You may have noticed that Warren is all about the numbers — he’s a pragmatist through and through, often taking his cues from the culture rather than scripture. He famously polled non-Christians before launching Saddleback to see what they wanted from a church. Unsurprisingly, he’s trying to convince the SBC to alter its doctrine based on numbers rather than solid scriptural exposition.
He’s blaming the declining numbers in Southern Baptist Churches on the Convention’s refusal to allow female pastors, ridiculously claiming that 50% of the church “is forced to “sit on the bench,” completely ignoring the fact that women can and do serve in ministries all over the world — just not as pastors. Never a gifted (or honest) exegete, Warren claims that the Great Commission — Jesus’s command to go into all the world and preach the gospel and make disciples — is imperiled unless women are allowed to stand in SBC pulpits.
“We cannot finish the task Jesus gave us with 50% of the church forced to sit on the bench.”
Saying that non-pastors (99% of all Christians) are sitting on the bench is offensive and completely unbiblical. Read Eph. 4:12. https://t.co/5iJDP7BCSa
— Tyler Eason (@TylerEason) May 18, 2023
How does reserving the office of pastor to men prevent women from sharing the gospel and making disciples? Obviously, it doesn’t. Warren is smart enough to know that the former doesn’t preclude the latter, but he’s gaslighting, muddying the waters, hoping enough Messengers fall for his ruse. His arguments have largely invoked straw men, and he’s been called out continually on social media for misrepresenting people and doctrinal stances. Here’s but one example of Warren being fact-checked for attributing something to former SBC President Adrian Rogers that he never said.
He also received pushback for claiming that the SBC’s biblical fidelity resulted in a huge drop in membership when, in fact, the drop can most likely be attributed to an effort to purge inactive members from the membership rolls of local churches.
Here’s a timeline with some milestones added. pic.twitter.com/k5BMOvphEQ
— FX Turk 🟦 (@FXTurkArt) June 8, 2023
Warren now claims that, after 53 years in ministry, he only recently discovered that the Bible allows women to be pastors. For the entire history of Christianity (until a few decades ago), theologians and scholars almost universally agreed that the office of pastor was reserved for men, but Warren now knows — with certainty! — that they’re wrong and he’s right. Not surprisingly, he apologized to women and begged their forgiveness.
My biggest regret in 53 years of ministry is that I didn’t do my own personal exegesis sooner on the 4 passages used to restrict women. Shame on me.
I wasted those 4 yrs of Greek in college & seminary. When I finally did my proper “due diligence”, laying aside 50 years of… pic.twitter.com/yz3HjNUFw6— Rick Warren (@RickWarren) June 10, 2023
(We’re keeping an eye out for tweets from the Apostle Paul apologizing for his complementarianism. We’ll report back if we see any.)
One Twitter user pointed out the obvious — that Warren is the one who changed, not the SBC.
Is there anything more boomer-mindset than @RickWarren trying to burn down the SBC because he’s the one who changed?
— bendell werry (@bendellwerry) June 11, 2023
It seems the best thing would be for Warren and his 87 trillion (or whatever) members to leave the SBC and start his own watered-down, woke, unbeliever-sensitive denomination and leave the SBC alone. His view is a minority in the SBC, but he somehow feels the need to make it to conform to his new-and-improved doctrinal clarity on an issue no one was confused about until about 15 minutes ago.
An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to the SBC statement of faith as the Baptist Faith & Practice rather than the Baptist Faith & Message.
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