Rick Warren, the founder and former senior pastor of Saddleback Church in California, made the case for his congregation’s return to the Southern Baptist Convention ahead of an annual meeting likely to center on the issue of female pastors.
Warren provoked controversy in the nation’s largest association of Protestant churches as Saddleback repeatedly ordained women to pastoral positions, claiming that the Bible makes a distinction between the gift and office of pastor. The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee reacted to the appointments earlier this year by deeming Saddleback no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the denomination, a move which Warren said he will appeal at the organization’s national meeting next week in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The megachurch pastor has accordingly launched a messaging campaign to assert that the Southern Baptist Convention allows for individual churches to differ on the matter.
“The overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists are complementarian,” Warren said in a mass email sent to pastors obtained by The Sentinel. “But we reject the idea that Southern Baptists who disagree are an existential threat to our convention, and not true Baptists.”
Warren followed the email with a flurry of social media posts seeking to bolster his argument. He said, for instance, that the debate over female ordination has produced a “climate of fear” and “exclusion” among Southern Baptists, and that the recently deceased pastor Charles Stanley was saved under the ministry of a female preacher.
Samuel Sey, a Christian writer and speaker who contributes to The Sentinel, replied on social media that he was likewise saved amid the preaching of a purported female minister but noted that the practice is by no means doctrinally sound. “God’s miraculous grace doesn’t justify her rebellion,” Sey countered. “You’re arguing that we should sin so that grace may abound.”
Critics of the moves to ordain females at Saddleback and other congregations indeed note that the Baptist Faith and Message, the doctrinal statement to which Southern Baptist churches adhere, explicitly confesses that “while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” The Southern Baptist Convention, unlike formal denominations, is composed of independently governed churches which pool their resources for efforts such as educational institutions, charities, and missions.
The advertising campaign from Warren, beyond supporting the reinstatement of Saddleback, doubtlessly has in mind the amendment proposed by Mike Law, the pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia, which would deem any church that employs “a woman as a pastor of any kind” as no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the Southern Baptist Convention.
Law has documented more than 170 instances of female pastors currently serving in Southern Baptist churches across the nation after noticing the trend at churches in his area. He noted that many churches have left the denomination as they grow frustrated with inaction over the issue.
One minister who plans to attend the Southern Baptist Convention meeting next week indeed told The Sentinel that developments in New Orleans will decide whether his church remains in the denomination. “Based on what I’m seeing it seems as though my decision is fairly clear,” he remarked. “However, we shall see.”
Warren also cited the fact that membership in Southern Baptist churches has seen the largest year-over-year decline in more than a century, a phenomenon attributed to broader decreases in church attendance over the past three years but possibly linked to a perceived theologically liberal drift in the denomination. Warren continued in the email, however, that failure to reinstate Saddleback would cause the Southern Baptist Convention to “grow weaker and smaller” while promoting “loss of trust and credibility, continued membership decline, and the death of the basis for cooperation upon which this body was founded.”
Law, on the other hand, will assert next week that American denominations which ordain female pastors have historically accelerated their declines into theological liberalism, thereby affirming cultural sins such as homosexuality and producing further division.
“The reality is, this issue has been a canary in the coalmine for many denominations,” Law contended in an article about his amendment. “If we cannot be clear and unashamed about what the Bible says a pastor is now, then there is little hope that we will stand firm on other teachings of God’s Word that are out of step with the standards of the world. We must believe what the Bible teaches and go wherever it leads regardless of cost or consequences.”
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