SBC 2022, Rick Warren, Heresy Hunters, and Women in Ministry
Everyone is a discernment prophet now. It seems the internet is full of men so holy, they can judge the hearts, motives, and even surmise the actions of over 10,000 people in a room just by watching a limited video feed. We’re lucky to have these men.
I know I’m starting off snarky, and I will admit I am annoyed at these folks. We have in Christian life a group of people who see theological liberalism or heresy around every corner and in every shadow. These people have the personality of hammers, and when you’re a hammer, you see nails… everywhere. It’s all you can see. Okay, I’ll drop the attitude from here — the best I can.
WHAT HAPPENED WITH RICK WARREN AND SADDLEBACK?
Much was rightfully made of the SBC’s leadership giving roughly ten minutes to Rick Warren, Church-world celebrity, author of “The Purpose-Driven Life", and until his recent retirement, longtime pastor of Saddleback Church in southern California.
While that decision from leadership was significant, the reaction from Twitter is full of people who weren’t in the room but have assumed the authority and expertise to speak to EXACTLY what was going on — in all of their omniscience.
I sort of get it. When you’re watching the online feed, you can see a couple dozen people applauding Warren. You can hear what seems to be loud approval of what he said. If you were in the room, you witnessed something altogether different.
A couple of points on that:
Warren’s presence was a surprise to almost the entire room. On the agenda at the time, the schedule called for “Miscellaneous Business.” When he was recognized and appeared on the screens, I wasn’t the only one who audibly groaned.
There were over 10,000 people in the room. If even half of them applaud at any given moment, it makes a thunderous noise on a broadcast. Moreover, remember, we’re Baptists and mostly southern. So, we’re polite. Some applause is just out of courtesy.
Some unquantifiable number of people in the room were not happy Warren was being given time. It was sprung on us. I know this is true: if Warren had pre-scheduled, featured time on the agenda, there would have been objections and motions made to preclude him.
As a consequence, for the discernment types out there, your take that there is vast acceptance and approval of Warren and his leadership from the SBC messengers is just wrong. You’re slandering and rumormongering – sinning. You should stop.
You also missed this somehow. He opened with a joke about how men on the gallows get to say their last words. He opened by acknowledging that the trajectory of the SBC is to expel churches who are doing what he did – ordaining women.
We’ve got a guy, Warren, giving his Conventional last words, being applauded by some people while he’s there, and you’re all interpreting that event as evidence for a liberal drift? Maybe you don’t know enough to be making that judgment.
But they applauded when he said we shouldn’t let secondary issues divide us.
That sentiment is broadly popular in SBC Life. Those of us highly attuned to the situation can recognize that he’s trying to apply that to women elders, and so we’re not on board. Others just hear the sentence denotatively and think, “Yeah, we shouldn’t let secondary issues divide us.”
Now, of course, Biblical gender roles in the church, I guess, can be a secondary issue when we’re determining who is generally in the family of God.
However, it is NOT a secondary issue when it comes to being a Southern Baptist. Because Warren and Saddleback are outside Southern Baptist orthodoxy on this, they should soon be gone.
What about what he said and the role of women in ministry?
Here’s a problem the SBC does NOT have: Any significant number of members or leaders who affirm that women can fill the role of elder and think they are remaining Biblically faithful.
Those claiming the SBC is running leftward on the role of women in ministry are just wrong. That contingent doesn’t exist in any significant way.
Here is the problem we do have: decades of varying traditions making a mess of polity of terminology.
We are not a denomination. There are no top-down instructions or unification regarding the terms we use. In that vacuum, we’ve had decades of people just making stuff up, and some of that stuff is not the proper, correct Biblical language.
We have churches using terms like “worship pastor,” “children’s pastor,” or “youth pastor,” and in many of those churches, those people in those roles –whether men or women – are not considered as or are acting as the core leadership of that local body.
We’ve had decades of churches that have a “lead pastor” (not technically a Biblical term), deacons (who functionally serve the Biblical role of “elders” in those churches) and then elders who – well we’re not sure what they’re supposed to do in that “model” of church.
Others even try to separate the functions of pastor/elder with the office of pastor/elder.
Baptist polity, in a lot of places, is just an absolute mess.
While it is a mess and in desperate need of correction in those churches, again, we don’t have a problem of people purposely, actively, affirming that women and men serve all the same functions and offices in church life.
So, what do we do?
What I’m hearing from some is that we need to aggressively hunt down these congregations who are incorrectly – but honestly (as in it’s an honest mistake) – using the incorrect terms for positions and expel them for doing something they’re not doing: ordaining women.
Might I suggest a different approach? Why not education? Instead of going to war, might we, in meekness, instruct the weaker brethren, who, because of tradition, have gotten these structures incorrect?
FINAL THOUGHT
We don’t have a liberal drift in the SBC. We have some fundamentalists who see liberal drift absolutely everywhere they look and sounding alarms as loudly as they can. I refuse to judge people’s motives. I don’t know why they’re doing it, but they are.
They’re not wrong that we have folks who misunderstand the office elder, deacon, and what a pastor is. That is absolutely true. Those same people are NOT arguing that we need to have women ordained or in the eldership.
That’s an important distinction that our fundamentalist brothers need to grasp.
So, let’s continue to pursue the expulsion of churches who are flaunting some of our Baptist distinctions — like Saddleback. Concurrently, let’s kindly instruct and teach others to see if we can win our brothers to right polity – instead of just casting them out.
