Southern Baptists reject Rick Warren’s appeal to reinstate Saddleback
At its annual meeting, SBC members also voted for an amendment to make it explicit women can’t be any kind of pastor
Saddleback, in Orange County, Calif., has for decades been the epitome of a modern conservative evangelical megachurch. But the SBC, the country’s biggest Protestant denomination, has since the 1980s been moving to the right on social issues, and after Warren ordained three women in 2021, an SBC committee tossed Saddleback out.
The 12,700 “messengers,” or church representatives, also affirmed the expulsion Tuesday of Fern Creek Baptist Church outside Louisville, which has been led by the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham for 30 years. The votes were 92 in favor, seven against.
The SBC’s executive committee in February told Fern Creek, Saddleback and three other churches that they were no longer in “friendly cooperation.” Fern Creek and Saddleback had appealed, arguing that the SBC should be a big tent of evangelical churches with different interpretations of issues not directly related to salvation, such as the gender or title of pastoral leaders, and should be based on a shared goal of bringing more people into relationship with Christianity.
SBC President Bart Barber — who was reelected this week for a second term — told the messengers before the count was announced that they shouldn’t “throw divorce parties” and to “behave like Christians” when the numbers were released.
The SBC had been expected to sustain the decision made by its executive and credentials committees, and both churches said before and after that they would make no changes to their leadership.
In a news conference after the results were announced, Warren said he knew he would lose but wanted to “encourage the next generation of pastors.” He noted more than 1,200 people voted for him and said he believes the people who come to the SBC annual meeting don’t fairly represent the 13 million-member SBC.
He was asked why it was only in recent yeas that he had done what he called an intensive scriptural study about the early church and women.
“I don’t think I wanted to know. I think it was more comfortable as a man” not to, he said. “I was sinning when I held women back.”
Later Wednesday, the messengers took a step on the issue of gender beyond the expulsions: They voted to approve a resolution saying SBC churches must have “only men as any kind of pastor or elder.” SBC rules require constitutional amendments to be approved two years in a row by a two-thirds vote, so the measure must be approved again in 2024 before it’s final.
The SBC hadn’t voted on the topic of female pastors in more than two decades, but its right wing has been working assiduously in recent years to draw brighter lines on gender, and to enforce them.
“Now is not the time for half-measures. … Adopting this clarifies and strengthens our cooperation. It brings clarity for egalitarians that they are out of step with the Bible,” Arlington, Va., Pastor Mike Law, who put forward the amendment, told the messengers before they voted. He used “egalitarians” to refer to people who believe men and women should have access to the same roles in the church. “We are not ashamed of our God and his word. We love what God says and obey what he says.”
Warren, whose best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life” is ubiquitous in U.S. churches, cast the disagreement as subjective when he spoke Tuesday at the SBC.
“We should remove churches for all kinds of sexual sin, racial sin, financial sin and leadership sin — sins that harm the testimony of our convention,” Warren said during his allotted three minutes. But the hundreds of churches with women on pastoral staff “have not sinned. If doctrinal disagreements between Baptists are considered sin, we all get kicked out! You’ll never get 100 percent of Baptists to agree 100 percent on 100 percent of doctrine.”
Saddleback ordained three women as pastors in 2021, and last year Warren retired, replaced by a male lead pastor whose wife was named a teaching pastor. Barnes Popham has served on staff of Southern Baptist churches for 51 years. The other three churches didn’t appeal.
Before the vote, Barnes Popham still sounded shocked that her lifelong denomination had thrown her out. SBC leaders over the decades had even spoken in her church, she said in an interview. Even in 2000, when the SBC passed a change to their statement of faith saying “the office of pastor is limited to men,” she didn’t worry, she said, because the statement of faith was always seen as a consensus, not a creed.
“It takes away complete freedom from the church,” she told The Washington Post. The movement for ejecting this handful of churches, she said, represents “a group of power-hungry men who are working in the darkness. … If I were them I’d be really sorry I’d done this because what will be the next reason? It seems like they’re trying to purify the church according to their standards when only Jesus Christ can purify the church. It’s like they’re trying to legislate purification.”
During her appeal, Barnes Popham said the rejection of the churches is evidence of Satan: “He is tearing this convention apart. He loves all those deeds done in darkness. He loves seeing religious leaders sitting on protected and padded pontifical thrones, being consumed by tradition, opinions, power,” and not issues directly related to salvation. “There are millions of people groping in darkness, needing to know the good news of Jesus Christ, while some are working in the shadows, seeking political power, covering up sexual offenses and diverting attention.”
While Warren, who founded Saddleback in 1980, is no longer the pastor, he was in New Orleans representing it. Saddleback has 57,000 members, 20,000 of whom are actively involved.
The SBC membership are very conservative, and there is no substantive push for women to have full access to the clergy. The debate is more over what members believe scripture intends to say about what women can do. Can they hold other jobs with the word “pastor” like youth pastor or teaching pastor? Can they teach scripture to men, and if so, can it be regularly on Sundays from the pulpit, the space and time held for the congregation’s real leader?
Then there are other debates about the meaning of biblical language. Is “pastor” a Jesus-created office or just a job description? Are “elders” really the bosses, rather than the pastors, and should elders only be men?
There is a parallel debate about how strictly Southern Baptists need to hew to the SBC’s statement of faith (called the Baptist Faith and Message).
Southern Baptists have been debating the role of women leaders since the late 1800s. But until the 1960s, there were as many women in Southern Baptist seminaries as there were in liberal seminaries, said Mark Chaves, a Duke University sociologist who wrote a book about women’s ordination.
Then came a wave called the Conservative Resurgence or the Fundamentalist Resurgence. It began in the 1980s and has continued since in the SBC, the country’s largest Protestant group.
In 1984, the SBC passed a resolution saying scripture teaches that “women are not in public worship to assume a role of authority over men.” In 1998, they amended the Faith and Message statement to say a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership, as “the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
In 2000, it amended the Faith and Message to say, “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
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