All the Eggs in One Basket

It’s almost a year old at this point, but Megan Basham’s post at American Reformer entitled “Mr. Smith Goes to the Convention” chronicles the ill-fated attempt by the pastor of a small Baptist church in Virginia to get a straight answer to a very simple question from the Southern Baptist Convention: Is a church that has a woman serving as pastor deemed to be in friendly cooperation with the SBC?

The answer was never forthcoming, at least not by April 2023 when Basham’s article saw the light of day.

All that changed a mere two months later, but Basham’s careful, though lengthy, walk through the mechanics of SBC decision-making remains a worthwhile Sunday afternoon read. The institutional stonewalling Mike Law encountered in trying — and failing — to get a straightforward answer to his question serves as an effective emetic for anyone who has swallowed the notion that with respect to the Christian faith, bigger is better. Are churches in any way better served by management at the national level than at the local level? I think not.

Blazing Saddleback

The road to leading the astute reader to this rather obvious conclusion runs through Rick Warren and the 6,000 churches he claims associate with his Saddleback fellowship, which ordained three women in 2021. The story of the on-again, off-again relationship between Warren’s powerful bloc and the SBC reads more like the Democrat primaries than anything with which discerning Christians would ever want to get involved. I have touched on Warren’s newfound egalitarianism in this forum at some length. His three arguments for why women should teach men in church meetings may be found here. To call them light and fluffy would be an undeserved compliment.

We can read Warren’s essentially content-free arguments for the ordination of women one of two ways. Perhaps they are evidence of his incompetence at interpreting scripture, in which case his value to the evangelical community and the work of the Lord has been wildly overrated. Far more likely, they are evidence of his willingness to sacrifice truth on the altar of popularity, in which case I am unlikely to take anything he says in the future at face value.

Men like Rick Warren are fluent in seminary jargon like “eisegesis” but mysteriously ignorant of the illegitimacy of a straw man argument. Of such, the apostle Paul famously said, “The things I am writing you are a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized.” Or, as the New King James puts it, “If anyone is ignorant, let him be ignorant.” With respect to the question of women serving as pastors, Warren is no longer orthodox. The apostle Paul called his view ignorant, and he ought to be ignored.

Ignorance on a Pedestal

Instead, Megan Basham reveals the 2022 Southern Baptist Convention put Warren on a pedestal, giving him unprecedented opportunity to air his views, double the time limit imposed on those speaking from the floor. Warren used his precious time to toot his own horn, noting that he grew Saddleback to become the largest church in the SBC and that he had trained 1.1 million pastors, “more than all the seminaries put together”. The metamessage, of course, was that Saddleback and its affiliates were too big and important to disfellowship. The SBC needed Warren, he thought, more than Warren needed the SBC.

However, by 2023, things had changed. The SBC began to respond to its more conservative elements and expelled four churches from association with the Convention, including Saddleback. The SBC then rejected Warren’s appeal for reinstatement in June 2023, in which he pointed to broad areas of historical agreement between the SBC and Saddleback, the metamessage there being that ordaining women is too trivial a matter to split over. I suspect the apostle Paul would have disagreed. This is precisely what “not recognized” means.

In summary, the SBC’s credentials committee, along with numerous representatives of the Convention, displayed extreme reluctance to do anything about the ordination of women in associated churches until push came to shove (in one case overlooking a woman pastor in their association for 30 years until Warren’s burgeoning sense of entitlement put the spotlight on her), and even then, getting a statement from them was like pulling teeth. This is in the nature of large organizations, which generally put off hard decisions as long as possible and make every effort to avoid being pinned down about anything if they can help it.

The Last Big Biblical Convention

One has to admit the early Christians had it all over the Southern Baptists, resolving an even more pressing question in the course of a single gathering, with the support of the entire church of the day. Indeed, that mid-first century “convention”, in which the apostles and elders in Jerusalem gathered to weigh in on the question of circumcising Gentiles, was the last time in the biblical record that any major question was resolved by appealing to a central governing body rather than to the elders of local churches. By the end of the first century, the deaths of most or all the original apostles made a consensus agreement among the universally acknowledged human leadership of the Church impossible.

Perhaps that meant that local churches with good leadership prospered and local churches with bad leadership did not, an unfortunate ending for those churches that had their golden lampstand removed from its place by the Head of the Church. (That’s a level of “disfellowshiping” clout of which the SBC credentials committee can only dream.) But what the impossibility of consensus definitely meant is that Satan’s efforts to harm the universal church Christ has been building for twenty centuries have been severely hampered by its God-given leadership requirements. Wherever these rules for recognizing elders are obeyed, local church autonomy is the inevitable outcome, which means that no governing body like the SBC’s credentials committee has anything authoritative to say about what you do in your own local church. As we find in Revelation 2 and 3, these are responsible directly to Christ. However, where the rules are rejected or downplayed, and where Christians come to believe there is strength in numbers or valuable synergies to exploit by bringing churches into formal association under one governing body, the outcome is that a single group of men wield an outsized influence over local congregations and attempt to make decisions too consequential for their combined wisdom.

The Beginning of Sorrows

That works well when credentials committees stick to scripture, although there is much howling and wailing from the disfellowshiped. It works less well when, as is inevitable some years down the road, the committee elects to abandon the Bible’s teaching concerning the ordination of women, as Rick Warren appealed to the committee to do. (Basham’s article also hints this is only the beginning of sorrows, as Saddleback is apparently also squishy on LGBT issues.)

What we should never overlook in the wealth of detail Basham provides about the mechanics of SBC decision-making is that the very existence of a committee empowered to make choices about how 47,000 churches and 13 million members define orthodoxy is an affront to the headship of Christ and a massive spiritual danger to the congregants who associate with it. All the eggs are in one basket, something our Lord never intended. Thankfully, this time Rick Warren’s straw man arguments weren’t what the committee wanted to hear.

Next time, who knows?