Thanks for your patience. Life does not get less busy, but it’s fun. Here’s an essay on the state of the largest Protestant Christian denomination in America. I started writing this last month, and it took me a while to organize my thoughts.
This may feel a bit like Sunday school, but be honest, we could use a bit more God talk. And you may find this one niche, but if you zoom out, I think it’s hyper-relevant. If Christians cannot figure out their direction amongst themselves, then what role will they play in the culture wars? Worse yet, should they be permitted to have a role at all? See you in the comments.
I was there when it happened. The 2023 Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana. Where were you?
We Baptists, the largest protestant “denomination” (more on this bit of chicanery later) in the United States, and the second largest religious denomination in the U.S. overall, had a doozy of an annual meeting this year. There was everything you could want in the high drama of religious and cultural politics within an annual meeting of people who share, or claim to share, about 99% of our belief structure.
There is much we actually do agree on. The reality of sin and our need for Christ. God as trinity. The need for evangelistic presence at home and abroad.
But the convention focused on some of our purported disagreements. Primarily, the role of women in church leadership.
In order to explain the growing fissure, it is necessary to explain the way our denomination functions. The fact is, we are not a denomination at all. This is by design. We are convention, a group, a convening of churches that share resources and a vision of reaching people far from God with the gospel.
The convention is modeled after a democracy. Our churches are expressions of the spirit of individuality. Each church sends representatives who vote on major issues, which we call resolutions. Officially, we have no creed, and our churches do not function in a hierarchy like our mainline compatriots. We are a fellowship of autonomous churches who exist in voluntary cooperation with one another.
Except that none of that is quite true.
We all vote, but not all of the churches in our “denomination” are represented at each year’s convention. We vote on the issues, but we only become familiar with them at the convention unless we are hopelessly involved in the Twitter subsphere dominated by the more bombastic pastors in our group. We have no creed, except of course, for the “Baptist Faith and Message,” a document that all churches are expected to closely align with. We have no hierarchy, no papacy, and yet those who are deemed to be insufficiently committed to our non-creed will be found to have broken fellowship. And in response, we break with them right back.
Those that exist outside of our world will be shocked to know we have wings, fringes, not unlike the American political system. There is a vanishingly small contingent of “liberals,” largely holdovers from the losing side so called “Baptist Reformation” of the 1970s and 80s. They hold no power, win no votes, and turn no hearts. There is a not so small blend of what could be called “conservatives” which speaks of a theological conservatism manifested in a rigid (read, pharisaical) morality that goes beyond what is required of a biblical people, rather than political conservatism.
Then there is everyone else. We largely agree on things, though due to the denominational commitment to the autonomy of individual church bodies, we often speak past one another, misusing or misinterpreting language in our decision making, erring on the side of the conservatives.
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, the faithful ask. As it turns out, quite a lot. If there is any art in faith, it must be said that our art imitates reality.
The Southern Baptist Convention, in imitating the modern American political system, has managed to come down on the opposite side of the cultural moment than popular culture would dictate. This should be a good thing. And yet, we remain disconnected from the center of the truth.
This is embodied in the essential debate of this year’s meeting. The most pressing and dramatic of the conflicts came up between the liberals and conservatives over the role of women in our congregations. As it stands, and has stood for decades, women are not permitted to serve as pastors in Southern Baptist Churches. The reasons for this are based in biblical interpretation, theology of gender, and historical precedent.
Two churches were removed from fellowship over the issue. The first, Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky is led by a female head pastor. She came in person to defend herself and her church. It must be said that biblical and theological qualifications aside, she showed herself to be a force. Brave, articulate, passionate. Qualities typically lauded among the religious in their pastoral leadership.
The disaffiliation with Fern Creek was never in question. Over 90 percent of the messengers present voted to remove the church.
The more interesting case, and more public, was Saddleback Church. Until recently the church was led by Rick Warren, a bygone celebrity of our denomination, in large part due to the success of his 2002 book, The Purpose Driven Life.
I have memories of the church I grew up in reading this book en masse, basing our Sunday school classes on its chapters. If I looked hard enough, I think I could find my mother’s copy somewhere in her attic.
The battle for Saddleback’s disfellowship was played out via trial-by-combat, Warren the champion for the California church fighting to the death against Albert Mohler, the de facto king of the ultra-conservative faction. Warren is no liberal, but was painted as such for his nuanced opinion on the role of women in his congregation.
Saddleback’s issue is multi-layered and complicated. Their church has several campuses under the leadership of a single head pastor, but also under the leadership of pastors of each campus. If a woman serves in one of these secondary positions, is she, or her church, in violation of the Baptist/biblical principal?
There are other questions raised by the Saddleback controversy that apply to other churches in our convention, to our theological assertions and interpretations. What about women who serve as pastors of a specific demographic? Can women be children’s pastors? Youth pastors? Worship pastors? What if the function is the same, but the title is different? Youth directors?
Is the problem when she exercises authority over men in teaching, such as the female conference speaker? Or is the problem when she exercises habitual authority over a congregation, serving in a codified role rather than a one off teaching? Is it bad for her to “pastor” men exclusively, or anyone at all? At what age is the cutoff for men? Can she teach second grade boys? Or is it anyone with male genitalia? If she “pastors” people, but we do not call her pastor, is that ok? And if a tree falls, and only women are around, how many will it take to run and get the pastor to tell them if it made a sound?
The essence of Rick Warren’s argument was not that he had answers to the questions above, or that he wanted the convention to adopt new ideas. In our political analogy, he was the libertarian. His message to the SBC was “act like Southern Baptists.” In other words, since the SBC has no creed, no litmus test, and we agree on the essentials, leave us alone and go back to the work that churches are supposed to be doing. I found myself in disagreement with him over the importance of the issue, but sympathetic to the sentiment.
Saddleback Church was found “not to be in friendly cooperation” with the SBC by a large margin, and removed from fellowship.
I break with thee, I break with thee.
Some rejoiced, and we moved onto new battles. There was an especially poignant moment when an organized faction of radicals from the far reaches of the conservative side asked each seminary president after their report to give an answer to some version of the question, “If abortion is wrong, why are we letting mothers off the hook for murder?”
Funny how quickly we find ourselves halfway down the slope and sliding fast.
The debate highlighted the problems in all sides of the issue.
The liberal wing’s problems are obvious. The bible, which Southern Baptists by and large believe is the true word of God, is clear about the role of head pastor at the very least. The advocacy of the opposite is an abandonment of the SBC stance on the Bible. This is not friendly cooperation. Nor is this an issue of interpretation.
Additionally, the liberal group, like their political counterparts, tend to let anything go. One can call oneself a Christian and believe and do anything. To thine own self be true. This is a beautiful idea. But if we are good on our own, the “Christ” in “Christian” is rendered meaningless. Whereas their opposition seems to want to section themselves off from culture completely, this side seems to bow to it. What role does the Church play in the cultural zeitgeist? Should it play a role at all? Athens, Jerusalem?
I find the problems amongst the most vocal, most conservative wing of our denomination to be more insidious.
They claim to believe the bible is true, and yet the same passage that renders sex a qualifying factor of pastoral leadership also demand that pastors be humble and not arrogant, gentle and not bullies, peaceful and not divisive. Self-controlled and hospitable. In elevating their own gender, while starting fights on twitter and talking down to those who disagree, they ignore swaths of scripture that demands their attention and obedience.
They hide behind false intellectualism of coffee-shop theologies and men like Albert Mohler. They elevate Calvin and Peter, denigrate Arminius and James, and ignore other faithful they deem to be out of step with orthodoxy as though they have a monopoly on it.
They do not reach people. They defend their dwindling populations by saying they are staying true to God’s word despite their lack of growth, wearing it like a badge of honor. A convenient excuse considering the Bible is littered with examples of congregations who suffered under persecution for their commitment to the truth, and yet experienced dramatic growth. Consider Israel, whose descendants are to be uncountable like stars in the sky, and the Christian church, who grew by thousands in single meetings despite Roman aggression.
They clang their symbols on twitter and bang their fists on the pulpit about their cultural and political opinions. But they show no love to the stranger, the foreigner, the mother who has an abortion. Most if not all Southern Baptists believe it is a sin to do so, but is God not gracious? Is God not a healer of wounds and a binder of the enemies that crouch at the door waiting to devour? Can he not save? And yet these pastors can muster no grace, no love. The bible is also clear on those who call themselves Christians but have not love. Abortion could be wrong, a deep sin, and the gracious hand of God still might call the a mother to come and find hope.
To be graceless is to be Godless.
Then there is the SBC writ large, with her own problems.
Problems with definitions and precision. What does the word pastor mean? The Greek is the same for pastor, overseer, bishop, elder and presbyter. Is our constant classification of demographic areas of ministry leadership as “pastor” a corruption or a complication? Our language is not precise. I mean after all, there are Southern Baptists in Vancouver and Portland and London.
And then there is our aversion to group identities, to creeds and comprehensive theologies. Southern Baptists are rightfully bent toward individual responses to the word of God and the autonomy of each member church to decide its own governance model. But at what cost? The constant debate and fissure over the tenants of our faith?
This presents a message to the outside world that does not reflect the unity of God’s body. We fight within, and the message without is one of disunion. The outside world is supposed to be able to identify Christians by our love for one another, Does our convention reflect our love?
In agriculture, when an invasive species overgrows the desired product, or the ground has become too crowded with the noisiest of vegetation so that the crop or forest or veritable beauty becomes suffocated, sometimes extreme measures are called for.
Those whose job it is to make sure that what is good grows sometimes prescribe setting fire to the area in order to burn away what chokes the life out of the plants that bear fruit and grain and good. The fire is a reset, a destruction for the sake of the whole idea of agricultural success.
Perhaps this is what is needed amongst our convention. A planned and deliberate fire-setting for the good. A reset.
This looks like an honest accounting of the fringes, a commitment to precision in the way we deal with doctrine, and a gracious and firm understanding of what it is our goals are. God’s honor and glory. Reaching the lost. Forwarding the truth in our culture.
It also means reevaluating pastors for more than their requisite genitalia, but also for their adherence to the other, equally important qualifications set forth in scripture. It means making our theology a twin pillar in our practice alongside evangelistic zeal. It means loving our neighbor while changing his mind.
In short, this will require the burning down of some of our most deeply held ideas, those that exist outside of biblical teaching of course. Still, the darlings must go swiftly to their graves. It probably means a creed, a system of theology, a rebuke or two. It means a restructuring of finances and focus. It means sending missionaries and valuing unity. It means an overhauling, painful and necessary.
It is no wonder that the Holy Spirit is often described in the New Testament with the metaphor of fire, falling on believers and consuming them and giving them power. God is described in the Old Testament as “an all-consuming fire.” The verse refers to his jealousy. The Hebrew God will not be put in second place for anyone or anything.
One of my favorite Sunday School stories is found in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus walks for miles with two of his followers after they watched him die. They are supernaturally prevented from recognizing him as he tells them how all of history has been pointing to his death. They invite him to dine with them and continue the conversation, and as Jesus breaks the bread to bless it, he disappears, and they finally realize who it was they were talking with. Their spontaneous response is telling.
“Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?”
In our faith, it is always the fire that makes room for the good. The fire that brings revival. The fire that burns away the idols of our own making. The fire that tells our hearts Who it is that we should be walking with on the road of life.
I think, maybe, the fire will burn away all the chaff of distraction. From our purpose. From our mission. From our devotion to the Divine. And when the smoke is gone and the new season comes, we may just find the buds of new faith growing in the ash.
We may even find that the fire has spread to other places. We will reap where we did not sow.
Amen brother- I streamed most of the convention and struggled with a lot of what I saw. For one I feel like this is a step toward stripping autonomy from churches- for better or worse. (Honestly don’t know…) Also, to your point on women leadership in the church- most churches would absolutely fall apart without faithful women filling pastoral duties (by title or not). Theology, practicality, and mission all need to align, but it seems some would be fine throwing everything out but ‘right theology’- no matter the cost.
My biggest issue during the whole thing was the tone so many had. I can’t stand someone at a mic with arrogance and anger underlying every word they say.
Particularly enjoyed this quote:
“They elevate Calvin and Peter, denigrate Arminius and James, and ignore other faithful they deem to be out of step with orthodoxy as though they have a monopoly on it.”
Overturning the ignorance of this this type of indoctrination, which was created by fallen men for thousands and thousands of years now, seems darn near impossible. Yet, it isn’t. Universal truths do not have to be written down or interpreted by anyone in particular, much less a man over a woman, to be understood. The creator and creative force is in each of us and available to all. It requires nothing more than an open heart uncorrupted by the beliefs of others. I sweep with a broad brush, but there is always a simple answer to the seemingly over-complex.