Warren makes emotional appeal to Southern Baptist delegates on women pastors: Bring my church back

The Rev. Rick Warren has delivered thousands of messages asking for a spiritual response during his 42 years as founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California.

But few of his appeals were freighted with as much importance as the 3-minute-and-10-second address he made Tuesday to the approximately 11,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s business meeting.

In February, the denomination’s executive committee voted to expel the megachurch for appointing a woman as a “teaching pastor.” Southern Baptist doctrine — established in a document called the “Baptist Faith and Message” — restricts the position of pastor to men.

Mr. Warren, a fourth-generation Baptist preacher, said his congregation agrees with “99.99999999999%” of the doctrinal statement, differing only with “one word” in that document.

He asked, “Isn’t that close enough?”

Mr. Warren said some circumstances do justify booting churches from the denomination, but this disagreement was not one of those.

“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,” Mr. Warren said.

“But the 1,928 churches with women on pastoral staff have not sinned,” he said. “If doctrinal disagreements between Baptists are considered sin, we all get kicked out! You’ll never get 100% of Baptists to agree 100% on 100% of every doctrine.”

In response, the Rev. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the prohibition on female pastors was inserted into the “Faith and Message” statement “because 30 years ago, this issue threatened to tear this denomination apart.”

He said, “Southern Baptists decided this is not just a matter of church polity. It is not just a matter of hermeneutics. It’s a matter of biblical commitment, a commitment to the scripture that unequivocally we believe limits the office of pastor to men.”

Saddleback was one of three SBC congregations challenging their removal and seeking a vote of delegates at the business session in New Orleans, which concludes Wednesday. One is appealing on the same grounds as Saddleback — Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham is the pastor.

A third congregation, Freedom Church in Vero Beach, Florida, appealed its expulsion over an issue involving alleged sexual abuse by its pastor.

The church said the cleric resigned in May and thus the church should be readmitted. A member of the SBC Executive Committee said the resignation was a tactic to rejoin the SBC.

All three appeals involved paper ballots so the results won’t be available until Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the SBC Executive Committee confirmed.

In other convention business, the Rev. Bart Barber, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, won a second one-year term as SBC president.

Mr. Barber defeated the Rev. Mike Stone, who was also a runner-up in 2021, by a margin of 68.4% to 31.4%.

Speaking to delegates in opening remarks, Mr. Barber made an oblique reference to the sexual abuse case revealed last year, whose aftershocks continue reverberating throughout the 13.3-million member denomination.

He said Baptists should look for the good while recognizing the bad.

“A good sense of taste arising out of a distinctively Christian aesthetic empowers you to acknowledge the ugly things in the world without losing hope,” Mr. Barber said. “Even when the ugly is all around you, Jesus empowers you to be able to see the beautiful things and to dwell upon them.”