Southern Baptists Kick Out Their Largest Church Because it has a Woman in a Pastor's Role
The largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention, Saddleback Valley Community Church, a sprawling, multi-campus congregation in Orange County, California where the founding pastor, Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, recently retired. There are actually three women on the pastoral ministry staff of Saddleback Valley church, the one generating the controversy among Southern Baptists is Stacey Wood, wife of senior pastor Andy Wood, who was just recently installed in that role.
Some Southern Baptists will argue into the ground that women cannot serve in leadership roles in the church and claim a few passages of scripture as authoritative on the subject. Frankly, it is only a literal interpretation of the Bible that leads to this conclusion. Even then, there is no actual "commandment" or statement that forbids or restricts women from church leadership, including serving as a pastor, or "episkopos," or bishop as the term is translated. It takes applying ancient culture, and what was believed about the role of women in society in the first century to come up with a restriction against women serving as pastors in Christian churches.
Of course, many Southern Baptists take a "we're right and everyone else is wrong" approach on what they consider to be their doctrinal distinctives, cleverly inventing what they refer to as a biblical "hermeneutic" which supports their interpretation. Of the two passages they point to, one is not very conclusive on the matter. The other is debatable regarding the scope of its meaning, and is not interpreted or applied literally in any Southern Baptist church, except when they want to restrict women from the office of pastor. That, frankly, is just hypocrisy.
I Timothy 3:1-11 is a list of requirements for bishops/overseers, which is equated with "pastor" in church jargon, and deacons. The single statement that Southern Baptists fall on as proof of the legitimacy of their doctrine that women can't be pastors is in verse 2, where, among other things, a bishop, or pastor, must be above reproach, the husband of only one wife, along with a list of other virtues and qualities expected for a church leader. Southern Baptists insist that "husband of one wife" can't be a woman, since she can't be a husband.
The most likely meaning behind that phrase is either "married only once," given Jesus' views on divorce, or in a culture where plural marriages were still relatively common, an exclusion of polygamists from the leadership of a church. It is not accompanied anywhere by a statement that suggests women are forever disqualified because they are women, something that Southern Baptist theologians universally require as a standard corroboration for any other doctrine they believe.
Just prior to this passage, I Timothy 2:12 says, "Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent." This is followed by a rationale referring to the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, though in that account, Adam is ultimately the one God holds accountable for their actions in the Garden of Eden, not Eve. In the other restrictive passage about women keeping silence in the church, found in I Corinthians 14:34-35, most Bible scholars believe that the context of women keeping silent in the church and learning in full submission must be somewhat unique to the church in Corinth. There is, again, no language indicating this is forever and all time and though he uses the phrase "As in all the churches of the saints," he does not point out in writing, to any other church, that this is the way things ought to be.
In reality, if there is a Southern Baptist church that literally follows these verses in every aspect of their language, doesn't have women serving in its ministry in multiple capacities, and which requires that they sit in submission, not ask questions and not participate in discussions, but save all that for their husband, I'd like to see where it is and how well that works. That would be consistent practice of a literal interpretation of theses verses. And if churches aren't going to apply the literal interpretation exactly as it is written, then it is unreasonable and inconsistent to apply it only to women who serve in a role identified by a church as a pastor. Baptists also loudly proclaim that the pastor role in a church is a model of servant-leadership, not authoritarian, rejecting the idea that a pastor is a "priest" with spiritual authority. So if that's the case, then a woman serving as a pastor would neither be "usurping" the role of a male in the church, nor exercising authority over one.
The bottom line on interpreting this is that by the rules put forth in any Southern Baptist seminary class in biblical interpretation, three scattered references, all from the same author, do not a doctrine make. Except in this case, and any other doctrine they conclude supports their social agenda. Or I could just say that they're hypocritical and leave it at that.
The Implications of Saddleback Valley's Exit from the SBC
In the Southern Baptist Convention, which lays claim to being the nation's largest Protestant denomination, there is no central hierarchy. Churches affiliate voluntarily and keep their independence and autonomy, which includes the ability to interpret the Bible as they see fit. There are some specific doctrinal requirements by which the denomination's credentials committee can exclude churches from participation, which amounts to nothing more than refusing to seat their messengers at the annual convention meeting.
It is somewhat ironic that the denomination's largest church is in Southern California, and not somewhere in Dixieland. Resulting from a couple of decades of church planting efforts outside the deep South in the 80's Saddleback Valley started as a small group in the home of its founding pastor, Rick Warren, who is now one of the most revered and visible figures in American Evangelicalism, author of one of the best selling books ever. It has grown into the largest single church in the denomination, considerably larger than any two or three megachurches combined in any southern state. Unlike most SBC churches, it doesn't track church membership, but reports a weekly attendance average of almost 24,000, four times greater than the average attendance of the next largest Southern Baptist church.
While the SBC has been leaking members like a sieve, including from most of its well-known megachurches, and in every state convention across the south and southwest, Saddleback Valley, in one of the most secular counties and states in the country, is expanding, has multiple campuses, and continues to look for space into which it can expand. As the number of baptisms, representing new converts to Christianity, has reached its lowest level in five decades among the churches of the convention, Saddleback Valley baptizes more adults in a year than some entire state conventions of churches do.
By contrast, with a membership that peaked at 16 million in 2005, but with an average attendance of right at 5 million, the SBC as a denomination has lost 3 million members in a decade and a half, and is approaching the 2 million mark in decline of attendance since then. So tossing a church that bucks those trends surely makes a lot of sense, especially over a secondary doctrinal issue like having a woman serve, under male authority, in the role of a teaching pastor, which is why Saddleback Valley was booted.
It's not like there will be a lot of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth--a biblical expression--among Saddleback Valley's congregation over this news. I doubt that one in ten people who attend the church are even vaguely aware that the church belongs to the SBC, and I'd bet there's not one in a thousand who cares. Southern Baptists have, for decades, proclaimed that the numerical and financial growth of their denomination, which lasted all the way up to 2005, though it began slowing in the 80's, was a sign of God's blessings on them, as opposed to the "liberal, leftist, mainline" denominations which started seeing declining membership in the 70's.
In an online discussion board when the recommendation was first brought to the convention that Saddleback Valley be "disfellowshipped" for this move, it was noted that Saddleback Valley shows signs of being blessed by God with numerical growth and the expansion of their ministry, while the SBC is staring at a massive decline that includes major budget cuts and slashes in its ministry support.
A defender of the SBC said, flatly, "Growth isn't always a sign of God's blessing." Except, of course, if it is happening to the SBC. Then it is. And that's the reasoning we're up against here.
I won't comment on that bit of hypocrisy. But I will note the realistic implications of the convention's executive board taking this action. The convention itself, meeting in Anaheim last June, inside a circle of Saddleback Valley congregation sites, wouldn't do it. So this backhanded, good-old-boy, action by an executive committee still stacked with fundamentalists, went around the credentials committee and took action on their own. And that is very typical of the backward, provincial way the Southern Baptist Convention does business.
This will most likely hasten the exit of many churches which have been riding the fence between remaining affiliated or severing ties with what they see as an increasingly irrelevant, cumbersome, bureaucratic religious organization. Saddleback Valley Church and its leadership is far more familar to a large group of churches, including many Southern Baptist churches in the west, than anyone who is in leadership in the SBC. With the drought in winning new converts deepening among Southern Baptists, many churches turn to Saddleback Valley for leadership in what really matters in a church, rather than to some entrenched bureaucrats from a failing bureaucracy.
This move has the potential for generating a long-predicted denominational split. About a third of the churches in the SBC have women on staff with the title "pastor". Most work with pre-schoolers, children, teenagers or family ministry, but this is one of those dividing lines between the autonomy of a local church and denominational enforcement of control. In a denomination where the loss of an entire generation, and almost half of another, is catastrophic, I can see this setting the stage for a contentious convention in New Orleans this June, and messengers forcing yet another floor vote to overturn this executive committee ruling.
There are already doctrinal and denominational political issues simmering in what has been a very hostile convention environment for a while now, as the old "conservative resurgence" leadership ages. This was heated up by the abrupt dismissal of one of its "architects," Paige Patterson, as President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, for failures in handling sexual abuse reports at both of the seminaries where he served as president. Patterson's allies have formed a group called the Conservative Baptist Network and are campaigning, political style, to get the appointive power of the SBC presidency back and to legislate their brand of conservative fundamentalism over the convention's institutions. They've been spectacularly voted down by messengers in the convention meetings.
If they don't get their way in New Orleans this June, many of them have threatened an exit or a cutback in financial support, though few of them are major financial givers at this point anyway. I can see a floor vote overturning the executive committee ruling about Saddleback Valley as a line in the sand for both sides. If churches see that their affiliation is threatened because they call the staff leader of their pre-school and children's ministries "pastor," or because there is a female church administrator who has that title, they'll just leave rather than put up with edicts coming from a denominational bureaucracy whose authority to do so is questionable at best.
They Just Can't Resist the Temptation to Control Other People
Whether it's advancing white Christian nationalism or enforcing doctrinal parameters on independent, autonomous churches, there are some Southern Baptists who just can't get past their control issues. They are compelled to make everyone line up behind them, no matter how erroneous their idea or how much it makes them look like hypocrites.
When Thomas Jefferson and James Madison set the churches of America free from state interference, building a wall of separation with the constitution and guaranteeing religious freedom, they opened the door to the biggest opportunity for ministry and evangelism that the Christian church had ever seen since the first century. But the prejudices, bigotry and corruption built in to institutional religion soon set up a severely divided church, behind denominational walls held in place by obscure, off-beat, out of context interpretations of the Bible. As the denominational walls went up between Christians and churches the opportunity slipped away.
The increasing secularization of America in this age is the direct result of the failure of Christian churches to get out of their institutional prison and become the real church. They have only themselves to blame for their decline and fall, and this is an egregious example of exactly that. As a denomination, Southern Baptists have seen their best days. This is another shot to the foot.
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