Baptist News Global: Saddleback's Retired Pastor Wants to Focus on the Great Commission
At its annual convention in June, the Southern Baptist Convention's messengers acted on a motion presented at a meeting two years prior to remove Saddleback Valley Community Church from its position as a church "in friendly cooperation" with the denomination. The reason given for the motion was that the church had violated a common interpretation of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which is the confesssional statement establishing the doctrinal and theological beliefs held in common by the seminaries, mission boards, commissions and executive committee that make up the denomination itself, and which are supported by offerings given by its 45,000 cooperating churches.
Saddleback Valley had ordained three women to the gospel ministry of the church and put them in positions of ministry responsibility on the church staff. One of them, Stacie Wood, the wife of the church's recently called lead pastor, Andy Wood, was named "teaching pastor" and occasionally has preaching responsibilities in the Sunday morning service. Those actions were deemed out of step with the SBC's doctrinal statement prohibiting women from serving in the office of pastor.
A messenger made the motion to declare Saddleback as "not being in friendly cooperation" with the denomination at the convention's annual meeting in Nashville in 2021, and the convention's President, chairing the meeting, referred it to the credentials committee. There's no real guidance regarding exactly how closely churches must follow the Baptist Faith and Message to be considered "in friendly cooperation," except on a few specific issues identified in the bylaws, such as actions which affirm or approve of homosexual behavior or which are deemed to be racist in nature. So, while the credentials committee "studied" the viability of the motion, not issuing a ruling on it in 2022, another messenger, a pastor from Arlington, Virginia, drew up a proposed bylaw that includes churches which call women serving on staff "pastor" also "not being in friendly cooperation" with the convention.
Contrasting Saddleback Valley Church With the Rest of the Southern Baptist Convention
Rick Warren, author of two of the best-selling books in Christian publishing, and retired founding pastor of Saddleback Valley, says the church focused on "the Great Commision." That's a way of saying their main interest wasn't playing denominational politics, it was finding people in the church's community and leading them to an experience of Christian conversion, or salvation as Evangelicals call it. And so they have.
In a Baptist church, as the name hints, when someone converts and becomes a Christian, they are baptized by immersion in water, and made a member of the local church. Since its founding in the early 1980's, by focusing on the Great Commission, Saddleback Valley has grown into a multi-campus congregation that has the largest membership and attendance of any church in the Southern Baptist Convention. That's unusual for a church located in suburban Orange County, California, far away from the dixieland "Bible belt" where culture and tradition is the biggest attraction to membership of Southern Baptist churches, not evangelism.
In fact, while Saddleback Valley has grown into the largest church in the SBC, the rest of the denomination is losing members at a faster rate than the mainline Protestant denominations are doing. Since it reached its peak in 2006, more than 3.2 million members have left the convention, and weekly attendance has dropped by 2 million since that time. It is significant that more than half of the membership and attendance declines have occurred in just the past four years. So in spite of being kicked out of the convention because it has three women pastors on its ministerial staff, Saddleback Valley continues to grow at a fast pace, baptizing more new converts in a year than several entire state Baptist conventions do. And while 90% of Saddlebacks baptisms are adults, more than 90% of those in the rest of the Southern Baptist Convention are under 12, and are the children of church members.
Shortly after Saddleback was disfellowshipped from the convention, another large megachurch, Elevation Church, based in Charlotte, North Carolina with several affiliated congregations in both North and South Carolina, also announced its exit from the SBC. The wife of Elevation Church's pastor Steven Furtick, is also a co-pastor of the church and their exit was pre-emptive, deciding on their own that they would go rather than being voted out. These two churches account for more than 3% of the total baptisms in the SBC in any given year. In a denomination where baptisms have declined by 80% in less than two decades, that will cut deep.
Elevation's departure is also a very likely sign of things to come. More than 3,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention have women on the staff serving in some kind of pastoral role, though very few actually have a woman in the senior pastor, or lead pastor role. Some will simply wait and see if they're on the "hit list" compiles by the same pastor who made the motion to adopt the bylaw requiring the dismissal of churches with women pastors. But, in weighing the value of the ministry of their local congregation in their own community againt their affiliation with the SBC, I think most will pick their own internal ministry, since being Southern Baptist has become a confusing tangle of loyalty to fundamentalist doctrine and theology that falls outside the scope of most SBC churches, along with the interference and confusion of intruding right wing politics. According to the hit list that has been compiled of the names of those churches who are next for being kicked out, most already have left the denomination of their own accord. By the time the convention in Indianapolis rolls around next June, I'd say 2,800 of the 3,000 churches will have stayed loyal to their female pastors, and dumped their SBC affiliation.
Prosperity Under God's Blessing versus Declining Membership and Attendance
Along with Saddleback, Fern Creek Baptist Church, a congregation of about 150 active members in Louisville, Kentucky, was kicked out because it has a female senior pastor, Linda Barnes Popham. Reverend Popham has been on staff at Fern Creek in ministry for 40 years, and has been pastor since 1990. Fern Creek is a much smaller congregation than either Saddleback or Elevation church, but under Pastor Popham's leadership, the church has constitently ministered to its community, maintained a stable membership, and baptized about twice the number of people that a church its size normally sees in the course of a year.
Fern Creek is in the shadow of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination's flagship theological school is just 10 miles away. Countless seminary students over the years have been influenced by Pastor Popham's leadership and preaching. It's not hard to imagine that women who were students, and who may have attended the church, found inspiration for their own ministries there. It's not a church, like some others in the area, that either severed ties with the SBC, or joined with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as an alternative to the autocratic SBC. They stayed, and continued to support the denomination until they got the boot. Critics can be as caustic or as dismissive as they like, those who are members there see God's hand at work in their church, and know they wouldn't see that if God's blessings weren't on their pastor. I don't think this is as big an issue, as far as God is concerned, as it is for the Southern Baptist Convention. In fact, I don't think God cares much about it at all, since he's the one Pastor Popham says called her to serve there.
Warren points out the flaws in the conservative interpretation of the few places in the New Testament they use to determine women shouldn't be pastors. The link from Baptist News Global gives a good rundown of his perspective. I have a tendency to trust what he has to say, based on his education, his leadership, clearly blessed by God in reaching thousands of people with the Christian gospel, and millions who were inspired and blessed by his ministry through The Purpose Driven Life. The manner in which he has handled both his ministry success, and his personal success, exemplifies the humility that Jesus called being "poor in spirit" in the Sermon on the Mount.
So if he has discerned, from his study of the scripture, an interpretation which allows the spiritual gifts of women to be used in the church, unprejudiced by the influence of ancient cultural biases against them, then I trust his judgement to a greater degree than I do those who seem to be protecting the patriarchy they've created, rather than opening the door to blessing for the church. And when I see the ministry of Linda Barnes Popham, as the lead pastor of a church that is being the body of believers that Christ intended for them to be, that's an affirmation of her call to serve the church and of God's hand of blessing on her ministry.
Compare that with the fussing, bickering, Southern Baptist Convention, facing a rapidly declining membership and attendance, factionalism and divisiveness, characterized by vicious attack blogs tacitly approved by a faction that calls itself the Conservative Baptist Network, and unable to figure out how to handle a large and crippling clergy sexual abuse scandal, turning on the female victims instead. A denomination in which a faction succeeded in driving off the head of its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission because his spiritual conscience discerned how a right wing political candidate many Southern Baptists were supporting was the moral and worldly opposite of the pursuit of righteousness that characterizes the Christian faith.
Do I trust them to correctly discern the meaning of scripture passages related to the role of women in the church? No. Not until they resolve the issues that are bringing them down and causing millions to look for spiritual leadership and discernment elsewhere. Not until there's evidence of their dependence on God's spiritual leadership, and not on their own claims to theological and doctrinal superiority.
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