Some of you know that the SBC has been having an important internal discussion about churches with female pastors. Our doctrinal statement is clear that while both men and women are gifted for ministry, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by scripture. That view was hard-won through the conservative resurgence of the 1980’s and 1990’s and was decisively inscribed in our confessional standard in the year 2000. That view was also overwhelmingly reaffirmed in our annual meeting last month in New Orleans as the convention voted to remove two churches with female pastors—one church with female pastors in associate positions and another with a female senior…

It’s been nearly a week since the SBC annual meeting finished up in New Orleans. I have been fascinated to read all of the “reports” and commentary that have come out over the last seven days. One thing that has become very clear. Even some of the “straight news” reporting has been beholden to a narrative that distorts what actually happened. According to the narrative, abuse reforms “slowed down” while Southern Baptists reasserted the “patriarchy” by excluding female pastors. The New York Times published a “report” that amounts to little more than thinly veiled contempt. The article frets about an “ultraconservative” take-over and reduces the SBC’s relevance to being “a…

In yesterday’s post about what happened at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), I mentioned that messengers voted to amend our doctrinal statement, The Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M). For me, this was perhaps the most stunning and slightly terrifying things that happened at our annual meeting. What do I mean by that? I agree with the changes theologically but I don’t agree with what we did procedurally. All it takes is a motion and a simple majority vote to amend the BF&M. There is no way that it should be that easy to change our entire denomination’s doctrinal basis. Our SBC seminaries and mission boards already must subscribe to the…

The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is now in the books, and this one was pretty epic. The reason we exist as a denomination is to partner together for the purposes of the Great Commission. Which is just another way of saying that we believe that like-minded believers can reach more people for the gospel and train more ministers for the work if we pool our resources together. That is what we have been doing for over a century and a half, and that is what we are doing now. That’s why the sending ceremony for our missionaries encapsulates for everyone every year why we do what…

Yesterday, Colin Smothers and I released a podcast previewing some of the items that will be coming before the SBC next week. Because it is the CBMW podcast, we focused entirely on issues related to gender and sexuality, and we spent the bulk of our time talking about Saddleback, Rick Warren, and female pastors. We spoke a little bit about the various proposals for structural change that have been circulating, and I reiterated my support for the Law amendment. But by far, I do believe that the most important matter before messengers on the question of female pastors is how the convention deals with Saddleback. It’s very important that the…

Liberalism and pragmatism aren’t the same thing, but they often lead to the same destination. Liberalism guts the authority of Scripture by assaulting the Bible’s integrity. Pragmatism guts the authority of scripture by pitting “what works” against “what’s true.” The latter approach is on full display in a recent mass email that Rick Warren has sent to as many Southern Baptist pastors as he could find. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. There are a number of howlers in this thing, but the gist of Warren’s message is that Southern Baptists have to make a choice between following a confession or doing the Great Commission.…

One of the most astonishing developments of late modernity has been the mainstreaming of transgenderism. In retrospect, the path to our current moment is clear enough (see Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing grown men in earnest behaving like a cartoonish caricature of an adolescent girl. And yet examples of this kind of thing are proliferating, and anyone refusing to go along with this risks all manner of social and perhaps even professional ostracism and recriminations. It is like Americans have gotten a really bad fever with no indication in sight that the fever will ever break.…

Southern Baptists have been having an intramural debate about how to ensure that our complementarian convictions remain a firm part of our cooperative effort together. Thankfully, there seems to be broad agreement with what the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M) says. We can’t be certain until the annual meeting next month, but I’m reasonably confident that we have broad agreement about what to do with Saddleback. Nevertheless, there is still some disagreement about other measures that we might take to make sure our complementarian commitments are clear. Pastor Mike Law has proposed an amendment to the SBC Constitution that would add some clarity, and I have already endorsed that proposal…