An unexpected thing happened this week at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) when Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, rose to make a statement that began with, “It’s customary for a guy who’s about to be hung to let him say his dying words.” He said it tongue-in-cheek, but we all knew that he was actually referring to something very serious—that his church is currently under scrutiny from the SBC for ordaining three women as pastors just over a year ago. Just recently, Warren also announced that his successors at Saddleback would be a husband and wife team, both of whom will be pastors leading the…
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Will the SBC Now Accept Women as Pastors?
Last year, Rick Warren’s Saddleback church announced that it had begun ordaining women as pastors. This caused quite a stir at the time because Saddleback is an SBC church, and the SBC’s statement of faith clearly disallows female pastors. Our statement of faith, the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M), says that the church’s …scriptural officers are pastors and deacons. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. So it was not a surprise that a messenger at last year’s convention moved to have Saddleback disfellowshipped from the SBC. This morning, the SBC’s Credentials Committee…
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Pride Month and Ezekiel 16:49
I’ve gotten quite a bit of pushback on a thread I posted on Twitter a couple days ago to resist the abominable observance of “Pride Month.” I was inspired to post the thread in part by Carl Trueman’s excellent column marking the first day of this month-long celebration of sin. (If you haven’t read Trueman’s piece yet, I highly recommend it.) My thread was simply a list of Bible texts dealing with sexual perversion and God’s grace to sinners. You can read the entire thread here, but the push-back I’ve read focuses on the text from Ezekiel 16: “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom… they were haughty…
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How Do Pastors Enforce Their Word? They Don’t.
Jonathan Leeman has a really helpful article dealing with the proper use of pastoral and husbandly authority. This is really insightful stuff, and I commend it to you. There’s a Satanic version of authority and a godly version of authority. There’s authority as intended in creation and exercised in redemption, and authority as exercised in the Fall. Godly authority authors life, like the root of the word itself. It builds up, equips, strengthens, serves. Satanic authority steals, takes, diminishes, destroys. Godly authority, as set down in Scripture and as I’ve witnessed it, is seldom an advantage to those who possess it. It involves leading and making decisions, to be sure.…
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Eyes Wide Open about Abolitionism
Tom Ascol has written a long essay in which he makes the case for the Abolitionist resolution passed at the 2021 SBC and against pro-life dissensions from it. He also engages my last two posts on the subject, so I thought I would write a brief word of response here. Tom Ascol frames our differences in term of class struggle—the SBC “elites” versus the average man in the pew. He writes: It is the elite class that is woefully out of step with the rank-and-file believers who are working hard to see the scourge of abortion brought to an immediate end in our nation… Six times Ascol uses the language…
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An Appeal to Southern Baptists To Support the Pro-life Cause
I am writing this short essay as an appeal to Southern Baptists who care about the pro-life cause. Right now, there is an effort underway by what I believe to be a tiny minority in the SBC to reverse the SBC’s longstanding commitment to the pro-life cause. They call themselves “Abolitionists,” but they are not the only ones who support the abolition of abortion. All sides of this debate want to see abortion abolished. The Abolitionists, however, condemn and repudiate the pro-life movement’s efforts to restrict abortion in whatever measure possible. After the Roe decision in 1973, the pro-life movement eventually coalesced around an incrementalist strategy to abolish abortion. Pro-lifers…
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Why Pro-Lifers Support Laws to Punish Abortionists but Not Mothers
One of the perennial points of debate between pro-lifers and abortion advocates is why pro-lifers don’t support laws to punish women who obtain abortions. Some abortion proponents even argue that this is some sort of inconsistency on the part of pro-lifers—as if not prosecuting women who get abortions reveals that we don’t really believe an abortion actually kills a human being. More recently, abolitionists have agreed with abortion advocates on this point. Abolitionists contend that consistency requires pro-lifers to support the prosecution of the women who subject themselves to abortion procedures. So what’s going on here? Are pro-lifers inconsistent? Should we be passing laws to prosecute post-abortive women? I don’t…
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Candidates for SBC President Discuss the Issues
The three candidates for the Presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention just completed a two hour discussion about the issues facing Southern Baptists. They discussed CRT, the sex-abuse task force, and a variety of other issues. You can watch the video below.
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Overturning Roe and the Attempt To Delegitimize SCOTUS
I’ve been watching the fallout from last night’s bombshell leak of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Of course, this is only a draft and not the court’s final ruling. We won’t know for sure how the court has decided this case until the Court releases it final official ruling. But if this one holds, all I can say is Hallelujah. Roe v. Wade has presided over the legal killing of over 60 million human beings since 1973. That is the holocaust times ten. The regime of Roe v. Wade has effectively given us abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy. And with the body…
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Carl Trueman at T4G Warning about Celebrity Pastors
I have lots of thoughts about the final meeting of Together for the Gospel (T4G) last week. I may try to put some of them together at some point, but that is not the point of my post today. The final T4G has given me an occasion to think back to the most memorable moments from T4G over the years. I’ve already written about one of them. Another one that I have always remembered was from 2012, and it involved Carl Trueman. I will never forget it. In the lead-up to T4G that year, Trueman had published a series of warnings online about celebrity pastors (see here, here, here, here).…
