Bart Barber has the only report that I have been able to find about what happened at the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention (SBTC) yesterday with regard to Fielder Church in Arlington, TX.
If you are unaware of the situation, you can read my previous post about it here. In short, Fielder is a Southern Baptist Church that employs female pastors. After the SBC removed Saddleback Church in 2023, Fielder’s pastor Jason Paredes addressed his congregation, publicly repudiated the SBC’s decision, and said “We unwaveringly, unequivocally, gratefully have female pastors in this church”—to which the congregation responded with raucous applause (see video below). Paredes also made a twenty-minute YouTube video explaining why he thinks the BF&M’s teaching on pastors is in error.
This is Jason Paredes. He voted to keep Rick Warren and Saddleback in the SBC. He openly states that his church has women pastors.
Our SBC leaders thought it would be a good idea to put a man who is proudly in defiance of the BFM2k on the committee to decide what to do about… https://t.co/ufz99Jm3l8 pic.twitter.com/5nd2HEFD3l
— Nate Schlomann (@NateSchlomann) September 14, 2023
From what I have pieced together from pastors who attended the SBTC annual meeting yesterday and from Bart’s post, the SBTC considered three motions with respect to Fielder Church. Kyle Newcomer made a motion to refuse the seating of Fielder’s messengers. Another messenger made a motion to suspend the “rules” so that the messengers could vote to remove Fielder. A third motion requested the Credentials Committee to disaffiliate Fielder Church. All three motions were ruled out of order.
I stayed up last night reading the SBTC’s constitution and bylaws. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds, but based on my reading of those documents and on what has been reported, those three rulings seem correct to me.
However, I disagree with Bart’s analysis of the situation in two respects.
First, what happened at the SBTC is not a trial run of what a “Law amendment” would have been like in the SBC. It is apples and oranges. In any case, the SBTC’s version of the “Law amendment” should not even have been the primary consideration in Fielder’s case, which I will explain below.
Second, Bart says that the Credentials Committee had “no choice but to rule as they did” last summer when they considered the status of Fielder Church. He makes this argument on the basis of the alleged vagueness of the language in SBTC’s version of the “Law amendment.” The problem with this analysis is that it misses Paredes’ and Fielder’s fundamental issue. Fielder’s problem is an ecclesiological problem before it’s a gender problem. Fielder’s pastor is on the record publicly denying that “pastor” is a scriptural office. That is a direct contradiction of the BF&M, which affirms “pastor” as an office of the church. The Credentials Committee should have recognized that last summer and ruled accordingly. The SBTC’s “Law amendment” would not even have come into play if this approach had been taken.
As far as female pastors are concerned, Fielder Church is still in violation of the BF&M, no matter what games they are playing with the title “shepherd.” I couldn’t agree more when Bart says,
I think it is striking that Fielder Church changed not only the titles of the women in various positions in children’s ministry and group administration but also the titles of Jason himself and his entire pastoral team. Fielder seems to be communicating that they actually do regard all of their “Shepherds” to be the same thing—a pastor/shepherd. That’s troubling and is contrary to the plain language of The Baptist Faith & Message if true.
This isn’t over yet in the SBTC. As Bart notes, the messengers of the SBTC will likely vote on this eventually. I hope they do. But no matter what the SBTC does, I expect the Southern Baptist Convention to vote on Fielder’s status in Orlando in June. If this comes to the floor of the national convention, I suspect the vote will go much the same way that it did with Saddleback. Fielder Church rejects “pastor” as an office of the church and employs female pastors, both of which are in violation of the BF&M. The messengers of the SBC have removed churches on these grounds before and will likely do so again.
