Op-Ed: As SBC Bans Women Pastors, Company Men Plot and Scheme with Trojan Horse Task Force

Fresh off the disfellowship of Saddleback church, Southern Baptist messengers voted yesterday to amend the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 to clarify language surrounding women in the ministry, barring them from holding the office of pastor, elder, or deacon.

The amendment crystallizes the new position and removes much of the semantic wiggle room employed by egalitarians seeking to nestle into the crevices of the confession, ensuring there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from denominational gadflies who thought they were in the clear.

It was also a bruising loss for the SBC’s Executive Committee, which can always be counted on to do the wrong thing. They recommended that messengers vote against the amendment and swiftly had their lunch thrown back into their faces, which are now freshly smeared with the tomato sauce and spaghetti noodles of their own failure.

But victory over new land is only as great as one’s ability to defend it, and the attacks are coming fast and furious. Company men within the SBC would never let it go so easily and they quickly concocted a new threat. Former SBC president James Merritt, surrounded by former SBC Presidents J.D. Greear and Ed Litton, convinced the messengers to approve this nasty little poison pill:

This is a trojan horse and should be immediately targeted for destruction, with nothing less than a crushing defeat at the next two conventions needed. Though you couldn’t see it, Merritt and his band of marauders were standing at the podium with fists full of leaven and a will to engage in some lump-making.

We went up to speak against the motion but microphone malfunctions and other procedural matters sucked up all the time, and we weren’t able to raise our objection to it on the floor. But make no mistake; Merritt’s motion is an underhanded attempt to introduce ‘soft-complementarianism/ camouflage egalitarianism’ into the denomination and weaken the newly built walls.

The Roman Catholic church has a three-legged stool of authority; scripture, church tradition, and the teaching magisterium. While all are supposed to hold equal weight, what inevitably happens is that live people win out over ‘dead’ documents. The magisterium decides what constitutes tradition and scripture and how to interpret each, making it the longest leg with the most power and authority.

In the same way, the ‘broadly representative’ study committee will have the power to interpret Article 3.1 and what it means, serving as a potential backdoor to overturning the amendment and acting as an end run around it.

While there is some ambiguity between the SBC constitution and the Baptist Faith and Message, their opportunity is clear. The constitution says churches within the denomination don’t have to strictly adhere to the BFAM, but rather need to ‘closely identify‘ with and be in ‘friendly cooperation‘ with it.

So what happens with the member church that disagrees with the BFAM on this one point and still hangs on to a female youth pastor, under the authority of a male senior pastor? We can easily see a Task Force adopting and recommending very loose definitions by saying that while entities like the ERLC, NAMB, IMB, and seminaries need to strictly adhere to the letter of it, smaller local churches with disagreement on that one point don’t rise to the level of not being in friendly cooperation because they identify closely enough. 

While this motion never should have been considered in the first place, unless Barber tilts the task force to be exclusively comprised of deep and discerning complementarian theologians, this will be how the egalitarians get back in and will play the spoiler to the hard fought victory.

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