SBC ‘Cooperation Group’ Member’s Church Has More WOMEN Pastors Than MALE Pastors
In response to the approval of a last-minute motion by a cabal of SBC insiders led by James Merritt, SBC president Bart Barber appointed a twenty-member task force, known as the Cooperation Group, to study and define the limits of “friendly cooperation.” In other words, how much could a member church’s doctrine and practice deviate from the plain meaning of the Baptist Faith and Message (BFM2000) (particularly regarding the hot-button issue of woman “pastors”) and still be considered in “friendly cooperation?”
The move followed recent decisions by SBC messengers to disfellowship Saddleback Church for ordaining women pastors and approve an amendment to the SBC constitution codifying that churches with women pastors would are not in “friendly cooperation” (amendments to the SBC constitution must be approved two years in a row to apply). While Barber insists that the role of the Cooperation Group is not “to rule in any way on the constitutional amendment proposed by Mike Law and amended by Juan Sanchez,” the messenger-undermining purpose of the group is clear – particularly as Barber has stacked the group with a veritable cantina bar-worthy cast of progressive egalitarians. Even Merritt, the gay-approving former SBC president who slipped the last-minute poison pill into the messengers’ drink, says the group’s purpose is about the role of women in ministry.
It’s an elegant, if crass, workaround, where even if the SBC constitution ends up saying specifically that the BFM2000’s prohibition on women pastors means lack of friendly cooperation, the Cooperation Group will have introduced its own muddy, subjective framework to confuse the issue just enough to make the issue of women pastors unenforceable. Even Barber insinuated that passing the “Law Amendment” would likely irrelevant because the Executive Committee (presumably with heavy influence from the “Cooperation Group”) would “rewrite” the SBC Constitution (at 8:10+).
Barber explains the makeup of who he’s choosing for the scheme:
“The Cooperation Group contains a mixture of men and women, pastors and laypeople and denominational workers, people from various parts of our geography, and people of different ages. Additionally, following the messengers’ instructions, the Cooperation Group contains people broadly representative of the various points of view that comprise the family of churches that is the Southern Baptist Convention. The breadth of the Southern Baptist Convention includes people and churches who do not affirm the entirety of The Baptist Faith & Message…”
Enter Rev. Dr. Jerome F. Coleman, the Lead Pastor of First Baptist Church of Crestmont, in Willow Grove, Pa.
Coleman is a member of the Cooperation Group appointed by Barber due to give their recommendations this summer.
He also happens to be married to Rev. Kim A Coleman, the Executive Pastor of the church.
Not content to stay in the background, Pastor Kim regularly preaches during the morning service.
This means that Barber appointed someone who, if their church had been considered for disfellowship at last year’s Convention, would like Saddleback have certainly been disaffiliated from and excised by the denomination.
It gets worse. The church frequently invites preacher ladies to attend the pulpit and speak at conferences.
Last of all, Rev. Kim Coleman is not the only woman pastor at First Baptist Church of Crestmont, but rather there are TWO women pastors, making them the majority clergy.
Call us crazy, but a church living on borrowed time where the women pastors outnumber the male ones 2-1 is not what most Southern Baptists envision when they consider selecting members who are “broadly representative” of the denomination, and don’t think for a moment Barber doesn’t know it.
About Author
The more I observe denominational drift within churches (SBC or not) the more obvious it becomes that it is a result of incompetent and unqualified elders not taking their jobs seriously. This is not something the Bible is silent about and there are multiple warnings against people taking up the mantle of “Pastor” without any comprehension of what is said in James 3:1, Matthew 23:13-14, Luke 17:1-2, Matthew 5:19, or Ezekiel 34:1-10
It should be mandatory reading for church leaders to read “The Reformed Pastor” by Richard Baxter, and even if you don’t agree with everything Baxter prescribes, he does an excellent job conveying the seriousness of being a shepherd of God’s flock.
With that being said, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people in church lament the fact that there seem to be so few men “stepping up” to be spiritual leaders as if qualified men just pop out of the ground. When it comes to leadership, churches act like it’s some kind of mystical process with how God “raises up” male leaders. This belief is especially bizarre when you consider that the world is very direct with telling men that any expression of masculinity (unless it’s for the service of women and children) makes you a bad person, and at the same time the world tells women that peak womanhood is acting exactly like how they tell men not to behave. Combine that with the fact that there is often a MASSIVE lack of respect for church leaders that make Biblical (and unpopular) decisions from both outside and INSIDE the church and you end up sending a very clear message that tells the exact type of men that churches need that they’re not wanted there.
What’s funny to me is how conservative churches have deluded themselves into thinking that they provide any real pushback to society with the way people think. I am talking in generalizations here, but most conservative churches are deeply closeted feminists that fear women more than they fear God and will not make any decisions unless they can determine how it will make women feel. What’s ironic is they way they cloak their feminism with a veneer of “Complementarianism” by saying something along the lines of “If men weren’t so weak” or “women only do this because men forced them to” which exact corollary to the world’s message.
TL;DR 1) As the elders go so goes the church; 2) The church expects qualified elders to just magically show up; 3) The Church is not the bulwark against the culture’s message against male leadership that it thinks it is , in fact, the church often reinforces that message.
You are right. I don’t think this can be fixed without having genuinely conservative seminaries. Any effort for reform that ignores the seminaries is just wheel-spinning.