Bart Barber Appoints Minister to Cooperation Group Whose Church Has SEVEN Women 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?”
Barber explained that the makeup of the scheme was to include “people broadly representative of the various points of view that comprise the family of churches that is the Southern Baptist Convention,” which includes “people and churches who do not affirm the entirety of The Baptist Faith & Message…”
Put another way, he’s appointed people to help define the BFM2000 who have a history of being openly hostile to it.
Rather than choose folks who have demonstrated a faithful adherence to the BFM2000, Barber has stacked the group with a veritable cantina bar-worthy cast of progressive egalitarians. We covered one of these members last week, Rev, Jerome Coleman, whose church has more women pastors than male ones.
Now, we have another.
Jason Paredes is the the Lead Pastor of Fielder Church and a Cooperation Group member appointed by Bart Barber. Barber has called a Paredes a ‘complementarian,’despite Fielder having seven ‘women pastors’ on staff. These include:
College pastor Nichole Sostre
Girl’s pastor Caroline Culver
Mobilization Associate Pastor Angela K
Foster Care and Adoption Pastor Erin Benton
Children’s pastor Yadira Molina
Children’s pastor Nadia Jennett
Children’s pastor Tiffany Rupp
Having this many pastrixes is something Jason Paredes is proud of and has repeatedly defended. Unsurprisingly, he also voted against the motions to remove Saddleback and Fern Creek (whose only pastor is a woman) from the SBC.
Bart Barber claims he doesn’t support churches with female pastors/elders/overseers remaining in the SBC, yet has given several egalitarians the authority to decide if they do. With friends like these….
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Aside from the influx of feminism, another issue is that we don’t know what a pastor is anymore. You can’t just say “pastor of (fill in the blank)” and truly call that a pastor. For example, if it was a man and his title was “Media Pastor”, well, that’s not a pastor. That’s simply someone who is overseeing a certain program. While a pastor is an “overseer” (although technically this term would coincide with “bishop”, not pastor, representing a different aspect of the same office), not everyone who oversees something is a pastor. Colleges don’t have pastors, churches do. Point is, many have been misusing the term for a while. But once we start to see what a pastor is biblically, we begin to realize that a woman does not qualify.
“…We believe this is spiritually accurate…”?
What Bible are these people reading?
There definitely has been inflation in the number of pastors; likely most of those that are in those roles are not actually functioning as true pastors. And nor should they be because they are not qualified.
I’m sure titles such as Coordinator or Director are much more suitable but the fact that they used the title ‘pastor’ is making a statement, at the very least. The bigger issue to be addressed is ecclesiastical polity.
Fielder is a liberal, progressive church and it has been for years and years. It’s another progressive, pragmatic megachurch with “pastors”, including top leadership such as the Executive Director of Operations (an elder), who have no theological education. This is an important leadership component of the liberal megachurch. It is run as a business, not as the Church of Jesus Christ. Staff and elders are preferred with no biblical-theological knowledge with which they could counter the un-biblical policies and practices (such as egalitarianism). Fielder is a weak-willed, uneducated staff running a business they call church.
You should look at Fielder’s YouTube page. Their brand of theologically bankrupt music, which they call “worship”, proudly consists of heresy-factory songs from Elevation, Hillsong, and NorthPoint. Bart Barber is a joke. Fielder is a joke. The SBC is gone.
The fixation with titles in modern and/or mega churches seems to be always accompanied by an avoidance of the most relevant title of all: liberal. Why can’t they just own up to that title?