1Name Church, the North American Mission Board Church plant that blew up in Southern Baptist circles after it was revealed they had a woman as lead pastor has left the SBC, sources have confirmed.
We wrote about this recently, after Jamie Farver, a woman, was aggressively and prominently marketed all throughout the church website and social media as a “pastor” and “lead pastor” even though that is strictly prohibited by the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BF&M2K), the official position document of the SBC.
Tom Ascol updated the world after talking to Kevin Ezell, NAMB president, about the status of the church plant, later adding, “If the church isn’t in agreement with SBC confessional commitments then it was an honorable decision to leave.”
Of course, we don’t find anything honorable about taking cooperative program dollars and then running off with the money. In fact, the “honorable thing” would be to pay NAMB back.
Was it honorable for the NAMB not to do their due diligence by ensuring that the church would be fully in line with the BF&M2K before they gave them who knows how much financial and infrastructure support? Did NAMB know they weren’t in full co-operation with the BF&M2K before they funded them or after?
When did they leave the SBC? Was it immediately after they were planted, or just recently as they received the negative attention?
Furthermore, who is the sending church? These things don’t happen ex nihilo. Surely the mothership would have known 1Name Church had no intention of her not preaching, teaching, and leading the church. Was this disclosed?
John Kaleo on Twitter is likewise asking the right questions.
As far as the request to leave them alone, we have that covered too:
A new Church plant from the Southern Baptists Convention’s North American Misson Board (NAMB – the church planting arm of the SBC) has tongues wagglin’ and liberals defendin’ after it was revealed that one of their lead pastors is a woman.
Jamie Farver, who co-leads 1Name Church with her co-pastor husband, is described on the church’s website under the “meet our pastors” section, as an “incredible wife, mother, and leader.”
Subsequent chyrons all across the website and in media reinforce this reality that she is a “lead pastor.”
Naturally, this is strictly prohibited by the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which says “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Despite this clear violation, we don’t expect anyone in the SBC or NAMB leadership to care, which is why we routinely dog them for their disobedience to the scriptures. In fact, we rarely expect anyone to acknowledge it, given how frequently they flagrantly flout how wretched they are, revealing the corruption and lack of integrity buried deep within the denomination.
Part of it is that it’s most prominent leaders don’t even acknowledge a problem. SBC President-Elect Al Mohler, for example, is convinced that the SBC has no women pastors, despite visuals like the above. He recently said:
…That’s rather stunning when you consider the fact that out of the almost 40,000 churches associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, not one of them has a woman as pastor…The problem with that is not one of those churches has a woman as pastor…We’re talking about 40,000 churches. And at the moment, I don’t believe that a single one of them has a woman as pastor…Again, the math, 40,000 roughly, and the other column zero. That’s not a close call…Again, 40,000 in one column, zero in the other…If Southern Baptists want Southern Baptist churches to have pastors who are women, they can do it, but they don’t do it.
Last year we did a big expose on this, when we discovered that 10% of the biggest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention have women pastors on staff, and another 15% have women functioning in the role of pastor, just without the title. 47 of them based on 466 churches. Add another 35,000 churches to the list, and it doesn’t take much to know we have a problem.
It is a fact. It has been a fact for years. It has been a fact for years that you can throw a rock into any random Baptist potluck and hit a pastrixes right in her Beth Moore Study Bible for the amount of them there are scurrying around unrebuked and un-kicked-out-of-convention.
The fact that a new NAMB church plant is operating in direct violation is only news because it lists Jamie as a “Lead Pastor” whereas most SBC churches give their pastrixes titles like “Worship Pastor” or “Spiritual Formations Pastor.” As a result, the only way corrupt organizations respond and act is by threats to their existence in the form of defunding.
If NAMB is going to actively plant churches with women pastors on staff, NAMB should be immediately defunded by the SBC and local churches ought to loudly and vocally cease contributing to the Cooperative Program, shouting out exactly why every step of the way.
