Three years ago, we did an expose demonstrating that 10% Of The Biggest Southern Baptist Churches Are Pastored By Women. This was around the time that SBTS president Al Mohler commented on RNS Ryan Burge article Most Southern Baptist Women Would Welcome a Woman Pastor. It’s Unlikely to Happen, where Mohler forcefully denied that SBC churches would stand for it and claimed that not a single SBC church has a woman pastor on staff.
And if you just take the headline at face value, it tells us that the majority of Southern Baptist women, the word of the headline was, “most,” would welcome a woman as pastor of the church. 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.
And:
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.
We noted that when you consider the top 500 biggest churches in the SBC, not only do 10% of these churches have formalized pastrixes in leadership, but another 91 churches have women on staff with the title of either “Minister” – such as “Women’s Minister,” “Youth Minister,” “Singles Minister” – or, to a lesser extent, “Ministry Director” or “Director of Women’s Ministries.”
While some are serving in faithful, biblically appropriate roles (if with loftier-than-needed titles), many who function in their given roles are doing so with the same authority and positioning in the church as the elders and authority of a pastor but without that specific title. This is the game many churches play.
Since many of the biggest churches do not list their staff, we excluded them. This meant that if you combined the two groups, at least ONE-THIRD of the country’s top 450 largest SBC churches have women pastrixes or women “Ministers” employed on staff. There’s more, however.
Recently, Arlington Baptist Church Mike Law filed a motion to amend the SBC constitution, clarifying that it “Does not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.” He reveals that he felt the need to offer this amendment because “five Southern Baptist churches, roughly within a five-mile radius of my own congregation, are employing women as pastors of various kinds, including women serving as “Sr. Pastor.”
As part of this amendment plea, he produces evidence that at least 170 SBC churches* list women as either Senior pastor, Lead pastor, Associate pastor, Assistant pastor, Children’s pastor, Youth pastor, or Elders of some kind. 217 pages of screenshots, websites and links buttressing his position. A typical example would be:
Will the SBC deal with it? Given that there is no appetite from leadership to tackle the issue in any serious way, we’re not holding our breaths.
Regarding the 170 churches, Law offers a few caveats.
Note #1: Affiliations are listed per the SBC Workspace Database. According to Annual Church Profile Coordinator for Lifeway: “The information on the Affiliations tab [in the SBC Workspace Database] represents the current affiliations of the congregation. If a relationship with the SBC is shown on the Affiliations tab, then it is believed that the congregation is in friendly cooperation with the SBC.” 1 Note #2: Some churches are in this document without “Southern Baptist Convention” being listed as one of their affiliations. For example, a church might be affiliated with the NorthStar Church Network and the Baptist General Association of Virginia, but not have the Southern Baptist Convention listed as one of their affiliations. Such a church remains listed because of one or more of the following are true: 1) They are listed on the churches.sbc.net website (the website has SBC|Churches up in the right hand corner, and it states that these are “Our Churches”). 2) They are listed in the SBC Workspace database. 3) Local and State Associations often relate to the SBC on a national level, so there is an open question of whether they are considered to be in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention for the purposes of seating messengers. For these reasons the relationship between these churches and the SBC needs to be clarified. Note#3: I have not examined all of the churches in the Southern Baptist Convention. These are either churches I personally discovered along the way of writing to the SBC Executive Committee, churches who disclosed their female pastors to me through correspondence, or churches who were brought to my attention through colleagues.
Christian author and political commentator Eric Metaxas, writer of biographies of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who we last featured after he sucker-punched a passing Antifa protester in the summer of 2020, said in an interview with Addison Smith on OAN’s In Focus that Christian leaders who don’t talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop or the ‘January 6 hoax’ should be compared to cowardly German pastors who stayed silent during the holocaust during WW2. He explains:
“The Silence of the church in America today, today, is precisely like the silence of the German church in the early 30s. They believed they had good reasons for being silent. The German Christian leaders thought, ‘Oh, we just want to preach the gospel. We don’t want to get involved in politics’. They really believed that.
What their actions did lead to hell on earth, led to the Holocaust, led to evil triumphing in a way that is unimaginable to those of us who live in a place like America. But it was unimaginable to most Germans in the 1930s. But it actually happened. My mother lived through it, my family lived through it. People lived through hell on earth. And it was principally, I say this as a Christian, because of the silence of German Christians. And today, there is no question in my mind, I write about it in the book, that we have exactly the same thing.
He continues:
You have American Christian leaders saying, ‘you know, and I want to take a pass on that. I don’t want to talk about controversial stuff. I don’t want to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop. I don’t want to talk about the Communist Chinese torturing Uighur Muslims who are making our Nike sneakers and our Apple products. I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about the hoax of January 6. I don’t want to talk about Gretchen Whitmer.’
Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to talk about it. We’ve got tones of Republicans who refuse to open their mouths because they don’t want to risk anything because they’re cowards and they’re not patriots. But even worse than that is Christian leaders who have chosen to be quiet. And I want to say God will not hold us guiltless. Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.”
Right-wing commentator Eric Metaxas says that Christian leaders who don't talk about Hunter Biden's laptop or "the hoax of Jan. 6" are exactly the same as Christian leaders who stayed silent in Nazi Germany: "We have exactly the same thing." pic.twitter.com/L2AbDBCuOq
You have American Christian leaders saying, you know, I want to take a pass on that. I don’t want to talk about controversial stuff. I don’t want to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop. I don’t want to talk about the Communist Chinese torturing of the Uighur Muslims who are making our Nike sneakers and our apple products. I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about the hoax of January 6. I don’t want to talk about Gretchen Whitmer. Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to talk about it. We have tonnes of Republicans who refuse to open their mouths because they don’t want tor risk anything because they’re cowards and not patriots. But even worse than that are Christian leaders who have chosen to remain silent. And I want to say God will not hold us guiltless. Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
Welcome to our bi-monthly roundup of the worst of the worst so-called pastors and pastrixes from TikTok and other social media hubs. These are a collation of lost souls fast on their way to receiving the greater judgment if they don’t repent of their sins and put their faith in Christ.
Each one is between 15 and 30 seconds and is used to demonstrate the sheer insanity that is out there. This also serves as a foreshadowing where some of these conservative denominations are headed if they don’t take an uncompromising, bombastically hard line against even a hint of LGBTQ influence in the church.
H/t to Christcucl Pastor. Like and sub to his channel for more videos.
A group of Southern Baptist pastors have submitted a resolution aiming at the denomination’s position on abortion, seeking the SBC’s sanctification and turning away from decades of affirming unbiblical regulationism that promotes exceptions for legally murdering preborn children, despite multiple pro-life resolutions aimed at atoning for and gaining absolution for the resolution they passed back in 1971.
In that horrific resolution they resolved to “work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion” for “rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
In the five decades since, the SBC has never called for the immediate abolition of abortion without exceptions, nor have they declared with one voice “no peace with child sacrifice!”
Will now be their time?
On June 15-16, numerous Southern Baptist Pastors will head down to Nashville with the hopes of having their resolution on the Abolition of Abortion adopted. If passed, this would represent a cataclysmic shift in the way SBC churches view and understand the great evil of abortion, which has so far fully accepted and openly supported regulating abortion rather than abolishing it.
We reached out to the Southern Baptist pastor who helped spearhead the resolution and who is bringing thousands of pamphlets and booklets with him to the convention in order to explicate that truth.
He told us that hundreds of Southern Baptist pastors from all across the United States have signed the resolution, and is praying that it will get a hearing:
Because Southern Baptists have always been ‘people of the Book,’ and affirm that abortion is murder, we believe that if heard, the messengers eagerly will receive this biblically faithful resolution and glorify God in crying out for equal justice for our preborn neighbors. As Christians, we must rise up with one collective voice, obey God, and demand abortion be abolished immediately, without exceptions for murder or compromises with the culture of death.
Some of the resolutions include:
(10) WHEREAS, over the past 48 years with 60+ million abortions, traditional Pro-life laws, though well intended, have not established equal protection and justice for the preborn, but on the contrary, appallingly have established incremental, regulatory guidelines for when, where, why, and how to obtain legal abortion of innocent preborn children, thereby legally sanctioning abortion, and
(11) WHEREAS, since 1980, the SBC has passed many resolutions reaffirming the importance of human life at all stages of development, but we have yet to call for the immediate abolition of abortion without exception or compromise, and…
Then, the call to action:
(13) RESOLVED, that the messengers of the SBC meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, June 15-16, 2021, do state unequivocally that abortion is murder, and we reject any position that allows for any exceptions to the legal protection of our preborn neighbors, compromises God’s holy standard of justice, or promotes any God-hating partiality (Psa 94:6; Isa 10:1-2; Prov 24:11; Psa 82:1-4), and be it further
(14) RESOLVED, that we will not embrace an incremental approach to ending abortion because it challenges God’s Lordship over the heart and the conscience, and rejects His call to repent of sin completely and immediately (Gen 3:1; John 8:44; Rom 2:14-15; 2 Corinthians 11:3), and be it further
(15) RESOLVED, that we affirm that the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law, and be it further
(16) RESOLVED, that we humbly confess and lament any complicity in recognizing exceptions that legitimize or regulate abortion, and of any apathy, in not laboring with the power and influence we have to abolish abortion, and be it further…
We hope and pray that this resolution is passed.
Full transcript below:
Southern Baptist Resolution on Abolishing Abortion(1) WHEREAS, from the moment of fertilization, all humans are created in God’s image by, through, and for Jesus to the glory of God, and all souls belong to Him (Genesis 1:27; 4:1; 21:2; Isaiah 7:14; Colossians 1:16; Romans 11:36; Ezekiel 18:4), and
(2) WHEREAS, as God’s image-bearers, all humans both display His divine worth, power, and attributes, and possess equal, objective worth before God, not varying on the basis of incidental characteristics; such as ethnicity, age, size, means of conception, mental development, physical development, gender, potential, or contribution to society (Rom 1:19-20; Gen 1:27; 9:6; Matthew 18:6), and
(3) WHEREAS, to murder any preborn image-bearer is a sin, violating both the natural law of retributive justice as set forth in the Noahic covenant, as well as the sixth commandment forbidding murder, and as such, is ultimately an assault on God’s image, seeking to usurp God’s sovereignty as Creator (Gen 9:5-6; Exodus 20:13; Proverbs 6:17), and
(4) WHEREAS, God’s Word clearly declares that all human life is a sacred gift and that His Law is supreme over man’s life and man’s law (Psalm 127:3-5; 139:13-16; Rom 2:15-16; Acts 10:42; 17:31; 1 Corinthians 4:5), and
(5) WHEREAS, God commands His own people to “rescue those who are being taken away to death” and holds them responsible and without excuse when they fail to do so (Prov 24:11-12), and
(6) WHEREAS, God establishes all governing authorities as His avenging servants to carry out His wrath on the evildoer; and commands these authorities to judge justly, neither showing partiality to the wicked, nor using unequal standards, which are abominations (Psa 82; Prov 20:10; Rom 13:4), and
(7) WHEREAS, in 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States rendered an iniquitous decision on Roe v. Wade, and in doing so deprived the innocent of their rights, and usurped God, who sovereignly ordained their authority (Isa 5:23; 10:1-2; Psa 2; Matt 22:21; John 19:11; Acts 4:19; 5:29, Rom 13:1), and
(8) WHEREAS, in the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court of the United States subverted the U.S. Constitution namely, the Preamble, as well as the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments without any legal authority (Article 6, Clause 2 “Supremacy Clause”), and
(9) WHEREAS, governing authorities at every level have a duty before God to uphold justice asserting their God-ordained and constitutional authority to establish equal protection under the law for all, born and preborn, by intervening, ignoring, or nullifying iniquitous decisions when other authorities, such as the Supreme Court, condone such injustices as the legal taking of innocent life (Daniel 3; 1 Kings 12; 2 Kings 11; Jeremiah 26:10-16; 36:9-31; 37:11- 21; 39:7-10), and
(10) WHEREAS, over the past 48 years with 60+ million abortions, traditional Pro-life laws, though well intended, have not established equal protection and justice for the preborn, but on the contrary, appallingly have established incremental, regulatory guidelines for when, where, why, and how to obtain legal abortion of innocent preborn children, thereby legally sanctioning abortion, and
(11) WHEREAS, since 1980, the SBC has passed many resolutions reaffirming the importance of human life at all stages of development, but we have yet to call for the immediate abolition of abortion without exception or compromise, and
(12) WHEREAS, our confessional statement, The Baptist Faith and Message, according to Article XV, affirms that children “from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord”; and further affirms that Southern Baptists are mandated by Scripture to “speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death,” now, be it therefore
(13) RESOLVED, that the messengers of the SBC meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, June 15-16, 2021, do state unequivocally that abortion is murder, and we reject any position that allows for any exceptions to the legal protection of our preborn neighbors, compromises God’s holy standard of justice, or promotes any God-hating partiality (Psa 94:6; Isa 10:1-2; Prov 24:11; Psa 82:1-4), and be it further
(14) RESOLVED, that we will not embrace an incremental approach to ending abortion because it challenges God’s Lordship over the heart and the conscience, and rejects His call to repent of sin completely and immediately (Gen 3:1; John 8:44; Rom 2:14-15; 2 Corinthians 11:3), and be it further
(15) RESOLVED, that we affirm that the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law, and be it further
(16) RESOLVED, that we humbly confess and lament any complicity in recognizing exceptions that legitimize or regulate abortion, and of any apathy, in not laboring with the power and influence we have to abolish abortion, and be it further
(17) RESOLVED, that as Southern Baptists we will engage, with God’s help, in establishing equal justice and protection for the preborn according to the authority of God’s Word as well as local and federal law, and call upon pastors and leaders to use their God-given gifts of preaching, teaching, and leading with one unified, principled, prophetic voice to abolish abortion, and be it finally
(18) RESOLVED, that, because abolishing abortion is a Great Commission issue, we must call upon governing authorities at all levels to repent and “obey everything that [Christ] has commanded,” exhorting them to bear fruit in keeping with repentance by faithfully executing their responsibilities as God’s servants of justice, and working with all urgency to enact legislation using the full weight of their office to interpose on behalf of the preborn, abolishing abortion immediately, without exception or compromise (Mark 6:18; Matt 28:18-20; Rom 13:4, 6).
The Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) is considering further rebellion against the scriptures by changing their title restriction and starting to allow women who are in high leadership roles in the church to be called “pastor” – a proposal which is supported by over 60% of the denomination.
The curent position paper on their denominational website, which was updated just three years ago, reads in part:
Women may fulfill any function in the local church which the senior pastor and elders may choose to delegate to them consistent with the Uniform Policy for Accredited Churches and may properly engage in any kind of ministry except that which involves elder authority...
While desiring both genders to be mobilized to exercise their gifts in a variety of ministries and leadership roles, The Alliance continues to affirm its understanding of Scripture that elders are male members of the local church. This includes the elected elders of the local church and the senior/lead pastor.
In many ways the designation is just a formality, with women in the CMA functioning in the office of pastor, but don’t use the title as a courtesy, all with a knowing wink and smile to the congregations, who are in on it as well.
It’s for this reason that the CMA is looking to shake things up at the denomination’s annual General Council meeting later this month. President John Stumbo has already come out in support of it, releasing a video where he laments the fact that “some of our policies unnecessarily restrict otherwise called and qualified ministers” and suggesting that by not letting women be pastors they’ve overstepped the limits of scripture.
The policy change, when all said and done, would schizophrenically still allow only men to be Senior Pastors but would allow women to be ordained and hold “key places of leadership in the Alliance at the local church, district, and national levels,” while using the “pastor” moniker. Presently both men and women can go through a two-year training process with the CMA – the end result is that men are ordained and women are “consecrated,” which is a distinction without a difference.
The fact is that if the Christian and Missionary Alliance thinks they can hold the line on women not being senior pastors they are sadly mistaken. They’ve already lost the battle, the war, and host of firefights and skirmishes along the way, but are just too blind to see it. The minute they give an inch and start taking surveys to see what the denomination thinks, start bringing in resolutions to consider the matter, begin forming exploratory committees to consider the pros and cons of the problem, or begin taking votes, it’s over.
The correct way to handle this, of course, is to root out anyone in favor of it and then cull the mischief-makers in a bloodbath of excommunications and congregational shaming.
But because they will not do this, within a decade they’ll be gathering once more to put for General Conference 2029 to celebrate their resolution to let pastrixes become Senior Pastors, patting themselves on the back for this vile act of stunning theological presumption and betrayal.
