Revealed: Egalitarian Playbook for the Upcoming 2024 Southern Baptist Convention
2024 marks a watershed year for the Southern Baptist Convention. In June, messengers to the national gathering of the SBC will conduct a final ratification vote on the Law Amendment. If ratified, the Amendment would explicitly define pastor as an office exclusively held by men, in alignment with the scriptural qualifications of 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. At the national convention held in Indianapolis, woke and institutionalist actors within the convention will aim to derail the Amendment using a combination of three methods.
The first and least likely method to succeed directly opposes the passage of the Amendment. Some of the Amendment’s opponents believe that women should occupy the position of lead pastor, a hardline egalitarian position that the SBC previously refuted during the conservative resurgence of the late twentieth century.
In the convention’s latest battles over Biblical manhood and womanhood, hardline egalitarians, a minority in the SBC, have aligned themselves with a motley crew of soft complementarians and church growth pragmatists, in a bid to turn the tide against Amendment.
Although openly egalitarian churches are rare in the SBC, there are examples where the credentials committee has ignored their practices in open defiance of the Baptist Faith and Message, allowing them to remain in fellowship with the convention. The soft complementarians range from leaders of churches with radical egalitarian practices that merely maintain the title of complementarian as a facade, to leaders of churches that have relatively consistent complementarian practices but abuse the title of pastor, applying the term in a way that is inconsistent with its patriarchal Biblical origins.
Soft complementarian churches in the SBC have used various methods to maintain appearances. Some allow women to preach to the entire congregation, but the pulpit is moved from the stage to the floor, or the sermon is scheduled for a Sunday night service and labeled a “talk” rather than a sermon. Others allow a woman with the “gift” of preaching to preach alongside her husband, in the style of Ed and Kathy Litton.
The real issue is not simply the use of the word “pastor” but also whether churches allow women to function in a teaching, leading, and shepherding role that puts them in a position as an “overseer” or “teacher” of men. A small number of churches have assigned the title of pastor to women who teach children or other women, such as an octogenarian grandmother who organizes a church’s Awana ministry. If this is the case, the title fix is relatively simple, because the practice of the church is in alignment with scripture, with the exception of titles.
However, the misuse of the title pastor for women in various church roles provides cover for other churches that have unbiblical practices of women functioning as a pastor or elder. One strategy of soft complementarians with egalitarian practices is to change the titles of women in roles that scripture gives to men.
These churches change the title of “elder” or “pastor” to “executive team member” and place women in those roles, a sleight-of-hand that allows them to claim complementarianism while entrenching a decidedly egalitarian model of leadership in the church. Once the egalitarian model is entrenched, the ‘complementarians in name only’ need only wait five to ten years before they change the title of “executive team member” back to “elder” or “pastor.” At that point, the congregation has already accepted that women oversee, lead, and shepherd, making the title change back to “elder” a mere formality.
The second method of opposition to the Law Amendment is to undermine the consequences of the Law Amendment by redefining the term “friendly cooperation.” Institutionalists and church growth pragmatists in the SBC realize that if churches in the SBC were required to maintain complementarian practices and titles, many churches would leave the SBC and join cooperatives that support egalitarianism, like the left-leaning Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. The pragmatists in the convention are easily identifiable, as they focus on the growth or survival of the convention, pitting survival against theological orthodoxy, a false dilemma.
Southern Baptists are confessional, with the Baptist Faith and Message providing a kind of skeletal structure of doctrine that underpins Baptist faith and practice. If the Baptist Faith and Message functions as a mere suggestion, the convention quickly becomes a gelatinous blob of loosely affiliated churches that support an undefined convention bureaucracy.
‘Mission drift’ would come like a thief in the night without a confession. If the Baptist Faith and Message is non-binding, who’s to say that anything would be beyond the pale? Every manner of false doctrine and heresy would inevitably flood the convention. Baptists who have watched the SBC for the past decade and seen the Resolution 9 debacle, the rise of woke institutionalism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism know that without the lone bulwark of the Baptist Faith and Message, the convention would fold like a house of cards under the weight of cultural pressure.
The third method of opposition to the Law Amendment involves the use of delay, a strategy that has already been employed in local and state conventions. Opponents of the Law Amendment know that while the 2023 vote was decidedly in favor of defining “pastor” as a male role, the cultural momentum favors a shift towards egalitarianism.
As the Overton window of popular culture shifts away from a worldview that is oriented toward and influenced by scripture, the Overton window of acceptable thought in evangelicalism has shifted toward egalitarianism. If egalitarians can delay the application of the Law Amendment by slow-rolling the removal of egalitarian churches for a few years or a decade, they may be able to effectively stem the tide until the fickle winds of evangelicalism shift in their favor.
If Southern Baptist messengers back the Law Amendment, thwart institutionalist efforts to redefine “friendly cooperation,” and elect a convention President who will support efforts to enforce the Amendment, there is hope for the future and Biblical faithfulness of the convention. If messengers fail to do these things or kick the can of enforcing the requirements of the Baptist Faith and Message down the road, the convention will hemorrhage churches with Biblical convictions on gender roles, which will ultimately lead to a downgrade on other issues such as Biblical sexuality.
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