SBC Update: Social Justice, Abuse Allegations, & the Law Amendment

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We are now live on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We're gonna talk about some

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Southern Baptist convention -related things today. I have covered the Southern Baptist Convention since 2019, when

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I started, really before that, I guess, but no one was listening or paying attention to my blog, not many people.

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But since the podcast has been around, the Southern Baptist Convention has been a topic of interest.

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And it's not just because I graduated from Southeastern, which is one of the big Southern Baptist seminaries.

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It's also just because it matters to the United States. It matters for people who live in this country, because it's the largest

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Protestant denomination. And they've been a bellwether for years, as they go, so goes the rest of American evangelicalism often.

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And so with that in mind, I'm gonna, once again, give you some information, some of the latest updates concerning the

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Southern Baptist Convention, knowing that some of you have left the SBC, some of you are not interested in being part of the

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SBC with good reason, but there are still some who are in the Southern Baptist Convention trying to slow down the regression that is happening, or with hope in their hearts, some think that they can actually take back the

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Southern Baptist Convention for more of a theologically orthodox and conservative understanding of public theology.

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And so I wanna do this as sort of a service for you as well. You're gonna be going to the convention in June, if you're in the

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SBC, and these are some of the things that are gonna be discussed leading up to the convention. And it seems like every year at the

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Southern Baptist Convention in June, there's a different fight. There's a different struggle between the more conservative wing and the more, they used to call them moderates, but I would say more progressive wing.

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And the progressive wing is, they claim the mantle of the conservative resurgence. So it gets really confusing really quick, but those are probably the best terms

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I can use. I could maybe say the more pro -social justice leaning wing, but for our purposes, we'll just say the more conservative wing, the more progressive wing.

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And the more progressive wing tends to set the agenda.

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This to me is one of the first times in the last few years, at least, going into the convention that the agenda seems to be set actually by the more conservative wing, which is interesting because if you think about like 2019, it was critical race theory, right?

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That was, and that agenda was set by the more left -leaning wing in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. And of course they didn't meet in 2020. And then 2021, it was, that was the beginning,

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I think, of more of the abuse stuff. And that's been an ongoing theme for the last few years.

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And until last year, there was kind of a change where it began to be more about female pastors.

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And that is the conservative setting the agenda. Now that doesn't mean the conservatives are winning or they're in charge.

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They have no institutional power. Hardly at all, I should say. They have hardly any institutional power in the Southern Baptist Convention.

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But the thing about this issue that makes it stand apart from the

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Me Too issue, which is really what I should call it and the social justice slash

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CRT issue is that on this issue, it has already been fought before during the conservative resurgence.

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In other words, this isn't a new issue for the Southern Baptist Convention. And the laymen and the people in the pews, the people that are coming to vote, many of them know this.

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They're used to this. They're familiar with this battle over female pastors. And because they're familiar with it, there's a powerful weapon in this.

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Now, I think I have my own opinions about what ought to have been done years ago and what the right emphasis was.

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But I will tell you this, the conservatives in the SBC, in my opinion, from my conversations, they've been waiting for a while to get to this issue.

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They knew this issue was eventually going to come to a head. They knew that the progressives, if they continue their slide, were eventually going to be kind of promoting female pastors or at least trying to promote the logic that would lead the convention into adopting female pastors.

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And they thought that this was a winning issue. For years, I've heard this, really. Even conservatives who failed to really deliver on CRT and Me Too stuff or immigration issues and so forth, they decided to kind of pull back.

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They weren't going to fight as hard. They didn't want to name names. They didn't want to call people out. Many of those more timid conservatives were just waiting for their chance for this issue.

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So we're going to talk about that issue today because now it is an issue. And it's going to be interesting to see what happens with this.

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The law amendment, of course, being the amendment that would prohibit churches with female pastors from friendly cooperation in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. Before we get there, though, there's a few things, related stories, that I want to share with you.

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And then, of course, if you are on YouTube or on Facebook, please participate, ask questions, make statements in the live chat, and I'll be sure to try to follow those.

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So it's kind of weird to have as many people watching this as we are right now and have no one in the live chat.

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I hadn't seen this in a long time. So I guess everyone's kind of listening to what I have to say. But if you have questions along the way or have clarifications and things that would help me do a better job explaining what's going on, then feel free to make use of the live chat there.

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And of course, if you're listening to it on the recording, later on, you can put your comments on YouTube or Facebook. Okay, or Rumble, I should not forget about Rumble.

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We are on Rumble as well, live streaming currently. Now, let's start here. I want to start, we're going to talk about SBC, but we're going to talk about abuse reform.

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We're going to talk about the law amendments as I just talked about. And, but before we do, I want to just talk about some general things going on.

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I thought Josh Abatoy from American Reformer had a wonderful thread, and I'm going to read for you, if not all of this thread, a big part of it, and just explain to you what his point is, because I think he is taking the temperature of the

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Southern Baptist Convention, their leadership, and he's showing that there's a lot to be desired here.

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So he says, I had hoped that with Dr. Moore's departure from the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Russell Moore, we'd started moving out of the era in which

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SBC leaders allowed their moral compasses to be subject to dictates of the mainstream media.

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Sadly, it appears we still have some work to do. And this is one of the things I've noticed really since I was a young seminary student.

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The Southern Baptist Convention, the leadership at least, has always been super aware of what the mainstream media is going to say, because the mainstream media focuses on this denomination more than others, because it's large, it has influence.

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So they're very aware of what the Washington Post and the New York Times and MSNBC and all these media outlets on the left, what they're going to say, and they don't want to be misunderstood, right?

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And so there's been many issues I've seen this on. I've seen this on the whole electing Trump in 2016.

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There was this big effort to kind of distance themselves, the leaders at least, from the people that are in the pews voting for Trump.

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And of course, with the critical race theory issue in BLM, there was the same thing. Now we see it again on the

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Christian nationalism thing. And so Joshua Abattoy says a couple of weeks back, Politico dropped a hit piece on Russ Voigt, American Renewal Center, and William Wolfe, because they purportedly adopt, or at least are

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Christian nationalists. And the same week on an NBC segment, pundits argued that merely believing that rights came from our creator is a

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Christian nationalist belief. More recently, Charlie Kirk reported that the Biden administration intends to fully lean into the scary

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Christian nationalists and Heritage Foundation's Frightening 2025 project as key campaign issues.

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True to form, Russ Voigt and William Wolfe, and I believe, I know William Wolfe is a Southern Baptist. I believe

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Russ Voigt is as well. I could be wrong, but I think he is. They struck back with no apologies.

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And Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, gave a barn burner of a speech at the national,

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I think that's radio broadcasters, conservative radio organization, subsequently publishing a revised manuscript with American reformers.

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So he's saying they hit back. Meanwhile, what's been happening in the Baptist world? Leaders raced to the

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Baptist faith and message to call balls and strikes, to distance themselves as quickly as possible from those scary

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Christian nationalists. And he's got examples. You have Bart Barber, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, saying, I've seen some folks on here demonstrating the inescapable truth that support for state religion contradicts the

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Baptist faith and message, but making that case actually undersells the point. Beyond the complete history of the SBC, it contradicts more than four centuries of Baptist thought.

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He talks about Nathan Kitchens. I'm not sure exactly what position Nathan Kitchen has in the

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SBC, but, and Matthew Millsap, let's see. He talks about these guys who,

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I guess, work in the SBC and how they're countersignaling this

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Christian nationalist attack or the people that are being attacked for being Christian nationalists.

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And he says, leading the way, the race away from Christian nationalism was Brent Leatherwood at the ERLC, the head of the

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SBC's public policy think tank. And he retweeted Ken Keithley. Ken Keithley is a professor at Southeastern, where I went.

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And Ken Keithley says, Christian nationalism in a nutshell. Welcome to the end of democracy. No Baptist can be a Christian nationalist. You can be one or the other, but you can't be both.

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And then Joshua Habitoy goes on. I mean, this thing keeps going. Keep in mind, some of these folks can't, for the life of them, figure out what the

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Bible, our tradition, or our confessional documents tell us what to do about women pastors. In fact, there was so much confusion that we had to create a committee to figure it out.

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And then he says, but when they get a chance to join secular media hits on scary Christian nationalists, they're all game.

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There's where they are. And Christian nationalism has many definitions and many proponents, many of which are entirely compatible with the

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Baptist faith and message. And he goes on.

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And so, you know, it's just an interesting, it means that nothing's really changed is what I see here.

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Nothing's really changed when it comes to the elites running the denomination. They're still playing the same game.

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When the media wants to go after white nationalists, whatever they conceive that to be, you see the

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SBC elites doing the same thing, running away from it. And, you know, and trying to say that that's incompatible with our

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Baptist faith and message, regardless of how the media, how sloppy the media is applying this, regardless of how the media is saying that every conservative

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Christian falls into this category just about, and the people who will make up the

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Southern Baptist Convention are guilty of this because of their support for Trump or something. You see this shift away, that we can't have that.

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We can't be seen as an association with them. And so we're going to be very sure about this, very confident that what our doctrine teaches, and our doctrine definitely teaches that we're not

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Trump supporters, we're not racists. We are not, we don't abuse women, meaning, and of course these are all framed in more progressive settings of, you're not on board with the

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Me Too movement. You're not on board with CRT, right? So, you know, they try to act like they are on board with those things, maybe halfway, however far they can go, they'll go with those things to just, and punch right, and make it seem like they're not the threat.

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We have the blood is on our door, please, angel of death, pass over us and go next door and get those

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Christians. So nothing has changed in the SBC, and that's really the moral of this story.

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So we have Josh Abattoy saying that. Another general thing I just wanted to point out, people were pointing this out on Twitter, and I thought, or X, I keep forgetting.

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It's always gonna be Twitter to me, but people were pointing this out that the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board, which is a local state association, the

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Southern Baptist Convention has a lot of associations. They used to have, I think, more, but the

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Tennessee Baptist Mission Board is one of them. If you wanna work for the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board, some people were pointing out that, this is on their website, preference is given to qualified individuals who are

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Christ followers, that have a discernible close walk with the Lord, serve effectively in their local church, and demonstrate a commitment to the purposes of the

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Tennessee Baptist Convention. Great, that makes sense. Preference is given to qualified individuals who will increase the ethnic, gender, and vocational diversity on boards and committees.

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So if you're a white man, not as likely to get a job with the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board, they're looking for minorities, they're looking for women, they're looking for people who increase the diversity.

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And this is something that I saw firsthand when I was at Southeastern, which is one of the prominent Southern Baptist seminaries.

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They had their Center for Kingdom Diversity. They did this with the student body. They're definitely trying to attract students by throwing money, really, that their direction, who were going to be in certain demographics.

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And white males were, in fact, it might still be seen as progress.

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The less percentage of the student body is made up of white males, which, again, you're not trying to train for spiritual gifts or qualified individuals at that point, or people who are necessarily contributing to the seminary and the

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Southern Baptist Convention and their church, et cetera. What you're doing at that point is you're trying to pick winners and losers.

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You're trying to put your thumb on the balance and say, we want a certain ethnic makeup here, a certain racial makeup, whatever, or gender makeup.

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And so you start putting money in a particular direction so that you can look a certain way.

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It's about the way you look, the exterior of it. And oftentimes, revelations brought up where every tribe, tongue, nation is in heaven.

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I just remember this so clearly. And we should look like that. You know, and just ignoring the fact that that's in heaven, that that is something

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Christ does, not we ourselves, we're not ever commanded to do this, and it's not even possible in certain regions.

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It's certainly outside the scope of the New Testament. And so I just remind everyone,

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I've talked about this many times before, qualifications in scripture for being a pastor are clear. We're not supposed to be thinking in these terms, but it's not like a

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Christian thing to do, but this is what's happening in the Southern Baptist Convention. So it's not, it's happening in little places, it's happening in big places.

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It's still happening in certain places. And so it hasn't gone away. I don't think the social justice issue has gone away.

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I think it's been institutionalized. And I've said this for a while, it's still there. It's just been institutionalized. So since we're talking about the

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Southern Baptist, I figured that I would bring that up as well. All right, well, let's talk about abuse reform stuff.

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The federal lawsuits, false Southern Baptist Convention for covering up sexual abuse.

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This is February 5th. We're going back over a month on this particular story, but the senior pastor of a prominent

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Mid -South megachurch has been named in a federal lawsuit. Pastor Steve Gaines of Bellevue Baptist Church was included in the federal lawsuit that was filed against the executive committee of the

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Southern Baptist Convention that stated that they have covered up instances of sexual abuse by church members and employees as a strategy of denying the rights of sexual abuse survivors.

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Now, I'm gonna point out, this is interesting to me, Steve Gaines, who I believe he's got a terminal disease, pray for him, but he's done a lot to push the needle to the left in the

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SBC. And from my vantage point, I remember one of the earliest things I saw from him was he was all about taking down monuments and that kind of thing, and throwing around his weight as a pastor to try to do this.

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And his son, Grant Gaines, was the one at, I believe it was SBC 2020,

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I wanna say 2022. I'm getting foggy. Was it 2021? I think it was 2022. When he had an alleged sexual abuse, quote unquote, survivor with him at the microphone at the convention and speaking on her behalf and behalf.

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I mean, they went all in on this Me Too stuff. And yet his dad now, and his dad who was very supportive of that is named in this.

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It just goes to show you though, you get on board with these things, they'll eat you sometimes.

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And so anyways, I don't know the particulars of it, but the lawsuit mentioned that the investigation showed at least 35 church pastors, employees, and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior.

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This is going all the way back to the Houston Chronicle story from 2019, if you remember that.

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And I did a whole podcast on it at the time and much could be said, but you can go back and listen to that.

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The lawsuit said that the investigation included 200 criminal cases and 700 victims over a 20 year period.

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So this is just an attempt to sort of bring this issue that nothing's new here that I can see, but to bring it into court again, to try to blame the

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Southern Baptist somehow, to try to squeeze money out of the Southern Baptist somehow that this was under their jurisdiction and they failed.

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And these are, again, this gets back into what is the Southern Baptist Convention? Is it an organization of autonomous churches or is it a top down structure where you have people in the top of the denomination calling the shots and responsible for what happens in local churches?

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So this federal lawsuit has been filed. Meanwhile though, the federal investigators who were investigating the

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Southern Baptist Convention closed the books on a year and a half long investigation that sought to determine whether leaders were criminally responsible for mishandling an abuse crisis.

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The DOJ concluded its probe last week without charging any SBC leaders. Let me say that again. They did not charge any

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Southern Baptist leaders. Abuse survivors and their allies celebrated news of the Department of Justice's investigation in 2022 for its potential to hold denominational leaders accountable.

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But on February 29th, 2024, counsel was informed that the U .S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York concluded its investigation into the executive committee with no further action to be taken.

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So it's done. Is this an embarrassment to Guidepost?

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I would think so, but you don't have anyone changing their tune that I can tell in the

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More Me Too crowd. Rachel Denhollander said the truth of this post still stands. She's talking about a post where she said that no one at MSU, the

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USAG or the FBI were convicted of covering up Larry's abuse either. That's the person who abused

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Rachel Denhollander, but cover up an unethical conduct and inexcusable silence that Wounded Hundreds still happened.

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And so she's just saying that, hey, this doesn't mean anything really.

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The DOJ officials have confirmed to me that this investigation is not closed and that information did not come from their office, regardless of the end result.

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Our personal call and command to pursue justice remains. So they're not slowing down at all. The Me Too stuff is still gonna be going on.

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But for those who were skeptical about this, this is somewhat of a vindication.

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And so that's the sexual abuse issue. I'm sure that those who are on the Me Too train are gonna try to bring this up as we get into the

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Southern Baptist Convention, but that is not the hot topic right this minute.

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The hot topic is the law amendment. Just yesterday, Dwight McKissick, a prominent,

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I would say, left -leaning Southern Baptist Convention pastor in the great state of Texas said the law amendment, which again, for those who don't know, this is the amendment that if it adopted would prohibit churches with women pastors from being in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. He says the law amendment enshrines into policy the devaluation of women above the affirmation of the gifts and calling of women.

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The law amendment is obsessed with the question of what a woman can't do rather than with the question of what a woman can do.

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The law amendment makes a political theological football over and about the subject of women in ministry rather than following in the biblical, spiritual, and Christ -like realm of empowering and equipping women in ministry and kingdom partnership with men.

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And so for Southern Baptists, this shouldn't be controversial. This has been the doctrine going back quite a ways that the pastoral office is for, and a function of that office is for men.

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And Dwight McKissick has been an egalitarian on this particular issue for quite some time as well. He's even debated

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Tom Askell on this topic at the Southern Baptist Convention a few years ago during the founders breakout or however they arranged that.

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And so he's just signaling his, he's upset that this is potentially going to move forward.

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You have Dr. James Merritt. I totally unequivocally agree with Bruce Frank. Bruce Frank, another prominent

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Southern Baptist pastor. By the way, Bruce Frank, for those who don't know, this is my first introduction to Bruce Frank.

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He's a pastor at Biltmore Church, which is near Asheville, North Carolina. He was the guy who sent

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Marcus Hayes, who Marcus Hayes, I believe, went to his church. He sent Marcus Hayes down to, guess where?

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First Baptist Naples. And Marcus Hayes was woke on a number of issues, thought same -sex attraction wasn't sin and pro -critical race theory, social justice type of postings and all of that.

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And he wanted to make some very fundamental changes to the church. And of course, when he was not voted in, the minority who voted against him were called racist.

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There was a whole documentary on YouTube about it, about First Baptist Church Naples. Just type it in. Bruce Frank was the one who made this video that they showed at the church, along with Kevin Eazell and others, endorsing

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Marcus Hayes. Marcus Hayes is the right man for you. Well, that was my first introduction. He's on the left more.

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That's Bruce Frank. He's also really big on the Enneagram. I don't know what his deal is with that. But you have

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Dr. James Merritt. James Merritt was previously a president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So he holds, he carries weight with him, saying,

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I totally unequivocally agree with Bruce Frank. When you try to fix something that isn't broken, you break things even worse.

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So we don't have a problem with women pastors. If you try to fix it, you're gonna have worse problems.

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Now, I wanna remind everyone, that was an article by Bruce Frank. I haven't read, and I probably won't, but we have another article to read that's more recent.

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I wanna just remind everyone, though, what the Baptist faith and message actually says. Many of you know, if you're

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Southern Baptist, but it bears repeating. It says in the Baptist faith and message that there are two scriptural offices, the pastor, elder slash overseer.

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So you have a pastor slash elder slash overseer and deacon. There's two. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor slash elder slash overseer is limited to men as qualified by scripture.

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I don't know if it gets much clearer, but as the progressives shift, change definitions, bring up situations that they consider to be exceptions, you have to be, you have to use more words, and you have to bring more definition because people are trying to lawyer their way out of this kind of thing.

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But that's what the Southern Baptist Convention's statement of faith, essentially, the

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Baptist faith and message says. Now this isn't forced on individual churches. They do not have to adopt this. They're not forced to adopt this if they wanna be in cooperation with the

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Southern Baptist Convention. But this is the statement that when churches do join to cooperate with the

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Southern Baptist Convention, they are expected to be in general agreement, general cooperation with.

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So this has been longstanding. Now you have a guy, his name's Robs Collingsworth. He's at Criswell College since 2015.

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He moved to his current position as director of strategic relationships in 2022. Let's see, he's worked at Southwestern Seminary, a major SBC seminary.

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That's where he got his MDiv. He's also a member of the Village Church in Fort Worth. That's Matt Chandler's church,

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I believe. And so Rob Collingsworth wrote an article that got some traction for the

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Baptist Review about this law amendment, the law amendment trying to fine tune the language already in the

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Baptist faith and message. And the title of his article is "'Five Reasons to Oppose the Law Amendment.'" I'm not gonna read the whole thing to you, but I'm gonna summarize what his points are.

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He talks about, first, the law amendment prioritizes title, but inconsistently.

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So he says that the reason for this is that pastor is semantically challenged in ways elder and bishop slash overseer aren't, and not all

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Southern Baptists use it in the same way. So because not all Southern Baptists use it in the same way, you could have a children's pastor, he gives this example, that that's the first problem with it.

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Number two, it excludes people who hold to our confession. So there's people who hold to the Baptist faith and message, but they, you have, he gives an example of a church that there's egalitarian churches that have women in this pastoral office, but there's also churches that use the term pastor of women, but they aren't actually egalitarian.

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So they're just using this phrase. Now, I would say they're using it incorrectly then, they're just using the phrase in a wrong way. They would genuinely believe scripture, though, he says, and the gender distinctions, and they're complimentary in practice, but the only thing they would need to do in order to not run afoul of the amended language would be to change the title of their children's or women's pastor, which

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I would think, why is that a big deal? That should be an easy fix then, right?

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The third thing is it is out of step, the law amendment, with how we have existed as a convention for nearly two centuries, he says.

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So how do you say that? How does he say 200 year period, we've not existed that way?

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Well, he thinks that what's happening is that there's a tightening and a forcing churches to adopt basically in their belief system, something that they don't necessarily subscribe to.

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And so they can be in general cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention, and they shouldn't have to necessarily have every jot and tittle part of their belief at their church, they don't have to have that.

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Here's the interesting part to me. He says, in 2015, we amended our constitution to include the phrase we are now contending with that cooperating churches must have a faith and practice which closely identifies with the convention's adopted statement of faith.

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So aside from, here we go, three fairly egregious examples. Okay, these are the egregious examples.

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In other words, these are the exceptions. These are the things you can force on the churches, right? And you can police for affirmation of homosexuality, racism and abuse.

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These are three things that Southern Baptist Convention has said, we're gonna police this. Specifically, we're defining what it means to be out of cooperation on these particular issues.

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And these are the egregious examples. But apparently, women pastors aren't. Now, this is interesting to me because you look at this and you think, and I've gone through this on shows before I've read the language.

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You think that that would be just as important, if not more important than some of these issues as far as, insofar as I'm talking about what scripture clearly defines.

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Scripture talks about this issue more than it talks about our modern conception of quote unquote racism, for example.

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And it's very loose language they use about racism. You don't really even know what they're talking about and it could be applied loosely.

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But this is something that's very set in scripture. The definitions are clear.

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And what he's saying is that that issue is not, it doesn't fall into this category. If it's not an egregious example of being out of step with the

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SBC. There's the implied presupposition.

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There's the assumption that it's really not that big of a deal, guys. The whole women pastor thing, really not that big of a, you know, it's a big deal.

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Racism is a big deal, but that whole women pastor thing, not really. That's the assumption that's behind this whole thing.

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And so this is going to, it's gonna from the top down force these churches, right? But he's okay with churches being forced on these other issues.

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Number four, he says the law amendment would invite unintended consequences. So he talks about, what's his example here?

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By instituting language into our constitution that requires not only that pastors and elders be men, but that they be biblically qualified, we are constitutionally requiring our credentials committee to respond to reports involving subjective criteria.

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Gender is objective. Hospitality, respectability, not so much. So he's saying like, you're now gonna put all pastors on trial if someone in their church or enough people think that they're not meeting scriptural qualifications for being pastors.

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Number five, the law amendment sets a dangerous precedent for future cooperation. So basically this is the, who's next?

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What's next? What issue are we gonna come up with next to police our churches on? And so that's basically the gist of Rob Collingsworth's statement.

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Now there was a great response to this from the Center for Baptist Leadership. If you are in the Southern Baptist Convention and you don't know about the

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Center for Baptist Leadership, then you need to know about it. So you go to centerforbaptistleadership .org, centerforbaptistleadership .org.

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And this is the group, the more prominent group from what I understand now, that is producing materials to try to combat the leftward drift in the

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SBC. And they put out a story by, I apologize if I'm not pronouncing this name correctly,

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Garrett Bell is the name, I believe, or I think it's

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Garrett. I don't know. I'm wondering now if I'm, I don't see a lot of people named

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Gerard, but I don't think that's how you spell Gerard. So my apologies to Mr. Bell, I'm sorry, but you did write an excellent piece.

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So here is the title of it, five reasons to support the law amendment.

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And this is a response directly to Rob's Collingsworth. And he says, reason one, it prioritizes title, but inconsistently.

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So he's going through the reasons that I just described to you and just kind of dismantling them one by one.

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He says that Collingsworth's entire first argument works against him and for the law amendment, because he admits there was a spreading semantic carelessness.

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So he's saying, hey, there's a problem. People are just using this word pastor all over the place. So we can't have the law amendment.

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We can't define what a pastor is. But he's like, that's the reason you should have the law amendment.

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And I think that's absolutely true. He says, on the reason two, it excludes people who hold to our confession.

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He talks about that if we already agree on excluding unapologetic egalitarians, as Collingsworth tries to claim, how can

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Bart Barber's elevation of Parides to the cooperation group be explained? I mean, for those who don't know, the president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention elevated someone who is for women pastors, explicitly so, to a group designed to kind of examine this issue and present their findings at the

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Southern Baptist Convention this June. So he's saying, this whole thing happened and this is happening under our noses.

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If the SBC function, as Collingsworth tries to assure us that it does, Fielder Church would be removed and not rewarded.

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So this has been said for a long time that we already have language.

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We've dealt with Rick Warren. We don't need extra language on this. But he's saying, how is that possible when you have a church that unapologetically is for women pastors, serving in the

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Southern Baptist Convention? Obviously there's a problem there and the law amendment would help rectify that.

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Reason three, it is out of step with how we have existed as a convention for nearly two centuries. He says, this gives you whiplash because in the immediate point above,

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Collingsworth makes a plea for not excluding churches who hold to our confession and even defended the enforcement mechanism of removing churches that violate our confession.

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So in other words, we have the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 we can enforce this.

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So we don't need the law amendment, but then turning around and saying, well, enforcing this through the law amendment is innovative somehow.

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Well, you can't have it both ways really. So obviously, it's a mess of an article and I don't even know if I need to go through the rest of it.

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These are just sort of self -revealing. It invites unintended consequences. I mean, it talks about, okay, like if you have a massive problem with churches with pastors who aren't qualified, maybe you could have a mechanism for bringing some of this stuff up.

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He doesn't say that. I'm saying that you could bring them up on... Like if you have a pastor, I'm thinking of like who's like, hopefully the church should be dealing with this, but they're just not qualified because they're stealing money or something.

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I don't know. That might be a reason. If the church supports this kind of thing, if you have this pastor who's egregiously violating what scripture says a pastor is supposed to be, then could you bring that up at the convention?

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Why not? It was wise of Law and Sanchez to adhere as closely to possible to Baptist faith message on this point because they use the language, they use scriptural language.

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They talk about, if I can find the exact language here. While both men and women are gifted for the service in the church, the office of pastor, elder, overseers, limited to men as qualified by scripture.

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That's what the Baptist faith and message says. And the law amendment echoes that language of as qualified by scripture.

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So this isn't bringing anything that's not in scripture as his point. And so, yeah, really that's all there is to say about that,

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I suppose. Reason five, it sets a dangerous precedent for future cooperation. He says, finally,

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Collinsworth asks where we will stop or rather he asked enforcing sound doctrine is good, but where do we stop? He says, if I had been an editor for his article,

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I would have asked him to read that sentence again, very slowly, where do we stop enforcing sound doctrine?

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And he's like, really, we don't ever, we should always enforce sound doctrine, right? So that's pretty much the conclusion.

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And that's from the, like I said, the Center for Baptist Leadership. If you want to check them out, they're a great organization that's out there doing good work.

35:11

So let's switch gears here, or no, I guess we're not quite switching gears yet. I wanted to point out one more thing.

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The IMB, the International Mission Board for the Southern Baptist Convention handles the issue of women pastors as well.

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And this is how they do it. We believe both men and women have vital roles in ministry. However, the role of pastor elder overseer is exclusively assigned to men in the church and not to women.

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This is not a Western cultural practice, but a biblical command. We're not at liberty to change it, nor can we step around this requirement by calling women by a different title, but then assigning them the leadership and teaching functions of a pastor.

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Regardless of local cultural norms, we must consistently teach and model that the role of the pastor elder overseer is only to be held by men.

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And we must never affirm or encourage women in this role. This is great language to clarify things.

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This is already in the SBC, in the IMB, in their, as I understand it, their foundations book, but people are freaking out that this could potentially be part of the

36:07

Southern Baptist Convention's doctrine. So that's it for the Southern Baptist Convention, really.

36:12

I just wanted to talk about some of the things happening in the convention. A lot of this isn't new, but of course much of this is intensifying,

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I would say. It's getting more and more, as we approach

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June, it's become, the arguments are becoming more and more potent, and you're gonna have to be prepared for them if you are in the

36:36

Southern Baptist Convention. So I think that's pretty much all I have for today. I did want to let you know about Bradford Christian College, and I'm gonna just play this one minute video.

36:48

If you wouldn't mind waiting till the end of the podcast, check this out, because you may have friends, even if you're not someone who can take advantage of this, you may have friends that can take advantage of this.

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They don't want the social justice garbage, and more and more people are doing it from home. And if you're someone who wants to learn about theology and you want a college education in that, you wanna do it from home, you want a mentorship experience,

37:18

Bradford Christian College may be for you. And listeners, it's difficult to get a good cost -effective education in today's world, let alone a

37:29

Christian one. Thankfully, there's Bradford Christian College. You've heard me talk about Bradford Christian College in the past, how it's an accredited and affordable online directed study program, great for homeschoolers and Christians who want to give their children a college education while they're still at home.

37:45

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for more information. That's bradfordchristiancollege .com. All right, well, check out bradfordchristiancollege .com

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if you are interested in that opportunity. A lot of parents and homeschool parents especially have found

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Bradford Christian College to be very helpful for them. I wanna just talk to you very briefly about this as my final announcement.

38:38

I do have some speaking engagements coming up. I will be in April in Boise, Idaho, April 27th through 28th at the

38:45

Stand Firm Conference. You can go to johnharrispodcast .com

38:51

or worldviewconversation .com takes you to the same place and go to speaking, and you'll find the links to register for these conferences.

38:59

I'll also be in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. That's outside the Twin Cities area, May 4th through 5th. A Be Not Conformed Conference is the name of that.

39:06

And then September 27th through 29th, 2024, the Fundamentals Conference, Camp of the Woods Speculator, New York.

39:12

And we have a website for that. It's fundamentalsconference .com. And you can go there, see a picture of me with a mustache.

39:20

And Dr. Richard Bargus is gonna be our main speaker this year. He is the president of the IFCA. And I asked him to speak on fundamentalism, the fundamentalist movement and what we can learn about.

39:30

And of course there are strengths and weaknesses to it. But what can we learn today with the issues that the church more broadly is going through?

39:38

What can we learn about from the fundamentalists and their movement to conserve orthodoxy?

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So I think it's gonna be great. I already have some ideas for sessions and we have fellowship.

39:50

We have the great outdoors. We have just a bunch of men singing. It's just a great time to be there.

39:56

And it's for a great price as well. So check it out, fundamentalsconference .com. And you can also go to worldviewconversation .com