Mr. Smith Goes to the SBC Convention

Introduction, Easter Weekend, and a Busy Tax Week

We are live for another unannounced live stream. I have to speak a little low tonight because it is late and we have some guests and I don't want to disturb them. So FYI, for those who are wondering, John, why do you sound like you have an NPR voice?

That's why I sound like I have an NPR voice right now. It's been a long day for me. I had a great weekend, by the way. I hope everyone else had a great weekend. It was Easter Sunday or Resurrection Sunday, as many in my church call it, and I got to go be with the family afterward.

It was a long day. We had the sunrise service, which I did not go to. It would have been a longer day if I did that. And then there was an Easter morning, Resurrection Sunday morning breakfast, did that, and special music and flowers and then the service.

By the way, someone who listens to this podcast came, actually traveled a distance to come to the service, which was quite a treat to be able to talk to someone who's one of the listeners out there. So we had a great time and then went to the family's house and didn't get back until late in the evening.

So I guess that's a typical holiday day. But I'm exhausted, not because of that, but because it's tax week. And because it is tax week, I did start last week, I did start on my filing. But today was, and yesterday really, were two full days spent just figuring out taxes.

And my taxes have become so complicated. And I wondered yesterday, why do I keep thinking about being off the grid somewhere out West, working as a cowboy or something? Oh, that might be why. It dawned on me.

I'm like, why do I keep having this thought? Because the taxes are so complicated and such a headache. That's why. It's just, it's amazing to me. It's amazing to me. It could be so much easier. I'm wondering if we have the most complicated tax code in the entire world.

We must. I just can't conceive of it ever being any more complicated than it is. But anyway, I've been working on that. And this week's just, it's a busy week. So all that to say, what I'm trying to do is fit in some podcasts, kind of in between things.

And I want to give you a little bit of an update. Tomorrow, I'm actually going to be meeting with Kevin Gutzman at Western Connecticut State University, interviewing him for the 1607 Project. I'm meeting with a culinary chef, I know, a culinary chef, right, interviewing him for the 1607 Project.

We're going to talk about colonial food. And then later this week, I'm going to be traveling in Georgia, and I will be meeting a number of people, including, now, I know only a few of you might know who this is, but including Paul Godfrey.

Some of you heard that name, and you know exactly who I'm talking about. Someone I respect a lot, I admire, at least when it comes to political, social commentary. And looking forward to that. So lots going on, truth, oh, by the way, I need to show everyone this, TruthScript.

Working on that, working on like five things at the same time, working on a book, working on TruthScript, working on all kinds of things. So this introduction is for those who care about all these personal things.

We're going to get to some meat in a moment, but let me see if I can pull this up and show you. So that's what it looks like. Not much there right now, but you can see the icon. I think we're going to stick with this.

One of the patrons actually made this, which is awesome. I love it. And we're not sure if we'll keep the font quite yet, but it's going to look something like this. And that's the mission. TruthScript's mission, I can say it, is to encourage Christians to be transformed by the renewing of their minds instead of conformed to the world coming soon.

So that is in the works right now as we speak, which is awesome. So just wanted to thank everyone who's been praying for that. This is the, I guess, the good TGC alternative. We want to do something similar to the Gospel Coalition because I think that the Gospel Coalition actually has done a good job on a few things.

I'm not saying all their content is good, but I'm saying they understood a formula. They understood simple articles, short articles for common people, not anything that's too long, too academic. And what we have on the conservative, if you want to call it side theologically, is we have a lot of discernment style blogs and ministries, and we need those, but that's what we have.

And then we also have exegetical type ministries. They're not really focused on, like, they're not going to give you a movie review. They're not going to give you information on what's current. They're going to focus exclusively on, I'm thinking about Grace to You, Ligonier Ministries, maybe G3.

They're going to focus on more interpreting scripture, founders' ministries. We need those outlets as well, but there's no one that I can tell. Some people have sent me a few websites and said, isn't this kind of like it, John?

And it's not. I haven't seen one that is doing what the Gospel Coalition is doing. So anyway, that's what TruthScript is about. We already have a board picked. We have the officers picked. We filed for 501c3 status.

That's all going forward. So exciting stuff. All right, so the stuff I wanted to talk about tonight is related to an ongoing conversation that's happening right now on Twitter. And I've been getting these notifications.

It's one of the things. There's been a bunch of things, but this is one of the things I've been getting a lot of notifications about. And I haven't actually, I think I understand where this article is going, but we're going to read it together.

I haven't read it yet because of everything I've been doing. And it's at the American Reformer. If you want to pull it up, if you're streaming live, and it's by Megan Basham and it's called Mr. Smith Goes to the Convention, meaning the Southern Baptist Convention.

So here it is. And we can read this together. And then I'm going to show you that the president of the Southern Baptist Convention has already reacted within, I don't know, three hours of this article being posted because I think it dropped this afternoon.

Mike Law, the SBC Executive Committee, and the Question of Women Pastors

Here's the title, the subtitle, Female Pastors, LGBTQ, and the Future of the SBC. In May of 2022, Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia, sent an email to the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As the only full-time member of a church of about 100, he had never had an interaction with his national leadership before. So he began with a chipper greeting, introducing himself and his congregation, followed by a straightforward question, is a church that has a woman serving as pastor deemed to be in friendly cooperation with the SBC?

Home to some 47 ,000 churches and 13 million members, the SBC's status as the largest Protestant denomination in the U .S. is due in large part to its loose structure. Rather than a top-down hierarchy, it's more of a casual association of churches who agree on doctrine and pool their money to fund missions, seminaries, and various charitable endeavors.

So you can tell all this background is giving information to probably conservative readers politically who aren't initiated into SBC politics. Most of you listening probably are, so I'm going to skip over this.

Though its contributions may have been small, Arlington Baptist was nonetheless a contributor in good standing, and its pastor was inquiring whether, since Article 6 of the Denomination Statement of Faith asserts that the office of pastor is limited to men, based on 1 Timothy 2 and 3, a church could remain in the club if it violated this doctrine.

Law explained that his understanding was that a church with a woman pastor would not qualify for what the SBC calls friendly cooperation because that requires a faith and practice that closely identifies with the Baptist faith and message.

The SBC's name for their statement of faith, churches that affirm homosexual behavior, have been disfellowshipped, why would this point of doctrine be any different? He finished by thanking the committee for its service and said he looked forward to their answer, and he never got one.

Now, I want to say, I think it's referenced later in this particular article, I did watch about half of Mike Law's video, it's only like 15 minutes long, and it's well done. It's a video anyone could have made, I mean, it's just a webcam and a little PowerPoint presentation, but he really is aggressive, he doesn't do that winsome thing where he's trying to just go along to get along, give the benefit of the doubt, he is sounding the alarm in this particular video, and he also cites some hard facts.

He says that he did a very scaled down study, it wasn't involved, it wasn't comprehensive, and he found 120 female pastors, according to him, 120 in the Southern Baptist Convention, in good standing, in churches that are in good standing.

I know I pointed out last week that there was that initiative, I don't know what you would call it, I guess initiative is the best word I can come up with for it, but that was supporting female pastors, and I just went, I probably spent maybe half an hour, not even 20 minutes, just going through a few churches on this list of pastors who had signed a statement, a petition I guess would be a better word, a petition to allow female pastors.

It wasn't specifically about the Southern Baptist, but just in general, and I started coming up with all these pastors, women pastors, who are in good standing in SBC churches. I went to the SBC website, and poof, there it is.

Places like Raleigh, North Carolina, where there's an SBC seminary right there, right down the road from the seminary, there were at least two churches that had women pastors on the staff, and they called them pastors.

I pointed this out last week, and I just said, I wonder how widespread this is. Well, here's the article. It's very widespread apparently. All right, so the response Law received from the Vice President of Communications, Jonathan Howe, explained that determinations of friendly cooperation are made by the Credentials Committee, not the Executive Committee, so if he wanted to report a church for having a woman pastor, that was where he should go.

Law wrote back, apologizing for not being clear the first time. He knew where churches could be reported, but was only asking about the general principle. Did the committee agree with the Baptist faith and message position on women in the pastorate, and did that belief guide their decisions?

Howe replied that he could not speak for the Credentials Committee, and did not think the Credentials Committee was likely to speak for the Credentials Committee either. They speak through their actions throughout the year, he said.

He then pointed Law to a portal where he could report a church for review. Now this, you'll recognize this as your standard ring around the rosy. This is your double speak that you get when you typically are trying to get a straight answer in the corporate world or something, and you're sent to this department and then to that department, and no one wants to take responsibility.

Same thing in an organization like the Southern Baptist Convention. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. To Law, the confusion lay in the fact that the committee had not been speaking through their actions.

In just a five-mile radius of Arlington Baptist, I had noticed five other SBC churches that had female pastors on staff, he tells me. Further, far from exhaustive research, turned up 170 more. Colleagues shared that they had 170.

Just think about that for a moment. 170. Colleagues shared, the standard argument that I keep hearing from, I've heard for years from people on the other side of the aisle, because it is an aisle now, it's more of a chasm in the Southern Baptist Convention is, yeah, you know, there's a few churches here or there that have female pastors, and it's because a lot of them are pre-conservative resurgence days, and they just haven't been rooted out, or they haven't noticed.

It's because of ignorance. It's not because of willful neglect or anything like that. 170? It's kind of hard to make that case anymore. Credit to Mike Law. He did the digging, and he was able to turn up all these results.

Colleagues shared that when they had reported churches in their areas for the same issues, the Credentials Committee took no action. Then there were the whispers that various SBC leaders themselves attended churches where women act as pastors.

In fact, one blog cited Hal's wife as one of them. Oh man, that's awkward. In short, it seemed to Law it would be helpful if the committee could be prevailed upon to speak through other means, namely words.

But while Law's next email to senior members of the Credentials Committee produced no better results, their response did clarify why his query was being met with stonewalling and unasked for directions on how to report churches.

I believe your question is in reference to Saddleback Church. The Registration Secretary informed him. Because of this, he said the committee would be unable to give a response. With 23 ,000 members across, for those who don't know, Saddleback Church, that's where Rick Warren pastors, or did, pastor, and that's where women, they have ordained women pastors there, and they call them pastors.

And this was a big issue last year at the Southern Baptist annual meeting. It will be a big issue at this particular annual meeting coming up. With 23 ,000 members spread across 14 campuses, not to mention extension groups around the world that attend services online, Saddleback could hardly provide a greater contrast to Arlington Baptist, where Law himself stuffs sermon outlines into Sunday's bulletins and makes the spaghetti for Wednesday night Bible study.

So you can see Megan is trying to, as the title suggests, show that Mike Law is, he's the little guy in all this. He is the Mr. Smith who is going to Washington and just cares about the church. So, let's see, we've got a bunch of people streaming now for this unannounced live stream.

One comment I'll just focus on before we keep going here from Truttle. It's an interesting icon you have there, Truttle, for your profile. A bureaucracy is an institution that exercises enormous power over you, but with no locus of responsibility.

That's a great quote. Bureaucracy is how this all gets enabled. Yep. Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. So, yeah, let's keep going with this. The megachurch's founding pastor, Rick Warren, author of Purpose Driven Life.

Let's see, we know this. He's on the left. Francis Collins, World Economic Forum, blah, blah, blah. All right. In 2021, Warren had defiled, defiled, he did defile, but he defied the Baptist faith and message by ordaining three women.

So, we just talked about this. All of this conjecture was immaterial to law, however, as he hadn't been thinking of Saddleback at all. Okay, so here's the thing. Saddleback's getting all the press, and maybe it's because they're so big and Rick Warren's there, and maybe that's by design to some extent is what I'm saying.

Maybe that's, Mike Law's saying, look, I got 170 churches here. Saddleback's only one of them, and for Saddleback to get all the attention means, I guess there's a few things. One possibility here is you get rid of Saddleback, or at least you say that they're no longer in good standing, and you say, and you make the problem go away in a high profile case, and then women pastors continue to ascend the ranks in the SBC, or at least they enter the pastorate, they increase in numbers, and you can always point to that example of when we disfellowshipped, or yeah, basically disfellowshipped Saddleback Church.

So it gives a shield for those on the left who want to continue this drift, if you will. So that's one thing. That's one way, one, I guess, idea of what might be going on. I'm not saying that is going on, but that could be what's going on.

It could also be that, well, I don't want to, there's some other possibilities, but let's keep going with the article. I don't want to interrupt myself too much here. So Mike Loft felt like clarity was in order, thus a month after his initial letter to the executive committee, he determined to attend the SBC's national meeting and propose a constitutional amendment.

It would require Southern Baptist churches to conform to the Baptist faith and message on the question of women in the pastorate, just as they were required to do on issues of sexuality. Delegates, known as messengers, to the annual convention would have the opportunity to consider the question on biblical merit, free from the wrangling over famous personalities like Rick Warren.

But then less than two weeks before the convention, Warren announced he was retiring and named as his replacement, a husband and wife team. The law would not know for it for some time. Warren's decision would become the main obstacle to his hope of giving the SBC a chance to make a clear cut up or down choice.

The first day of the convention started at 8 a .m. Warren's law arrived at 745, stationing himself near one of the ten microphones. So this is back in the last annual meeting in June. Though he had pre-submitted his amendment by email the night before, there were no guarantees he would actually be granted an opportunity to make a motion as the process is by all accounts harrowing.

There's only two 20-minute periods when you can make motions and long lines form for the mics. This is all SBC stuff to explain to people who are outside the SBC and I think most who are listening to this podcast probably understand a little bit because I've covered it so much of how this all works.

So law resolved to continue standing near the mic for two and a half hour wait, even after Hal came by and pressed him to sit down. His persistence paid off. He wasn't the first to make a motion as he'd hoped, but he did get his proposal in early and it was quickly seconded.

At that point, the committee on the order of business would have scheduled his amendment for an immediate vote. Instead, they sent it to the executive committee who would then decide whether to bring it forward at the next convention in the summer of 2023.

At that moment, law had a choice to make. He could have pulled the amendment out of the committee to force a vote on the floor and in fact that morning friends had nudged him to do so, but senior leaders of the SBC persuaded him to be patient and trust the executive committee to shepherd it through a formal vetting process, something that would also give him more time to drum up support before the 2023 convention.

It was a decision he would later come to regret. And I understand why he did that, but I think there's a lot of this going on. Maybe Mike Law would even say now, I don't know, that one of the reasons he regrets this is he didn't realize how bad the rot was in the SBC, how corrupt it really is.

And this happens all the time. I'm telling you, it's still happening all the time. It's no different than in the last few years, people who have also been quote-unquote red-pilled on the medical establishment or the deep state.

Donald Trump Jr., I saw he was in an interview just recently and he was saying he pretty much trusted the FBI and the CIA. If they were going to go after someone, at least there was a reason for it. Even if they were wrong, there was something to it.

And then he saw the whole Steele dossier, Russia collusion thing. And he said, you know, that really showed me you don't really actually need any evidence. And he was totally cynical. He is cynical on the deep state, quote-unquote.

And that's happening. There's a lag time a little bit because people tend to trust their church maybe. But people are coming to that same conclusion that, oh my goodness, the people that are at the helm, the people that are actually steering the boat, it's not that they're ignorant.

It's that they actually don't care or they're evil or there's some kind of a motivation there. There's some kind of a weakness there that is preventing them from taking the actions that they should. And so it looks like Mike Law came to that conclusion.

Trusting those guys wasn't the greatest move. And that's what he believes now. That didn't mean the issue of women in the pastorate was tabled for 2022. However, at the 2021 convention, a pastor from Louisiana had submitted a motion calling for Saddleback to be disfellowshipped over its ordination of the three women.

As with Law's motion, the credentials committee had decided not to act immediately, but rather take a year to consider the matter. They were now due to deliver a decision. Instead, the committee chairwoman announced that they were recommending the creation of a new committee that would spend another year studying the definition of the word pastor.

Everyone remember that? I remember that from the floor of the convention. And actually, to his credit, Al Mohler had a great response to that. It's like, if we need a committee to study the word pastor, we're in deep trouble.

How many other words are we going to form committees to figure out what words mean? What is the meaning of is? There was a friend of mine who, I don't know if he wants me to say his name, but he has another podcast.

He was thinking of doing a documentary similar to Matt Walsh's What is a Woman? He was going to do What is a Pastor? I think he abandoned that project because, I don't know why, he was probably just too involved.

But it was a good idea in a way. It would just be hard to pull off. But it's the same problem. It's the loosening standards, getting rid of definitions, challenging definitions. The war is over definitions and principles.

That's what it's over. It's not over these surface-level things that I think people in power in these bureaucracies would prefer we argue about. He felt that perhaps the problem was not with the word pastor but cooperation and suggested the new committee could instead spend a year studying what it meant to cooperate with the statement of faith.

Let's see. Who is the he there? Oh, the committee. Okay, a former chair of the SPC committee. Then it was time for lunch. Okay, I remember this. When the meeting recovered, then-president Ed Litton was announcing standard business from the platform when he was summoned to a hushed exchange with a credentials committee chairwoman.

Upon returning to the podium, he announced there would be a departure from the agenda to hear from a surprise guest. That was, of course, Rick Warren. You can see where the deference is. This is exactly James, right?

This is what the left always says. Oh, those conservatives, you give preference to white males. That's what you do in your church. You're giving preference to rich people. You're not looking at the poor and the marginalized.

Then you see it's the same crowd that runs the convention, that loves to scream about those things and use them as wedge issues when it suits them. Many of them do. Here they are making a decision to allow someone with much authority and prestige and money to come in and monopolize the microphone with a limited time available for the people who are messengers from other places.

As the New York Times has highlighted, Saddleback has never used the word Baptist in its name. Just showing that Rick Warren really cooperated with the cooperative program, but he's not exactly your standard Southern Baptist pastor, I suppose.

Months later, Warren asked Pew to alter its online transcript. Warren says he misspoke. Warren calls widespread misperceptions about Southern Baptists. The Baptist Standard observed that he has always downplayed Rick Warren, any affiliation with the SBC, because of that misperception.

I've heard this so many times. Sources who have been in the SBC leadership for decades tell me that before 2022, they can only recall Warren attending the convention a couple of times in 35 years. I will say this, I've been in those discussions.

There's not a name mentioned here, but I will tell you that I do know names of people who have been at the conventions who say this, that they have not seen Rick Warren there. It is very doubtful Rick Warren has been at these conventions, but he shows up to make a spectacle.

Nonetheless, Lytton gave Warren a VIP welcome, permitting him to make a speech that ran six minutes. Then she goes over what Rick Warren said. He basically just touted how important and powerful his church is and his work.

When he was done, Lytton thanked him. Law tells me that in many SBC conventions he's attended over the years, he has never seen anything like that. That never happens, he said. He adds that as the question of Saddleback's membership was not being debated, there was no mechanism in Robert's Rules of Order.

The platform recognized Warren. She focuses on this preference that Rick Warren is given. I want you to ask in your mind why that is. Come up with your own idea. If you're in the SBC, why was Warren afforded so much attention?

Does that bother you? What does this mean on the issue of women pastors? Why focus on Warren and Saddleback and not the 170 plus churches that have women pastors in them in the SBC? After Warren's speech, the credentials chairwoman announced that the committee had heard the messengers.

So she's pointing out the hypocrisy here. Still the seed of questioning definitions was planted. Luckily, unlike James Madison or Thomas Jefferson, the authors responsible for Article VI of the Southern Baptist Statement of Faith were still alive and able to tell their denomination exactly what they meant.

So you had Albert Mueller, Chuck Kelly, Richard Land, that released a statement clarifying what they wrote. They said, look, we weren't confused about what a pastor is 20 years ago when we came up with this.

Not came up with it, but when we affirmed the Baptist view on women in the pastoral role. As for why so many Southern Baptists were experiencing this newfound confusion, Mueller believed it has less to do with definitions and more to do with cultural pressures.

And he's actually, I think, right on that. I'm going to skip over this a little bit and what Al Mueller says. We talked about it before. So it's a slippery slope, and I would agree with that. It is a slippery slope.

In early 2020, Saddleback pastor Chris Clark and his wife Alisa co-founded a Saddleback chapter of Embracing the Journey, a ministry for parents of LGBTQ children with longtime Saddleback members Doug and Shauna Habel.

By the end of 2021, an ETJ newsletter revealed that Saddleback was hosting four ongoing ETJ support groups and one small group. So this quote-unquote ministry is happening under Saddlebacks. Well, it's not even under their nose.

It's with their approval, with their funding, with their applause. While ETJ does not specify whether it affirms LGBTQ lifestyles and identifies its founder, Craig McDonald, sits on the board of Renovus, another faith-based nonprofit that does assert that homosexuality and transgenderism are compatible with Christianity.

Two organizations are linked, billing itself as a religious nonprofit that exists to reclaim faith for LGBTQ plus Christians. Renovus says its vision is a world where no one has to choose between their faith and sexual orientation or gender identity.

That's just great. I mean, I don't believe for one second, people. I don't believe. Everyone who can hear my voice right now, that Rick Warren, the pastors at Saddleback Church, are ignorant about this stuff.

And I know it's a big place. I know some things slip through the cracks. But it's the same issue at a place like Saddleback that you have in the Southern Baptist Convention. There's not a concern about it.

When it is revealed, there's not a statement put out. I mean, as far as I know, this organization, these ties are still there. There's not been any retraction. It's approval. At some point, it becomes approval.

At what point is that? Probably, initially, it was approval. But it becomes a default option, position, I guess, that we have to hold, we're required to at some point when it's been years and you have nonsense like this going on.

Along with recommending ETJ, Renovus endorses groups like the Reformation Project, GayChurch .com, and Q Christian Fellowship. And the Reformation Project, that's Matthew Vines. That's really gay-affirming.

Interestingly, Karen Swallow Pryor, who I think is still a Southern Baptist, even though she is quitting her position at Southeastern, she had Matthew Vines write a chapter in her second-to-last book called Cultural Engagement.

In the introduction, she says that all the authors, that would include Matthew Vines, are Orthodox in their theology. That's happening in the Southern Baptist Convention. It's been happening in a number of different places, not just at Saddleback.

This is the time to be clear. This is the time to draw firm lines, especially with what's happening with the transgender stuff. It is the time to really, really double down. It's not even just doubling down, it's re-educating people.

It's solidifying. Think about a war-like scenario. We are in a spiritual war. The troops need to have firm grounding. If they don't have firm grounding, they don't have the sword of the spirit sharp, they don't have the shield of faith ready to go, they're going to be trounced.

They're going to be routed from the battlefield, which is, I'm afraid, what's happening. You have a number of shepherds out there who should be shooting wolves, protecting sheep, who aren't really shepherds.

They are interested in fleecing the sheep as much as the wolves are, because some of them are wolves. On its event page, Renovus lists an upcoming ETJ conference in Atlanta. The lineup includes Saddleback pastor Chris Clark, Renovus board member Demi Kazi, as well as a number of authors like Matthew Vines, there he is, David Gushy, and Justin Lee.

Those guys are way out there. But even if ETJ were so deeply intertwined with openly affirming organizations and influencers, its recommendations and activities should still call Saddleback's discernment in deciding to partner with the organization into serious question.

Nowhere in its online materials does ETJ characterize LGBTQ identities or behaviors as sinful. Oh, Ryan McLaren, wow. The vast majority of its recommended resources are explicitly affirming. I didn't recognize these others.

I recognize Gushy, Vines, and Lee, but John Pavlitz and Colby Martin, I didn't recognize them, but Ryan McLaren, man, he's probably the grandfather of the emergent church. He is way out there, way outside of orthodoxy.

He's more in like panantheist or pantheist world. To return again to those who launched ETJ at Saddleback, a close examination of Shauna Habel and Chris Clark's activism suggests that fears about the connection between the churches who shift stances on ordaining women and those who shift on LGBTQ issues are well-founded.

Let me just say this. This is totally 100 true. You start questioning the word of God on a social issue in one area, you will question it in another area. It is a slide. You just keep applying the same logic.

That's all you do. This has been a problem for a long time. I would say it goes back farther than this. Those who accepted the BLM narrative or the CRT narrative tend to get soft on the issue of women pastors or soft complementarianism, they call it, where women can function in the role, but they can't have the title or the position.

Things like that. They separate the two. That comes from people who were soft on BLM CRT. Now they're soft on this. Yes, the train just continues. A number of people have pointed this out for years. Anyway, it's a very well-founded, it's not a slippery slope fallacy.

It is just a trend. The argument isn't that if you adopt the idea that women can be pastors in the denomination that you will necessarily go for homosexuality or something like that. In fact, I know a number of people in other denominations who don't do that.

I have my reasons for thinking why. I'm going to put that on the shelf for a moment. It's not a necessary relationship. The reason is because it's the same logic that's being applied. It's this undercutting of biblical sufficiency, this confidence in man's wisdom today, the experts, whatever, and casting tradition aside and casting the final authority of God's Word aside as anything authoritative.

A lot of people who do this don't think that's what they're doing, but that's what's happening. Once that happens, then you can do anything. You can make the Bible say whatever. It's an origami at that point.

I think this is totally true. That's what it's about, the logic used in the Southern Baptist Convention to justify women pastors. It is a whisper from the serpent. Does the Baptist faith and message really say, does God's Word really say?

That gets applied to other things. When it does, you can ask. You really could if you wanted to say, does God's Word really say that Jesus is the only way? Why not? Why stop with something like pastoral roles?

In a Facebook fundraising video for the documentary 1946, which argues that the traditional Christian condemnation of homosexuality traces back to a modern translation error, Habel, who sometimes goes by Habel Morgan, explains how she came to share this belief, describing her attendance at the 2016 Reformation Project Conference with her daughter.

Habel says, I saw gay Christians worshiping God. I saw the Holy Spirit, and I knew that God was in this place. Again, look what's happening. It's what I saw with my eyes, this. It's not about the authority of the Word of God anymore.

What does the Word of God say? It's about what I felt in a moment. It's about my experience. Once that shift happens, anything's possible. Habel had been clear on Twitter that part of her mission is persuading churches to abandon biblical orthodoxy with respect to sexuality and gender in response to trans-identifying actress Ellen Page's criticism of non-affirming churches.

She posted churches like Killsong that mandate queer celibacy should try a year of solitary themselves. God's endgame is love. All right, so Megan Basham is just, there's paragraph after paragraph here, and I'm not going to read all of it.

You can go to American Reformer if you want to see more of this, but just getting into the details of what's going on in this with Saddleback pastors like Chris Clark, what's going on with ministries, the ETJ ministry, and how these things are, the rod is much worse than you thought, is what she's saying.

The rod is much worse than you thought. Finally, the couple Warren selected to lead Saddleback don't seem entirely clear on the Bible stance on homosexuality either. When asked whether a gay married couple, so this is the current pastor and I guess pastor, pastor's wife.

When asked whether a gay married couple should carry on with their sinful relationship after coming to Christ, Andy and Stacey Wood answered, I don't know, that's really hard. Yeah. They went on to say there is no black and white answer and they have to ask the couple how they feel the Holy Spirit is leading them.

The Woods did not cite any scripture in their response. So this is what's going on at Saddleback Church. As of summer of 2022 faded into fall, Mike Long began to make the case for his constitutional amendment to the wider SBC.

In August, he drafted a public letter and began soliciting signatures from SBC pastors to demonstrate to the executive committee that an up or down vote was necessary to bring clarity to the current confusion.

Many pastors seem to agree with him and his petition rapidly gained more than 2 ,000 signatures but dozens of pastors replied that they could not sign because their churches, the majority of which had been Southern Baptist since their founding, had already broken with the SBC over perceived leftward drift.

Wow. That's one of the problems with trying to even take back the denomination now. It's the window of opportunity has, I believe, closed. And if it hasn't, it's closing fast. As a decade, maybe, you know what?

I'm not telling Mike Law what to do. I don't know a lot about Mike Law, but what he's already done, maybe he should be running for president of the convention. I mean, he's shown some backbone and leadership and this is a Mr. Smith moment.

Like you think about this, what he's done as a really more of a small time pastor here. There are people even conservative types in the convention that had the resources to do what he's doing. And they had more of a platform to be able to persuade and they haven't really used it effectively.