June 24, 2024 Show with William Wolfe & Jared Moore on “What Really Happened at the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention Meeting?”

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 18th day of June 2024.

And today, for both hours, with two different guests, one each hour, we are going to be addressing the question, what really happened at the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention meeting, which just very recently occurred?

And during the first hour, to address that very question, will be William Wolfe, founder and executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership and widely respected and authoritative commentator on the role of the Southern Baptist Convention in broader American evangelicalism and the intersection of faith and politics in our nation.

During the second hour, that same topic will be addressed by a returning guest to the program, Jared Moore, senior pastor of Homestead's Baptist Church of Crossville, Tennessee, who is also an author and a recent candidate for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention.

And it's my honor and privilege, first of all, for this first hour to welcome, for the very first time ever, to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, William Wolfe.

Thanks for having me on.

I'm really honored to be a guest here on your show today.

Well, I want to thank you so much for being willing to carve an hour out of your vacation time to be on the program with us. And I know that the last thing that people typically want to do on their vacation is to leave even for an hour, their spouses and children and so on, and be involved in something that is more work-related in your case.

But this is such an important topic, and we didn't want too much time to elapse after the meeting that the Southern Baptist Convention had to make it old news, as it were. But first of all, tell us about the Center for Baptist Leadership.

Yeah, thank you so much. The Center for Baptist Leadership is a new nonprofit launched here within the last, really, just a few months that exists to help cultivate courageous and uncompromising and biblical Baptist leadership for the 21st century.

We are focusing on the Southern Baptist Convention, but also broader than just the Southern Baptist Convention. We're seeking to be a leader in all of American evangelicalism and Baptist life. And our mission, our goal is to help revitalize the Southern Baptist Convention from within to help it address the doctrinal and theological and really even sort of best business practices issues that are presenting themselves within the Southern Baptist Convention in a biblical and God-honoring way.

We also want to help defend the Southern Baptist Convention as a critical American Christian institution, and not just an American Christian institution, but really a global Christian institution that takes the gospel all over the world.

We want to defend it from the progressive left that we do believe wants to destroy it. And we're not just making that up. There's been many revelations that have been brought to light recently by reporting, particularly with Megan Basham in this upcoming book she has, Shepherds for Sale, that show that mega donors of the progressive anti-Christian variety are targeting the Southern Baptist Convention, trying to subvert it, to infiltrate it, and ultimately to destroy it.

So we want to help equip institutional leaders, pastors, and lay members in the Southern Baptist Convention to defend it from those who are coming after it. And then finally, the Center for Baptist Leadership is here to serve as a better Baptist voice in the public square, speaking to the political and cultural issues, again, facing Baptists and all American Christians today.

Well, if you want to get more details on the Center for Baptist Leadership, go to centerforbaptistleadership .org, centerforbaptistleadership .org. Well, before we head into the main theme, which is what really happened at the Southern Baptist Convention's meeting 2024, before we get into that major theme, as always, since you are a first-time guest on Iron Troupe and Zion Radio, we always have our first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony that would include the religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And we'd love to hear your story.

Yeah, thank you. So I was raised by Christian parents, first-generation Christian parents. Neither one of them grew up in a Christian household, but the Lord drew them to himself later in their lives, both in their sort of college, post-college years.

They got married and moved to North Carolina, and that's where I grew up. And we have five kids. My mom's in a wheelchair, and she home-schooled us and raised us in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

I'm really thankful for my parents and my upbringing. I said a prayer when I was 9 years old at a vacation Bible school, a sort of repeat-after-me prayer from the pastor, asking Jesus into my heart.

And unfortunately, though, I think as time went on, that proved to be what we could call a false conversion. It was certainly something I intended well at 9 years old, but I think as you looked at my life, there wasn't really evidence of fruit, particularly after I went off to college and lived a very worldly and sinful lifestyle through college and then shortly after college.

And it was in really the second year after I was out of college, I had a tragic incident in my life. Actually, it'll be 13 years ago this June 21st when my 15-year-old younger brother lost his life in a tragic accident.

And losing my younger brother really shook me and led me down a dark road. You could say I sort of hit rock bottom. And that weekend that I hit rock bottom, the Lord was providentially gracious enough to lead me to a point where I met a Southern Baptist pastor, Mark Dever, in Washington, D .C.

And I was really an alcoholic. I was suicidal at the end of my rope and mourning the loss of my brother. And the Lord used this conversation with Mark Dever to open my eyes to the reality of the Christian faith.

And Mark walked through Galatians 5, the acts of sinful nature versus the fruits of the Spirit, and where Paul says, I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And Mark Dever said, look, I know you might have said a prayer when you were 9 years old, but the way you live your life makes me think you actually really aren't a Christian, William. And that was the first time somebody, as much as I can remember at that point in my life, had been so blunt with me about that.

And I appreciated it. I read a book called Am I Really a Christian? by Mike McKinley. And then the Lord used me actually reading the book of Isaiah over a period of a couple days to reveal my sin to me, reveal the need for true salvation in Jesus Christ.

And it changed life, not just one of lip service, but one of deeds done in repentance and faith and the Lord, I believe then, drew me to himself. And that was at the end of 2011. And so then I ended up moving to Washington, D .C. to go to that church, Capitol Baptist Church there.

I was baptized as a believer there. I joined that church. I was married there and spent the first 10 years of my walk with the Lord there at that church. And it was an excellent time to get grounded in the faith and really even kind of ties into my interest in the Southern Baptist Convention because, you know, I became a Christian through meeting a Southern Baptist pastor and the Southern Baptist Convention is dear to me, and I hope that many others continue to have that opportunity to hear the true gospel from Southern Baptist churches.

Well, praise God for that. And you mentioned something in your own testimony that I believe is at the heart of many, if not most, of the major problems within the Southern Baptist Convention is the rampant nominal belief that exists not only with the Southern Baptist Convention but in the Bible Belt in general.

You have this phenomenon where many, if not most, people in any given region of the Bible Belt will have been born and raised in a professing Christian home, and they're teaching their children from the moment they are infants that they are certainly, without question, Christians, and they get baptized at 12 or 13 just as a matter of something that's expected of them, whether they are regenerate or not or give any signs of being born again.

And this has perpetuated into, tragically, a mess where you have sometimes churches that are dominated by unregenerate people, but that is not going to be necessarily the main focus of our conversation today.

We are talking about the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention meeting that recently took place. First of all, when exactly did that take place?

The Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting was just last week in Indianapolis, Indiana. The two main days for the convention were Tuesday and Wednesday. They run a pastor's conference that runs Sunday night through Monday the days before, and so it's kind of a multi-day affair, but the highlights, the main business session, was just last Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Purpose of the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention Meeting

Well, what was, first of all, the intended purpose of the meeting? Most important meetings, there'll be a list of things that are intended to be addressed and dissected and voted upon and so on. What was the main purpose of this meeting taking place?

Yeah, thanks. So the Southern Baptist Convention gathers annually, it gathers every year, and the main purposes of that annual gathering are a couple-fold, but there's some main ones that they do. Every year, they elect a new president.

The presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention, they serve one-year terms. They're eligible to serve two consecutive one-year terms, which is pretty standard practice, and then after taking at least one-year break, they can serve again.

So we were gathering to elect a new president, and that's very important for Southern Baptists because it's the president of the Southern Baptist Convention that kicks off this whole cascading effect of committee appointments on different committees.

There's a committee on committees, there's a committee on nominations, and then they appoint the trustees for our different institutions. And so we elect a new president, we hear reports from all of our entities, including six seminaries that we have, the International Missions Board, the North American Missions Board, which does church revitalization, planting, and evangelistic efforts on the North American continent, United States and Canada, and then also from our Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is our public policy arm.

So we hear those updates, we commission new missionaries, and then we get into some debates over the current state of our doctrine and our confession of faith and other things like better practices within the Southern Baptist Convention like increased financial transparency.

And so one of the other big things on the docket that we had this year was a second vote on a constitutional amendment regarding more clarity on the fact that in order to be in cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Baptist churches must only have men as pastors.

That's what's been known as the Law Amendment, named after the man who offered it, Mike Law, Jr., from Arlington Baptist in Arlington, Virginia. And so we had a second vote on that this year. So those were some of the big reasons why we were getting together.

The Law Amendment and Women Pastors

Well, can you be more detailed about the Law Amendment?

Sure, absolutely. So the Southern Baptist Convention, according to its confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, says that we believe that only men, as qualified by scripture and the scriptural qualifications, are found in 1 Timothy 3, 1 to 7, in Titus 1, 5 to 9, where it talks about the qualifications for appointing elders or overseers or pastors, which those are all words used interchangeably for the same office in the church in the New Testament.

You can't separate the function from the office or the function from the title. And so our statement of faith says that that's what we believe. And yet, Chris, unfortunately, over the last decade or so, we've seen a rising tide of egalitarian practices and egalitarian churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, that is, churches who are appointing women to serve as pastors, either as senior pastors or associate pastors or doing preaching in the local church, which is part of the function of being a pastor.

And so Mike Law, a couple of years ago, he actually realized that just within a five-mile radius of his own church, Arlington Baptist in Virginia, there were five churches with female pastors on staff.

And he started having communications with those who are in charge of this aspect of our life together as the Southern Baptist Convention. There's a committee called the Credentials Committee. They're the ones who are supposed to adjudicate whether a church is operating according to our confession of faith.

And Mike got, really, you could say he got the runaround. He got stonewalled. He didn't get clarity from the people who were supposed to be having this oversight over our convention. At the same time, we had a major church, Saddleback, run by Rick Warren, one of the biggest churches in the SBC and, of course, in our entire country.

And they were having women serve as pastors, a co-pastor between a husband and a wife. And so that was coming to the head on the West Coast, too. So Mike offered this constitutional amendment. It would have been not at our meeting before, but the meeting even before that in Anaheim in 2022.

It got referred to a committee in Southern Baptist Life, the Executive Committee. And then they ended up bringing it out for a vote before the messengers in New Orleans in 2023. And it's a constitutional amendment.

So it had to pass by two votes for two years at a two-thirds majority, a 66 percent threshold. It did pass for the first time in New Orleans, and it was affirmed by over that two-thirds threshold. And so this year was the second vote on it.

And if we had succeeded in adopting it, it would have been added into our Constitution, reiterating what we believe in our statement of faith. Unfortunately, it fell short by about four percentage points.

It got about 61 percent of the vote there in Indianapolis. So that is a majority, but it was not a two-thirds majority. And so it did not get adopted.

So when the rubber meets the road, did the Southern Baptist Convention vote to affirm women as pastors or not?

Yeah, so that's not exactly the right way to put it, but that is, of course, what a lot of the headlines are saying, particularly from the mainstream media, AP, New York Times, other places like that.

It wasn't a vote to affirm women pastors. It was a vote to try to be even more clear that we do not affirm women pastors. And yet I do think that one of the outcomes of the vote, until we deal with this issue more fully and finally, is that it does signal that we have a little more room for women pastors in the SPC than we should have room for.

And so we failed to affirm this constitutional amendment, and yet our statement on the issue is still clear in our confession of faith. And if that sounds a little confusing, I'm sorry, it kind of is confusing in Southern Baptist life right now.

You can say that there's still a little more gray area on this issue than many biblically-minded conservatives in the SPC would like for us to have.

And just to be clear for people listening, because I have listeners in all stripes, varieties of evangelical Christianity. I even have listeners that are not Christians, and I have listeners that are very brand-new Christians.

So just to clarify what we're talking about here, you and I and many, if not the majority, of truly conservative, especially confessional, Bible-believing Christians, and perhaps even more especially those that tend toward Reformed theology, doctrines of sovereign grace, we believe that women are not eligible to have any position of leadership over men in the church.

Now, we're not saying that there are not women, millions of women out there, who are extremely gifted. I mean, there are a multitude of women who are brilliant, scripturally literate. They are phenomenal orators.

And we could go on and on and on with the true, honest compliments of many women that are out there in the body of Christ. But we do not believe that they're eligible for any leadership positions over men simply because the Bible is crystal clear in its prohibition of this.

Am I putting that correctly in your opinion?

Yeah, that's right. And I would say that we could even say that there are many men who aren't qualified to have those positions of leadership in the church. It's not really a question of gifting, but rather it's a question of qualifications to fulfill the role of pastor, the role of elder, the role of overseer in a local church.

And one way to put it is you could say that the Bible is very clear that your biological sex is a necessary but not sufficient qualification. You know, that only men can be pastors, but not every man will be a pastor.

But, of course, only the men that a local church deems hopefully rightly meets these qualifications. And the ability to teach is one of those, and that can be sort of sometimes understood as a gifting.

But you can also learn how to teach. You can become a better teacher. And so, yeah, this isn't it's of course not about demeaning women in any way, shape, or form. It's just about holding on to the truth handed down to us from the Lord, and we believe that it's actually grounded in the creation order.

And we believe that because Paul himself grounds it in the creation order both in 1 Corinthians when he's talking about the role of men and women in the church and also in 1 Timothy 2 when he's talking about whether women should teach or exercise authority in the church.

He says no, and he grounds that in creation order. And so it's really a question of whether the church is going to submit to God's will and vision for how it should be run or we think that we know better somehow here in the 21st century.

And another point I'll make too is that this really wasn't an issue of debate at all in any denominational stream or expression of Christianity until really the last 70 years with the rise of feminism.

And now we use these terms complementarianism and egalitarianism to describe these positions of whether or not we think women can be pastors or can't be pastors. But even those are fairly new words, and the egalitarianism position, which says women can do everything a man can do in the church, was originally called biblical feminism.

And in response to the rise of biblical feminism coming out of first and second and even third wave feminism in the United States, people like John Piper and Wayne Grudem and others, they formulated what we now call complementarianism, which reaffirms that historic biblical position on this issue.

And so it's one of those debates that's really culturally located and even chronologically located to our own time and place here today. And really, you know, for the first 2000 years of the church, almost this wouldn't have been something that was even debated.

Right. And we're going to our first commercial break. If you have a question, please submit it immediately, because my first guest can only be on for another 35 minutes or so. Our email address is ChrisArnson at gmail .com.

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So I'm gathering from what you said that the Southern Baptist Convention left the door open to affirm women as pastors.

Yeah, I think that's a fair way to put it, you know, in the long view here. Now, we did remove a church that has women pastors, First Baptist Church Alexandria. The convention voted about 91 of the people present to do that, which is surprising that we had about 10 of the people there who voted against doing that.

That shows you that there is an issue in the Southern Baptist Convention on this one issue in particular. But as the data has shown us, we're dealing with probably about 1 ,000 churches and maybe about 2 ,000 women pastors across those churches.

And it's going to take some decisive action to really deal with that going forward, which was part of why this law amendment was being put forward. And we didn't get that done. And so the door, I think, is still cracked open.

And this debate is going to continue as Dr. Albert Moeller, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a major figure and voice in the Southern Baptist Convention and all of American evangelicalism, said this issue is not going away.

In one of his write-ups on the convention, he said that the law amendment will rise again. So we're not exactly sure what form that will take, but the debate is going to continue.

The Nicene Creed and the Southern Baptist Confession

Did the Southern Baptist Convention reject or not affirm the Nicene Creed?

Yeah, that is a great question, too. So I would say at the last minute, somewhat late in the game as we were running up to the convention, one professor at Southwestern Theological Baptist Seminary, Malcolm Yarnell, and some others, they proposed adding the full text of the Nicene Creed into the Southern Baptist Convention's Confession of Faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which everybody should know that that is an amendable document.

In fact, it was amended on the floor of the convention last year in a matter of 10 to 15 minutes. Now, in light of how quickly that was done, we're changing some of our practices. So that takes a little bit of more time, too.

But many people thought that it's just not the best idea to add the full text of the Nicene Creed, which the vast majority of Southern Baptists affirm, if not really almost all of us affirm, I'm sure, into an amendable document.

And so that suggestion was referred to a committee for further study and maybe a different path forward on how to more specifically affirm, maybe not just the Nicene Creed, but some of the other, you know, classic creeds as well.

The Orthodox Creed, the Apostles Creed, the Athanasian Creed, et cetera. And so we did not deny it. We did not actually even refuse to affirm it. That motion was referred to a committee for further study to try to give us a better path forward on incorporating affirmations of those creeds into our specific confession of faith.

OK, we have a listener in Toronto, Canada, Lila, who says, What I understand of the Southern Baptist Convention, you guys were successful in purging the denomination only a couple of decades ago from any remnant of liberalism.

How on earth did you reach this point where it seems to be coming back in very strong numbers today?

Why Liberalism Returns in Every Generation

Yeah, that's that's a great question. And, you know, to that, Chris, I've said this before. It's every generation's duty to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Apostasy doesn't sleep.

Heresy doesn't sleep. Confusion always creeps into the church. I mean, we saw the very first generation of Christians who, you know, were either direct descendants of or even knew people knew the apostles themselves or Paul himself who saw the risen Christ.

What was he doing when he was writing the epistles? He was correcting errors in the first century church. So we always have to be vigilant to correct errors, to fight for orthodoxy. About 40 years or so ago or even more, depending on when you start it, there was a major battle in the Southern Baptist Convention, particularly over the inerrancy and the infallibility of scripture.

We had professors at the Southern Baptist seminaries denying the historicity of books like Jonah and denying, you know, the miracles of Jesus. I mean, it was classic, you know, sort of German higher criticism forms of theological liberalism creeping in.

And that that took many years for that battle to be fought and to hold Southern Baptists faithful to scripture. Now, here we are a generation later and there's new forms of theological liberalism all across our country and the world.

Some of these aren't so much on questions of inerrancy, but it's really on the questions of the sufficiency of scripture, the application of scripture. And maybe even on the infallibility of scripture.

Do we believe that scripture is our final authoritative, infallible rule for faith and practice in the church, including things like who can be a pastor? And so I'm not surprised that we're in this position again.

I don't think any generation should be surprised to find themselves in a position that they have to defend the faith. I do think we are more conservative now than we were then, but we're trending more liberal in different ways.

And that's, again, why Center for Baptist Leadership exists and other organizations who are fighting this fight in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Just to clarify, I know the listener in Canada said in a guesstimated form a couple of decades ago when your denomination or your group. I know it's not technically a denomination because you still have some level of independent autonomy of congregations, if I'm not mistaken.

But at any rate, was it more like 30 years ago or 35 years ago when primarily under the leadership of Al Mohler that purging was successful, purging of liberalism?

Yeah, so one of the high points historically of the original conservative resurgence was the 1979 election of Adrian Rogers to be the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. So that puts us at 45 years ago when Rogers was elected.

But then the fight was going on for a few years before that. And interesting to note, it wasn't until 1993 that Mohler was actually appointed president of the Southern Baptist Convention. And so it takes many years of this downstream effect for the changes to take root.

OK, we have Jill in Manhasset Hills, Long Island, New York. And Jill says, do you think some of the problem with this encroachment or re-resurgence of liberalism in the Southern Baptist Convention has to do with a soft approach to the woke and social justice movements.

To some degree, not that they are necessarily enthusiastically supported, but that they are not really boldly condemned?

I think that's certainly a part of it. I think that over the last few years, last decade or so, as many institutions have been going woke, the Southern Baptist Convention has been no exception to that.