WWUTT 1905 Q&A (Part 2) Rick Warren’s Biblical Case for Ordaining Women Pastors

What does the Bible say about why a woman cannot be a pastor? And what are the verses that Rick Warren uses to claim a woman can be a pastor?

That's what we're going to be examining today when we Understand the Text. This is

When we Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the Word of Christ. For he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Tell your friends about our ministry at www .wutt .com. Once again, it's

Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. Today is the second part of a critique that Becky and I did of the interview that Russell Moore of Christianity Today did with Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life, when

Rick Warren gave his reasons for why he believes women can be pastors. He said he changed his mind about this a few years ago and that there were certain passages of scripture that convinced him.

Even the Bible says that a woman can be a pastor. We're at the part of the interview where Warren gets to those passages, and we're going to examine what those passages are and what the

Bible has to say. If you missed part one, you can go back and listen to yesterday. It was in that part that I went through 1

Timothy 2, 11 -14, so that you can hear what the Bible says with regards to why women cannot be pastors.

Let me go ahead and read that part again, and then we'll jump back into the interview. 1 Timothy 2, starting in verse 11.

A woman must learn in quietness in all submission. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

For it was Adam who was first formed, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into trespass.

So Paul goes back to the creation story and the story of the fall in Genesis 2 and 3 to ground his reasoning for why a woman cannot be a pastor.

She cannot even function in the role. And then the instructions that are following in chapter 3 verses 1 -7, where you have the qualifications for a pastor, the qualifications a man has to meet in order to be a pastor.

It's clear what we're talking about there is a man. Only a man is qualified for that role.

So Rick Warren claims that he's got different verses of scripture that lead to a different conclusion.

So here we get to that part of the interview, and then Becky and I will break in and offer our critique.

Here's part two of this interview between Russell Moore and Rick Warren. First, I understand why people get upset about this, because I believe the way they did until three years ago.

And I actually had to change because of scripture. Culture could not change me on this issue.

Antidotes could not change me on this issue. Pressure from other people would not change me on this issue.

What changed me was when I came to confrontation with four scriptures nobody ever talked about that I felt had strong implications about women in ministry.

And nobody had ever shown it to me. I knew the Titus passage. I knew the Timothy passage.

I knew 1 Corinthians. And every time people say, why don't you have women pastors, I say, show me a verse.

You give me one verse, you know, I'll consider it. Because I'm a Bible guy. I can't just say, well, everybody's doing it.

Or I've been to 165 countries and I've seen churches of 30, 40, 50 ,000 people led by a senior pastor who's a woman.

That's not enough for me. I have to have a biblical basis. Notice that he mentions,

I know the Titus passage. I know the Timothy passage. I know the 1 Corinthians passage.

Doesn't go to any of those passages. He's going to mention these other verses at the exclusion of those verses that explicitly say, a woman cannot be a pastor.

So he's deciding to go with, this is my interpretation, my infallible interpretation of these other passages that therefore give me permission to appoint and ordain women ministers.

Three years ago, right after I had taken the leadership of finishing the task, and that's something else

I hope we can talk about later on, when COVID hit, I started reading every book

I could find on the Great Commission and on church history. And I read over 200 books on the

Great Commission and on the history of missions. This sounds like one of those Mark Driscoll claims where he used to say that he read like five books a week or something like that.

It was like just some incredible amount that just could not have been true. Going through five books, unless they're like 20 pages long.

Well, that's what I was thinking. They might have been like short novels. Yeah, he's claiming he read over 200 books during COVID.

So like in 2000, in a single year, he read over 200 books. I don't think I've read 50 books in one year.

I don't know. I'm not that speedy reader anyway. I'm definitely not.

That's a lot of books. Over 200 books. That is a lot of books. I mean, the funny thing is he says that, but he never quotes any of them.

He doesn't say like this author, according to this person. Did he just skim them then?

I have no idea. I don't know what he means by read over 200 books. Did you see that video of his that went viral a few months back where he like showed off his library?

No. So this was on social media. He pulls out this, he's in a small library, it looks like his small office, and he pulls out a book, which of course is

The Purpose Driven Life, and he opens it up and the book's been hollowed out and he's got a button on the inside.

Okay. And so you push the button and then this bookcase opens up and it opens into this vast library.

Like it's probably three times the size of our house. Oh, wow. It's a huge library.

Goodness. And he's just walking past book after book after book and the whole time he's doing it,

I'm just going, man, how do you just keep walking past all this stuff? I'm like, hey, leave me here for a little bit.

I want to stop and read. Pick me up when you come back. I mean, at least read through the titles or something. Yeah. But he's just walking and he's like, here's my

Spurgeon and here's my Edwards, and he's got little busts of these theologians that kind of line the hall that he's walking down.

Okay. Just bookcase after bookcase after bookcase. He goes all the way to the very back where he's got this trash can and it's full of these tools which he says are his pastor illustrations, and he pulls out a shovel and he's like, this is my shovel.

Because sometimes a pastor has to really shovel through the crud and all that. That's what he goes through with his bucket of tricks.

Okay. And to me, it was kind of like, that was so indicative of Rick Warren. Yeah. Like you're walking past a world of knowledge and you ignore all of it and just go to your quick bucket of gimmicks.

Yeah. Because that's all I've ever seen from his teaching is just a bucket of gimmicks.

And so, yeah, here he talks about, I read 200 books, which just honestly, it just sounds like he's bloviating and saying, so I am the authority on this issue because I read 200 books, over 200 books.

And I was asking two questions. One, why did the church grow fastest in the first 300 years?

We went from 120 people in the upper room to becoming the official religion of the

Roman Empire in 300 years. In my library, I have a Roman denarius of 87 with Caesar on the coin.

But in 320, I've got a picture of a denarius with a cross on the coin.

That's major cultural change. And the church grew about 50 % a decade for the first 300 years.

Is that what he means by birth? Like the church was best at its birth? Oh, so like in the very beginning of the church?

Right. It could be. Maybe that's what he was referencing. But the answer to that question is actually very easy.

It's the Holy Spirit. How could the church have possibly survived its first 300 years when persecution against the church was at its worst in the history of the church?

How could the church have possibly survived that? Because the Holy Spirit. To show that this creation and this building of the church, this expansion of the gospel and people coming to faith and believing, even though it may cost them their lives, so that we would see and know that it was not by the work of man.

Right. Amen. It was the Holy Spirit that did it. So that no man may boast.

You give it to him, babe. Yeah, that's 1 Corinthians 1 31. And I made a list of about 25 things that they did that we're not doing today as a church.

I also made a list of the things that we have, that we think we have to have, that they didn't have. They didn't have planes, trains, automobiles.

They didn't have church buildings. There were no church buildings in the fastest period of growth of the church for the first 300 years.

I've been in the oldest church in Malula, Syria, and a small little church seats about 50 people.

They had no pulpits. The idea that one guy would stand behind a pulpit and preach, that wasn't

New Testament worship. Paul says, everybody has a song. Everybody has a scripture. Everybody has a teaching.

It was in a house and everybody shared. It wasn't one guy sits still while I instill.

That's our cultural imposition. There's another one of his creed things, sit still while I instill.

But yeah, that whole thing he's saying there about there weren't pulpits. That's not true. There were. There absolutely were pulpits.

They had stands on which they would roll out the scrolls and then they would explain the

Old Testament scriptures. Sometimes the church would meet in the synagogue because that's where you had to go to find the scriptures, to find the books and the parchments and everything else so that they could read the scriptures aloud and then explain what it was that they read.

In the first church that's gathering there in Jerusalem, they're gathering where? Where are they gathering?

In the temple. Yeah. They were in the temple. That's true. So yeah, people's houses, certainly.

There were people. There were churches that gathered at someone's home. It's understood that Lydia in Philippi, her home was the place where the church was gathering.

Philemon was probably the guy who's hosting the church in Colossae. You know, it's probably there in his house.

So yeah, there were house churches. That was definitely a thing. But there were also, guess what?

There were elders. There were those who were actually appointed to teach and oversee the teaching.

Rick Warren's making it sound like everybody had their own teaching. No, they didn't. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14, that's chaos.

And that's not the way that the church was supposed to be structured, especially the worship service.

And so what did they do? They didn't have printing press. They didn't have the internet.

They didn't have radio, TV. And yet they grew faster in the first 300 years than any other period of time.

Then the next 1700 years, I was asking, what went wrong? So notice that his approach here is not biblical or spiritual.

It's entirely pragmatic. What was the church doing in those first 300 years to make it so big?

I want to find out their formula so that I can duplicate it. Sounds like a Rick Warren approach.

Yeah, exactly. It's a new book. Now, what was the church not doing for 1700 years after that?

That was such a problem. And now the church hasn't been spreading, which is not true. Right.

I mean, there's more people in the church today than there was 1700 years ago. So it's kind of an absurd comparison to try to say that, well, they were doing it right 1700 years ago, but now we seem to be getting it wrong.

Yeah, we're all wrong now. In 1988, the

IMB, International Mission Board, hired an Anglican scholar, David Barrett, to study, and he wrote a book called

The 877 Plans to Complete the Great Commission from AD 0 to 1988.

I've used that book for the last three years as an index to study why we didn't get it done, what went wrong.

And it even tells you the Catholics had this many plans and the Anabaptists had this plan and the

Lutherans and Methodists. And you can look at them all. And I've seen all the things they did wrong.

And so FTT, we're talking about that. Well, anyway, in that study, yeah,

I'm sorry, at some point, he's actually going to get to these verses. Are you sure? I'm not so sure anymore.

In that study, caused me to change my view about women.

Nothing else could have studied it as I came upon three different scriptures. First, three different scriptures.

How many did he say before? Four. Yeah, he said four. He couldn't recall all of them, though. There were four scriptures, and he's changed his mind now.

I mean, honestly, that just kind of goes to show he's really not thought through this. Because he was so caught.

He even held up the number four. You can't see that, but he held up four fingers earlier. There were four scriptures. Now it's three.

Hmm. The Great Commission. Now, Baptists, Southern Baptists like to call ourselves

Great Commission Baptists, and we claim that we believe the Great Commission is for everybody.

Both men and women are to fulfill the Great Commission. Well, not really. You don't believe that because it says there are four verbs in the

Great Commission. Go, make disciples, baptize, and teach.

Women are to go. Women are to make disciples. Women are to baptize.

And women are to teach. Not just men. Just because I obey the scriptures, which say that a woman cannot be a pastor, does not mean that I am opposed to women fulfilling the

Great Commission. Right. Warren's argument here is that a woman can only fulfill the

Great Commission if she can be a pastor. So we just make all women pastors then?

We make all men pastors? Because apparently you can't do the Great Commission unless you're a pastor. Well, how many pastors does he have now?

1 ,800, I think. I don't have any idea. I'm sure actually - That's not enough. Actually, I probably undershot that, knowing

Rick Warren. Just wait a little bit. He'll change his mind.

I mean, he is the quintessential. He really is a quintessential Baptist. He's pedigree Baptist. He can inflate numbers with the best of them.

That is a Baptist quality right there. Oh, dear. Now, this is one of the reasons why

Saddleback has baptized more people than any church in American history. 57 ,000 adult baptisms in 43 years.

Why? Because in our church, if you went into Christ, you get to baptize them. So if a mom wants to baptize her child or a wife wants to baptize her husband that she led to Christ, anybody can baptize anybody they led to Christ.

57 ,000. It's the reliberation, the emancipation of every member as a minister that truly we believe in the priesthood of the priest most of the time instead of the priesthood of the believer.

Now that right there, that is an area where we can agree to disagree on.

Like who gets to baptize? Does the pastor baptize? Can a deacon baptize? Can you let a woman baptize?

Or does it always have to be a man baptizing? I think that's an area where we can, sir, yeah, you want to let a woman baptize?

I honestly don't have biblical grounds on which to say that she can't. Now, since that's part of our worship service, it's part of what we do in congregational worship, then it's always going to be a man baptizing.

And at least as far as our church goes, it's the pastor, unless it's a situation where like one of our deacons.

So you're still talking about somebody who's ordained, but they're ordained as a deacon and not a pastor. Like say one of our deacons kids becomes a believer and they want to baptize their kid.

We're going to let him baptize their kid. So it doesn't exclusively and always and only have to be the pastor.

But since that's part of our corporate worship, it's going to be a man who does that because he also teaches from the baptismal in addition to dunking under the water and bringing back up again.

Right. Now, we've had this discussion before, and I can't remember under what context, but it's come up before about, would we let a woman baptize, things like that.

I don't think that the church would like, okay, now we got to shut our doors or we got to split because suddenly women want to baptize.

I don't think that's the direction our church would go if some sort of a conversation or issue were to be drummed up like that.

I don't see that being a split because we're somehow arguing now over whether or not women can baptize.

That's certainly an area where we can agree to disagree what he's talking about there, where I don't agree.

I don't agree that his 57, is that what he said? Because he said it like 20 times. So surely it's got to get into my head, 57 ,000 baptisms.

I don't believe that those are legitimate baptisms because I know what Rick Warren's taught at his church.

There are many, many, many, many who were baptized and never heard the gospel.

Yeah. Now, great commission, go make disciples, baptize, teach. You can't say, well, the first two are for men and women, the last two are only for men or maybe just ordain men.

That's eisegesis. You got a problem, who authorized women to teach?

Jesus. All authority is given to me, therefore teach. All authority is given to me, therefore baptize.

You've got a problem with the great commission. I had to repent when I actually looked at the great commission,

I had to say, it's not just for ordained men, it's for everybody. And I don't disagree with that.

So he's creating a straw man. He's saying that our argument is the great commission is only for men.

I have never, never, never, never heard anyone say that.

Yeah. I've never heard that before. Me either, honestly. Yeah. I don't know.

So he's positioning a straw man and he's kicking it over. See these people who say that women can't be pastors, they're preventing women from the great commission.

What? No. Yeah. That's never been the case. Titus two, three, older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine teaching what is good so that they may instruct the young women in sensibility to love their husbands and love their children, to be sensible, pure workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands so that the word of God will not be slandered.

Amen. Is that what Rick Warren's women at Saddleback have been teaching the women at the church?

No. Because that, that is the context in which women teach according to Titus two, three, the older women teaching the younger women how to care for their homes and be subject to their husbands.

Yep. And I've always taught that. So you can't tell me that I've been keeping women from the great commission.

The second thing that changed my mind was the day of Pentecost. Two things happened on that day.

We know the first day of the church, the church is its birth, is the church at its best.

On that day at Pentecost, we know women were in the upper room. We know women were filled with the

Holy Spirit. We know that women were preaching in languages that other people couldn't hear to a mixed audience.

We know women, it wasn't just men, women were preaching on the day of Pentecost. How do we know that?

Because Peter felt obligated to explain it. And so in Acts chapter two, verses 17 and 18, he goes, hey guys, these people aren't drunk.

What you're seeing was foretold by Joel. It was going to happen. And he said, so he explains why you're now seeing women preaching on the very first day of the church.

He explains it. And he says, this is that, that Joel predicted. And here's what he says.

In the last days, and clearly that means Peter thought the last days began with the birth of the church.

We're in the latter of the last days now. We don't know how many more there'll be, but the last days began with the birth of church.

Peter says, in the last days, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, all flesh.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy. That's different than the old

Testament. Russell, I've looked at over 300 commentaries on those verses. And it's interesting to me that almost everybody goes, yep.

In the church, everybody gets to play. Everybody gets to preach. Everybody gets to prophesy.

And the people who don't like that ignore that verse. John MacArthur doesn't even cover that verse.

He just skips over it. That's a lie. I was going to say, in all the years that John MacArthur has been preaching, he's got commentaries covering every single verse in the

Bible. Yeah. What is he talking about? Apparently, that was not one of the 300 commentaries he looked at.

I've heard John MacArthur talk on Acts 2 and explain how that prophecy applies.

And it shall be in the last days, God says, that I will pour out my spirit on all mankind, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, even on my male slaves and my female slaves.

I will, in those days, pour out my spirit, and they shall prophesy. Now then, just because it says that in Acts 2, that does not mean that there were women at Pentecost who were preaching to the people, to the

Jews that were there at Pentecost in Jerusalem. That's not what that means. Warren is, now he's being eisegetical.

So he made that comment earlier about, that's eisegesis, that's exactly what he's doing. He's reading something into the text that it doesn't say.

Peter is simply quoting Joel, but he's not explaining, hey, you guys are wondering how there are women out here teaching.

Well, let me explain to you from Joel. That's not what Peter is doing. He's explaining to the people how they're hearing what they're hearing, and he's showing them, this is now the fulfillment of what

Joel had predicted. It's not exclusively there at Pentecost.

We see later on in Acts that Philip's daughters are prophesying. They're prophesying together among themselves.

They're not prophesying to men. So just because it says your daughters shall prophesy, it doesn't mean, that means they get to be pastors.

We're going to platform them as pastors, because otherwise, is Paul contradicting what's happening in Acts 2,

Peter's reference of Joel, is Paul contradicting that then when you go to 1 Timothy 2, and he says,

I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. Yeah.

And it doesn't say anywhere in there talking about how women are being the pastors, leading the churches.

Yeah. And every time you hear this argument, every time you hear somebody talk about how women can be pastors and they try to explain it biblically and say, well, they do what

Warren's been doing. Like, well, if women can't be pastors, then you ignore the great commission. What? How did you get there?

Yeah. Like we've leapt over all kinds of biblical instruction to get to where you just said, to whatever it was you just said.

I mean, there's always just this twisting of, you know, well, that has to do with women. And if you don't let women do this, well, then you're actually going against scripture.

Explain to me, 1 Timothy 2, what does Paul mean there? And why do you not have a single example in the entire

New Testament of a woman as a pastor? Culture. Yeah, right.

Culture. And that's a common, that's a, that's a, I actually had to respond to that earlier today. Well, it's clear to me, and he was, he was referencing 1

Timothy 2. It's clear to me that what's going on here is a, is a cultural issue. Paul goes back to creation.

How can you say it's a cultural issue? And then the third thing that changed my mind, none of this had to do with culture, had to do with scripture.

I thought I spoke too soon there. That's funny. Yeah, it, no, his, his answers here have everything to do with culture.

It doesn't have to do with scripture. He has decided that he's going to ordain women pastors and I know everybody's going to get on me.

Yep. Everybody's going to get on me about those passages that say that you can't, you can't, a woman cannot teach or have authority over a man.

And so I'm going to ignore those. I know the Timothy passage. I know the Titus passage. I know the first Corinthians passage.

I'm going to go to these other ones though. And it's because of these passages. And otherwise, if you, if you don't ordain women pastors, you ignore the great commission.

Yeah. These three or four verses. Then for 40 plus years as a pastor of Saddleback, I mean, really, he incriminates himself there.

Yeah, he does. For 40 plus years at Saddleback, he was not fulfilling the great commission.

Well, he said he repented. Yeah. Well, that's still your entire pastoral ministry.

You were not doing the great commission. So who are you to be boasting about all these baptism numbers if you weren't even doing the great commission, right?

True. And then all of a sudden I noticed that the very first sermon, the very first Christian sermon, the message of the gospel of good news of the resurrection,

Jesus chose a woman to deliver it to men. It wasn't a sermon.

That's what I was thinking. Come on, all you guys gather around, sit down.

I'm going to preach to you. I'm going to take you through all the old Testament scriptures. And now I'm going to show you that Jesus Christ has risen again.

And it's a woman that's standing among them and delivering these scriptures. No. He had

Mary Magdalene go and tell the disciples. Now that clearly wasn't an accident.

It was an intentional. It's a whole new world, baby. Now he has a woman go tell the apostles you got on.

Can a woman teach an apostle? Evidently did it on the first day. He chose her to be the first preacher of the gospel.

So you would, after the last three years, you would support men and women as elders, a senior pastor, as, as everything within the church.

I would, I would, I would. But I, but here's what I say, because I have to say, this is my interpretation.

I have to say with humility, it doesn't bother me if you disagree with me.

Yeah, it does. It very much bothers him that you disagree with him. That's what I was thinking. I mean, why are we even having this conversation?

I'm like, what's the point of your platform right now? Yeah, that's absurd. It's especially,

I mean, if you're watching the video, he's looking dead eye into the camera and he's like, if you don't let women be pastors, you disagree with the great commission.

Yeah. I mean, this, this is guilt trip. This is not his interpretation. He's gaslighting. Yeah. He is heaping condemnation on you because you disagree with his interpretation of the great commission.

This is pharisaical. He is adding to the scriptures. What is not there? This is the tradition of man, not the tradition of God.

For 2000 years, the church has debated the role of women in culture, but to make it a litmus test for, are you a

Baptist or not is nonsense because the very first, the very first Baptist confession of 1610 says the officers of the church are elder, not pastor and deacons and deaconesses.

That's the original Baptist confession. So do you want to go back to the original or not?

And so by the way, the 1610 Baptist confessional does not say that it doesn't know what's to say.

It says that the officers of the church are elders and deacons. The word deaconess does not appear in the 1610

Baptist confession. Interesting. So yeah, no, he's just inserting that in there. And this is what

I said before. He's going to get to some of these confessional things as well read as he claims that he is.

Did you not really read the 1610 confession or are you being deceptive?

Go read the preamble of the Baptist faith message, which it says, this is not binding on anybody.

It says it in the preamble. This is not binding on any church. Always sounds like he's saying

Baptist when he says Baptist. It does. Anyway, the

BFM 2000 does not say that in the preamble. It doesn't say that this is not binding. Oh, really?

That word binding doesn't even appear in there. So I don't know what he's referring to. Interesting.

The preamble of the BFM 2000 says the committee rightly sought to identify and affirm certain definite doctrines that Baptists believe cherish and with which they have been and are now closely identified.

Our living faith is established upon eternal truths. Thus, this generation of Southern Baptist is in historic succession of intent and purpose as it endeavors to state for its time and theological climate, those articles of the

Christian faith, which are most surely held among us. So if you disagree with this statement, guess what?

You're not, you probably shouldn't be part of the fellowship, but now we're turning it a confession into a creed and we're weaponizing it.

We're starting an inquisition. And if this, this now falls into place, any pastor each week can stand up and say,

I want to kick out that church because they disagree on dispensationalism. No, you can't because dispensationalism is not in the

BFM 2000. That's what I was going to say. And I don't even read it. You can kick out a church based on that, but you can remove a person from the fellowship because they disagree or rather because they ordain women pastors.

It's under the article on the church article seven. It says it's scriptural officers are pastors and deacons while both men and women are gifted for service in the church.

The office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture. So if you store, if you start ordaining women, you put yourself at odds with the statement of faith that defines the

Southern Baptist convention. And so therefore the convention is right to disfellowship you.

Yeah. There's other denominations and conventions and all that stuff that, that would align with you.

Go to another convention. I just don't understand what the big, it's obvious that the

SBC has put out there. What exactly it is to be SBC. Right.

And then, so if you disagree, you're not SBC. I mean, why is there any gray area with this?

And then understand some of the people that are listening here, you may not be Southern Baptist and that's fine. If you're part of another denomination or order, or maybe you are totally independent, sure.

Maybe your church is independent. That's fine too, as long as you stand on the word of Christ. But this matters because the

Southern Baptist convention is the largest Protestant denomination. Yes. I know technically it's a fellowship, not a denomination, but it's still the largest collection of Protestant churches in North America.

So as goes the Southern Baptist convention, that's going to be reflective of the rest of evangelicalism.

Right. It should concern you about what's happening here. Now I'm not Methodist. I've never been

Methodist. I've preached in Methodist churches before when I was growing up as an itinerant preacher and was traveling around to different places.

I've been in several Methodist churches, but even what's happening with the Methodist assembly right now concerns me.

What's happening with the Anglicans right now? What happens to the different sects of Lutheranism?

I watch all of that. I mean, all of these things are important because where you see a politic or body of churches going in a particular direction, that's going to affect many other churches, even outside of that particular fellowship.

And so this, this one's hugely important since the Southern Baptist convention is the largest one.

Yeah. So, and of course there are, there are people on the outside that are trying to infiltrate what's happening at the

Southern Baptist convention. Oh yeah. Big time. Scott McKnight, who is, he's a leftist.

He's a liberal. He's pro LGBTQ in addition to being egalitarian, which means he believes women can be pastors, but he's passing around on social media, some document that he wants people to sign so that the

Southern Baptist convention will ordain women pastors, Scott McKnight.

What does that have to do with him? Yeah, it's, he's not a Southern Baptist pastor, but he's, he's satanically trying to disrupt any sort of biblical obedience that still exists in the

Southern Baptist convention. If we can just get them, if we can just get the Southern Baptist, then we can get everybody else.

And what Rick Warren is doing here is demonic also. Yeah. Uh, when it comes to the issue of women pastors, this is not a salvific issue, but what he's doing is still demonic.

Yeah. This is the teaching of demons. It is not the teaching of scripture. Satan knows the

Bible really well, but he twists it just like Warren is doing.

We should kick out churches for sin. We should kick out churches that harm the testimony of the, of the convention.

This isn't harming the testimony of anybody. What's my favorite passage about adding to the

Bible? You shall not add or take away from scripture. That's in revelation 22.

What, but what's the next verse? What happens to you whenever you do? If you add to or take away from this book, the plagues that are mentioned in this book will be upon you.

Yep. That's serious. I will add to you the plagues that are in this book. I will take away from you access to the tree of life.

Yeah, that's a pretty big deal. That's, and it's huge with how many people he says he has access to and, you know, like all trickling down from there.

That's that affects a lot of souls. Second Peter 3 16 says that the letters of Paul have some difficult things in them, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the rest of the scriptures.

And that's what Warren's doing here. Twisting the scriptures to his own destruction. If he doesn't repent.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, like you said, this is very, very serious. And I made the comparison to him doing something satanic a moment ago.

This is exactly what Satan did to Eve. Did God really say, did he really say, yeah.

Is that what the great commission really says? Which we didn't read it earlier. Neither did

Warren and we didn't read it either, but the great commission in Matthew 28 verses 18 to 20, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Therefore go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the

Holy spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you and low. I'm with you always, even to the very end of the age.

I didn't mention that earlier, but there's the, there's the great commission. And it's a, it's what's a disputable issue.

As Paul says in Romans 14, the problem with the fundamentalist is there are no disputable, no secondary issues with them.

Every one of them matters. Well, the subject of women pastors is not in Romans 14. No, really?

So, yeah, that's, that's talking about, let's talk about Christian liberty issues and the woman pastor issue is not a

Christian liberty issue. Okay. I mean, this is an ecclesiological issue. We're talking about order of the church, right?

Yeah. Talking about how worship is supposed to be ordered in function. According to what scripture says, you have it stated in all three of the pastoral epistles, first and second,

Timothy and Titus, that the leaders of the church, the overseers are supposed to be men, right?

It's in all three pastoral epistles. It is. So where are you going to go when it comes to understanding who's supposed to be filling in the role of pastor?

And what are his qualifications? You should go to the pastoral epistles for that, which of course that's not where Warren is going.

He's making an explanation on the scriptures here at the exclusion of first and second,

Timothy and Titus. Let's ignore those books. And I'm going to tell you from these four passages,

I changed my mind, three passages, why you should be ordaining women.

And if you're not, then you're ignoring the great commission. And you too should repent. Yeah. And he's the one who's binding.

He's the one binding the conscience there. Yeah, he is. I mean, it's just a huge guilt trip.

Right. To make you feel bad about not doing. Yeah. As much, as much as he keeps going to this, well, it's a, it's a tertiary issue or a secondary issue or whatever.

We can agree to disagree as much as he is pushing it or making the statement, like I might be wrong.

As much as he tries to kind of, to flower his language with all of these extra caveats and things like that.

That's not the way he's delivering this stuff. No. He's not going now. I might be wrong, but as I understand it, a woman can preach.

A woman can preach to the gathered assembly of men. A woman can be a pastor. We can just agree to disagree.

That's not the way he's approaching this issue. Not at all. He's saying, if you don't ordain a woman as a pastor, then you are being eisegetical, you're reading something into the text that isn't there.

And you're not going against scripture. Exactly. You're not fulfilling the great commission. That's exactly the way that he's presented this.

He is a double -minded man, unstable in all of his ways, as said in James 1.

Definitely. He is the man who is to be avoided. He is a false teacher. Rick Warren should have been removed from the

Southern Baptist Convention decades ago. Agreed. And the ordination of women pastors has nothing to do with it.

Uh -huh. I agree. I'm glad he's out. I think he should have been removed some time ago when he was actually a pastor.

Yeah. When he was actually a pastor. Right. I, cause I guess he's not doing that anymore. And by the way, uh, the two senior pastors of Saddleback church are a man and a woman.

They share that responsibility. Yeah. And I've watched, oh, five or six minutes or something like that of Stacy Woods, one of the pastors, one of the senior pastors of Saddleback, I've watched her preach.

So it's not just a matter of her holding that title. She's even fulfilling the role and preaching on Sunday mornings.

So we went quite a ways. I was going to say, do we have more Rick to listen to? Oh yeah.

We got more. Do you want to keep going? You want to do it, babe? Sure. I gave you an out.

I am glut for punishment here. People, you are witnesses. I gave her an out.

We're going to keep going by Becky's decision. Only a little bit. Well, only a little bit more.

Okay. Here we go. How do you tell the difference between primary and secondary issues?

Not, not specifically with. All right. Let's, let's skip all of this. Okay. They're going to keep going on about primary and secondary doctrines.

Uh, yeah, we'll get past all of that. If anybody wants to ask a question about, well, so how do you decide that's for next week?

What's an essential doctrine. What's a secondary doctrine. We can talk about that another time. Sure. But instead of, uh, there's, there's one other part that I wanted to get to.

Okay. And it's a, this is the last, this is it. This is the last comment. Yeah. Good. Cause uh, you know, you're done.

I agreed to move on, but you know, with limitations, we need an insight.

Okay. So here's the last comment. All right. I was trying to get at least this far in the interview. So here's

Rick Warren again. For hundreds of years, black Baptist churches have been ordaining women as bishops, as pastors, as prophetesses, as apostles, as elders, as deaconesses.

If this is true, the SBC is holding up a sign said all black churches look elsewhere.

You're not wanted here because they already have. That is one of the most racist comments

I've ever heard a pastor say. Yeah. That's insane. Every single black church is doctrinally unsound.

According to Rick Warren, every one of them. Right. And the Southern Baptist convention is saying black churches.

You aren't welcome here. Yeah. Which if that were the case, if it were the case that every single black church actually was that bad, that they are, they're appointing apostles, raise the dead and prove it.

Right. If you're going to claim to be an apostle. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's pretty bad. Anyway, if it was true, what

Rick Warren said that, that all of these black churches are ordaining women, pastors and apostles and all this other kind of thing, then the

SBC in refusing to admit them into the fellowship would be doing it on grounds that have nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin.

It would be on the basis of a doctrine that you've chosen to accept that is contrary to our statement of faith.

Right. And the way that we've defined these things. Right. So we're not receiving you into our fellowship. Right. That's, that's the right thing to do.

I keep forgetting that he's saying this as like a derogatory towards the

SBC. Like when, when he says the, the appointing of apostles, that he's in agreement of this, is that right?

Well, he's saying it's a secondary matter. So we shouldn't refuse somebody from the

Southern Baptist convention because they're ordaining apostles. If you're ordaining apostles, you've got people who claim that the word that they speak is, is

Christ's word. Right. Exactly. Like they're receiving new revelation that is on par with anything that we have in the

Bible. That's heretical. Right. Cause the Bible says that you can't add anything to it.

Yeah. Don't add anything to scripture. Don't add anything. Don't subtract, which we talked about earlier. So, so with the, um,

Oh, what was I going to say? So, so they're, they're ordaining women to be pastors, women to even be apostles, according to this, which, and, and by the way, we haven't gotten into any of this here, but, uh, when a, when a church goes the direction of putting women in the position of pastor, you will find problems with a lot of other doctrines.

Yes. It wasn't just one day. They decided everything else that we believe is Orthodox. Let's start ordaining women pastors.

So like their entire doctrine is Orthodox, except that point. Right. That's not true. They, they had many other wonky points before they got there.

Yeah. But that is an open admission that we, we just don't, we just don't care.

We don't care that the Bible says that a woman cannot be a pastor based on what I read earlier from first Timothy two.

Well, if everything else is wishy -washy, why can't that be too? Yeah. I mean,

I don't know. You're talking about roles for men and women don't matter. Right. Uh, what we call complementarianism, although I would prefer the word patriarchy, but, uh, but this, this is a biblical concept.

That God has appointed men for certain things and women cannot hold teaching authority over men in the church.

Egalitarianism, which is the idea that men and women are equal and women can do everything that men do, including preach, including be pastors.

That is unbiblical, right? I mean, there's just no two ways about it. Egalitarianism is unbiblical.

And so Rick Warren's argument is every black church is unbiblical. I mean, he's not trying to say that he's trying to say it's a difference of opinion, but he's accusing every single black church of being unbiblical.

Yeah. And therefore the Southern Baptist convention is being unbiblical by refusing to let them in that.

That's just an astonishingly, uh, self -defeating argument. It's, it's really bizarre that he's talking in circles almost.

Yeah. Which, I mean, this continues on. Oh. I've had over 300 letters written to me by scared pastors gone.

If they find out us, we've ordained, uh, women in our church. Will we get kicked out too? And they're scared to death.

I I'm actually, uh, to me, if all this hurt was

Saddleback, I'd just walk away from it. But, but there's two things that I I'm concerned about.

I'm concerned about now convinced we'll never fulfill the great commission with half of the church sitting on the bench.

So what he's saying is I'm doing absolutely nothing because I'm not a pastor.

Right. You as a woman are not fulfilling the great commission. How on earth am I sitting on the bench?

Yeah. How? So tell me taking care of children, raising children to be Jesus followers and to understand the word and to look at the world through a biblically informed lens and trying, you're not doing the great commission and trying to help walk other women through their, their

Christian walk and everything is, is yeah. Thanks. So he made that he made a racist comment and now he's making a misogynist comment.

I appreciate this guy. Women cannot fulfill the great commission unless you let them be pastors.

No. And I mean, he's, yeah, he's saying half, half the church is sitting on the bench. All the women are sitting on the bench are pastors.

Yeah. Right. This, this isn't making any sense. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. When you're talking about angry, you're talking about the average, the average

Southern Baptist church is what? A hundred to 120 people or something like that. And only one of them is actually fulfilling the great commission, right?

Because he's the pastor. Well, there, there is no sense in his arguments whatsoever. However, this does shine light on his numbers of how many pastors he has raised up.

Oh yeah. Where he talked about like, well, was it 1 .7 million? I can't remember. It was, it's some astronomically huge number and it was like over the last 40 years, he had to have been raising up seven, 70 pastors a day in order to like whatever, whatever number that was.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so this does shine a lot of light on how he got those numbers.

At least a Baptist. Like I said before, I mean, he knows how to inflate the numbers with the best of That's just what he does.

Thanks for lightening the mood. Yeah. So you have this incredibly racist statement, all black churches, we're excluding all black churches because women can't be pastors.

And then you have this misogynistic statement. That I'm doing absolutely nothing. You're doing nothing. Yeah. Awesome.

I just, I just don't think he. I want to kick this guy to the curb. Well, we did.

I know, I mean me. You know where he said earlier, he said, we should be kicking out churches for sin.

We did. Yeah. We kicked your church out for sin. I was thinking, yeah, you're going against God's word.

You're deliberately disobeying it. And then you're twisting other scriptures to try to justify this decision that you made to make women pastors and make everybody else feel guilty when they shouldn't.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Again, going back to the fact, well, this is a secondary disagreement, but then he makes a comment, like half the church is now sitting on the bench.

Yeah. Like he is, he is accusing the entire Southern Baptist convention for not fulfilling the great commission because they won't make women pastors.

And yet he claims we're the ones who are elevating doctrines to like these essential fundamental places.

Well, you know, do as I say, not as I do. Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, he's a hypocrite and shame on Russell Moore, never pushing back on the guy.

Oh, he doesn't never, he never argues or contends with any of these claims that Warren is making.

Wow. I mean, we know that about Russell Moore, but I'm still, I'm still saying very PC shame on him. Yeah. Which is too

PC for, for being biblical. Yeah. But, well, we got the most worked up at the very end here.

You're welcome. So we're going to, we're going to stop there unless we, uh, unless we explode these mics here or whatever.

Plus I seem to be getting more congested as we keep going. Yes. Something's coming on me.

I know you've had some allergy issues. Oh yeah. I've had migraine for, for days, but it's finally starting to go away and now you've got whatever else is in the air.

Yeah. We gotta be, gotta be healthy for Sunday. That's right. It's Easter. It's going to be

Easter Sunday. Praise the Lord. Of course, every Sunday that we gather as a church, we are remembering that Christ is risen.

Amen. For it was the first day of the week that he rose again. And that's the day of the week that we have church.

So we celebrate his resurrection every time, but still, it's always a great season. Easter is a good season.

You've got things coming back into bloom as our congestion is testifying to here. Well, apparently that depends on where in the world you live, but at least you're looking forward to the things coming back into bloom if they haven't started yet.

We heard, we heard from some friends in Alaska who said it's 28 degrees right now. Yeah, degrees, man.

And that was during the day. I can't imagine they have sunrise services. Yeah.

When does the sun come up anyway? It's Island time. I love it.

We gather when we gather. All right, let's finish up there. We'll pray and be concluded.

Yes, let's. Heavenly father, we thank you for the goodness that you have shown to us and that according to your word, we can know the will of God.

We read in Matthew 28 verse 18, Jesus spoke to his disciples saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the

Holy spirit, teaching them to keep all that I have commanded you and behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

This is something that all believers should aspire to, uh, to continue in, to walk in that our churches would be obedient to this particular call, which we call the great commission, but we all have respective areas in which we are appointed to serve.

Paul even talks about the different parts of the body in, uh, in first Corinthians chapter 12, everybody has a different function.

Everybody has a different role, but we're part of the same body with Christ as the head, aspiring to the same thing, building one another up in love and holding fast to the head.

Who is Christ protect us from these false teachers that try to divide the body. Let us be unified in the gospel of Christ and continue to proclaim these things, not just in an

Easter weekend, but all the time rejoicing in Christ, our savior, who is risen again.