Mohler, Akin, and Greenway React to Women Pastors in the SBC

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The Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We are going to talk today a little bit about the crisis over women pastors and preaching in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. I think it's going to be one of the things you're going to want to know about when you go into the convention if you are a messenger this year in June.

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But if not, I think it's still interesting to see kind of the cracks that are taking place in the foundation right now because I realize some of you listening, your denomination may allow for women preaching or women pastors or something similar to that.

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But here's the thing. If you're in the Southern Baptist Convention, these issues have been defined. If you do a search on my

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YouTube channel page, you'll find I've given my position on this as well. So I'm not going to go through all the scripture or anything like that.

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I more want to talk about the politics of this because it's interesting to me. Cracks are in the foundation, clearly.

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People are disregarding what the Baptist faith message says, churches are, and this is happening it seems like more and more and more, and people are becoming more brazen about it.

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And Al Mohler, who has let so many things happen in regards to critical race theory and in some ways also the normalization of homosexuality, etc.,

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this is the one issue it seems like he has been fairly consistent on. Now I know before he took charge of Southern Seminary when he was a young man, he was more egalitarian and he switched, and that surprised people when he became the president of Southern.

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But since that point, this is one of the issues I think he's going to come out hard for the conservatives on this.

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And I can't get inside his head. I don't want to do that. I just want to talk about the available information that we have.

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But I'll just punt it back to y 'all who are listening, what do you think the motive for this is?

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Why is he coming out so strongly? And the way he did it is also interesting to me, so I'm going to show you that with Al Mohler, and then some of the other seminary heads that are taking his lead on this.

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Because it's very interesting. There's kind of like, even people like Danny Akin, who calls himself a kinder, gentler complementarianist, or complementarian.

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He believes in a kinder, gentler complementarianism. And he's said this in lectures, you can go look them up.

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Even he is trying to kind of create a line. So there's, I think this is the issue, this is my gut,

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I think this is the issue that those who have been playing with critical race theory, playing with other things maybe, are going to try to tout their conservative credentials by saying, but I'm not for this.

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And so, let me show you what I'm talking about here. Christianity Daily reported this on Monday, May 10th, that Rick Warren's Saddleback Church ordains its first female pastors, gets mixed reactions.

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And so this is a Southern Baptist Church, because Rick Warren's Saddleback Church is Southern Baptist, and there's three pastors that they ordained, they're first ever women pastors.

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And they're doing this, it's just, it's interesting that it looks like you almost have to have a mask to ordain them, but if you are a woman pastor, you don't need a mask.

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I'm not sure if that is a power that you get when you, just looking at the picture,

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I think there's one guy who, maybe he's a pastor too, he doesn't have a mask either. Is that, I don't know. I don't know what that is.

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But this happened over the weekend, and so there were questions about, okay, what does this mean?

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Are they kicked out of the SBC? And the answer to that is, I guess, no, from what I can tell. A few of the candidates that are running for president said, look, these are autonomous churches, the central convention can't just kick them out.

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But like the local, I guess that's up to the local associations to do that if they want to do that. But regardless, it's a trend that's happening.

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Why would you want to be part of the Southern Baptist Convention if you don't actually believe what the Southern Baptist Convention believes? That's the question I have, unless you're trying to change it.

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But here is a video, I'll show you real quick, just some clips. This is Beth Moore in a

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Southern Baptist church on Mother's Day. And this is a church bulletin from January 1994, Lake Point Baptist Church.

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And what you got here, I want you to notice two things. One, if you are too young to have lived through the 90s, number one, you need to know that hair is on point, on point, okay?

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But number two, this is long enough ago, back then she was not known as Beth Moore, she was known as Elizabeth Moore.

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And so, Lake Point family, would you please help me not just welcome, but honor someone for 43 years of faithful ministry,

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Beth Moore. Good morning,

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Lake Point Church. I have got to tell you, I have had the biggest blast with the staff of your church and with you.

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All right, so she makes some small talk and she gets the message, but this happened just last Sunday. And this is,

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Beth Moore has left the convention, but this is, from what I understand, someone who is in the know told me this is an

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SBC church. Now here's another, this happened at a

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SBC church plant on Mother's Day Sermon. This is Echo Church. They have locations in San Jose.

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All right, well, we're going to transition now to our time with the message and get to hear from Pastor Stacey Wood.

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And every time we hear from Pastor Stacey, you feel the passion through the screen. I always leave encouraged, inspired and fired up.

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And I truly believe that there's something that God is going to use Stacey to speak to your life today. So make sure you follow along with your message notes and lean in and let's hear from Pastor Stacey.

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Well, happy Mother's Day to all of our campuses, those of you at South San Jose, Sunnyvale, Crossroads, Fremont, here at North San Jose and those of you joining us online.

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And we are so glad that you chose to celebrate part of your Mother's Day here with us.

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You know, we live in a culture. All right, so I'm going to stop it there. But just giving you the flavor for it.

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And if you're coming from a traditional church background, you're probably like, wait, that's church? Yeah, that's church in a lot of Southern Baptist churches now.

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That's that's we Southern Baptists have reinvented themselves. You know, the popular churches, at least like every 10 years, they have to reinvent themselves again.

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So that's it. Yeah. So that's what's going on there. Al Mohler came out and said, here is

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Brodess getting right to the point. Is that the first one? Let me I just want to make sure I'm quoting the first one here.

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I think that is. No, that's not the first one. OK, this is John Brodess. He said, warning against the practice of women preaching in church worship.

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This is not a new belief or doctrine. Brodess wrote this in 1880. Beth Moore trolls him and says, happy Mother's Day, Al.

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I mean, that's what I said. They're getting more brazen about it. And Al Mohler putting this this quote out from John Brodess.

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Now, I think it's interesting Al Mohler is quoting John Brodess because Brodess is someone that is.

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Well, I'm going to read for you a quote from Mohler in a minute and you'll see why I find it interesting. He put out a second quote from John Brodess.

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So he's not quoting the Bible, which, OK, I mean, you can quote other people. But but John Brodess is an interesting person for Al Mohler to quote.

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So he says he said in an article in 2015,

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I just want to take two clips from it is what he said to put the matter plainly. One cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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One cannot hold a racial superiority and simultaneously defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Pretty serious, right?

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Pretty serious stuff there. However, he said that Boyce and Brodess were chaplains in the

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Confederate Army, the founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary, and they were racist defenders of slavery. And well, the thing is, now, whether that's true or not, whether he's just sort of taking, you know, more of an interpretation streaming from a new left perspective a little bit there, but Brodess was a slave master.

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So I just I find it interesting that he can quote Brodess. He says these kinds of things, but then he'll also quote

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Brodess. Now, you know, I just want to throw that out there. Why is he doing that?

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This isn't something normally Al Mohler seems to have done in the last few years, because if you remember the

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Brodess gavel, which J .D. Greer wanted to get rid of when Al Mohler was interviewed by the media, he said, oh, yeah, you know, that maybe maybe that's basically

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I'm paraphrasing. But you can go watch my video, What Happened to Al Mohler? And I put the quote there is maybe that's not something we want.

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So make make of that whatever you want to make of that. I think that you can take quotes from people who have said things very well, who may have even done or said things that you disagreed with in other areas.

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But you usually don't take quotes from people that you say, you know, that you come out this strongly in a sense against on this level or, you know, you really come out strongly against any ideology of racial superiority.

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You say that Brodess had that ideology, and that would mean logically that he wouldn't be able to rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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But now you're quoting him on this issue. That's what's weird to me a little bit inconsistent. Inconsistent would be the word in my mind.

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But Danny Akin, then president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, said that Adam Greenway, who is the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was 100 percent correct with this quote.

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The quote is, And Danny Akin says he is 100 percent correct.

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The Bible is crystal clear. Now, he says the Bible is crystal clear on this, but I want to show you something that just happened.

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I had Bill Roach on the show on Monday. You hopefully heard his talk. Bill Roach said, The next day,

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Danny Akin came out and he said this, and I don't know if it was in reaction to it, but it's just the contrast is interesting. He said this,

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So we can know it truly and genuinely and study it forever. If what Danny Akin is saying is true, then you can't really know anything.

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Because how do you know if in the areas in which you don't know anything about, there's evidence that overrides what you think you know if you don't know all of it?

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You can never know the text completely. I mean, this undermines knowledge itself.

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You have to be able to know what the text is saying. And here's the thing, because I think the trick here, the thing that confuses some people is we're finite beings, right?

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So you can never know completely. But the thing is we live in God's world, and because of God, because of who he is and the way he's designed the world, there is an objective reality, and he has given us instruments to be able to know that objective reality.

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Otherwise, you can't know. You'd have to know that you can't know, which means you have to somehow ascend beyond your level of knowledge to assess your knowledge, if that makes sense.

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You can't assess it from a position of not knowing. You have to know somewhere along the line. This is consistent with postmodernism.

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It's a subjective approach to the word of God and to biblical interpretation. So he says he can't know.

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You can never know the word of God completely, can never know it completely or exhaustively, and yet he says this,

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Bible is crystal clear, 100%. Which is it? Which is it?

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So that's, I wanted to point that out as well. And this is why I think there's such a weakness in the

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Southern Baptist Convention on this issue. Because when you undermine truth, when you undermine the positions of people like Brodus, you attack their character.

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You attack the character of the people that went before you who had Orthodox doctrine, and you attack it by saying, going so far as to say they really couldn't clearly communicate the gospel.

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That's a serious charge. So you attack church history, you attack our ability to know the text of the word of God, and then you wanna come out and you wanna say, yeah, but you can't have women pastors.

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Sorry. You're just not on good footing. You don't have a firm foundation.

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And this is, I think, one of the reasons the SBC is going the way it is. This is why this will continue, this egalitarian push, because there is no real firm foundation when you're chipping away at our ability to know the scripture, and when you're also chipping away at the character of people who had

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Orthodox theology, and then you wanna then use them to support your argument. It's not gonna work.

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So I wanted to leave that with you. That is my little assessment of kind of where the

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SBC's at on this issue, and they're gonna keep going, I think, towards the left. When you get to the convention, though,

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I think this isn't the only issue. This is one issue, but it's a symptom of a disease, and that's really my main thing

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I wanna communicate, symptom of a deeper disease. And if you give in to the critical race stuff, if you give in to the

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LGBT soft -pedaling stuff, you're gonna give in to this stuff. How can you not? It follows the same kind of logic.