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

Women Pastors as a Symptom of Denominational Drift

Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We are gonna talk today a little bit about the crisis over women pastors and preaching in the Southern Baptist Convention. I think it's gonna be one of the things you're gonna wanna know about when you go into the convention if you are a messenger this year in June.

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.

But here's the thing, if you're in the Southern Baptist Convention, these issues have been defined. And if you do a search on my YouTube channel page, you'll find I've given my position on this as well.

So I'm not gonna go through all the scripture or anything like that. I more wanna talk about the politics of this because it's interesting to me. Cracks are in the foundation, clearly. 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. 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, et cetera.

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.

But since that point, this is one of the issues I think he's gonna come out hard for the conservatives on this. And I can't get inside his head, I don't wanna do that. I just wanna talk about the available information that we have.

Al Mohler, John Brodus, and Conservative Signaling

But I'll just pun it back to y 'all who are listening. What do you think the motive for this is? Why is he coming out so strongly? And the way he did it is also interesting to me. So I'm gonna show you that with Al Mohler.

And then some of the other seminary heads that are taking his lead on this. Cause it's very interesting. There's kind of like, even people like Danny Akin who calls himself a kinder, gentler complementarianist or a complementarian.

He believes in a kinder, gentler complementarianism. And he's said this in lectures, you can go look them up. Even he is trying to kind of create a line. So there's, I think this is the issue, this is my gut.

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.

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. And so this is a Southern Baptist Church cause Rick Warren's Saddleback Church is Southern Baptist.

And there's three pastors that they ordained. They're first ever women pastors. And they're doing this as it 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.

I'm not sure if that is a power that you get when you're just looking at the picture. I think there's one guy who he, 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, but this happened over the weekend and there, so there were questions about, okay what does this mean?

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.

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. 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. But here is a video I'll show you real quick. Just some clips. This is Beth Moore in a Southern Baptist church on Mother's Day. And this is a church bulletin from January, 1994.

Lake Point Baptist Church. 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?

But number two, this is long enough ago, back then she was not known as Beth Moore, she was known as Elizabeth Moore. And so, Lake Point family, would you please help me not just welcome, but honor someone for 43 years of faithful ministry, Beth Moore.

Lake Point church, I have got to tell you, I have had the biggest blast with the staff of your church and with you. All right, so she makes some small talk.

And she gets the message. But this happened just last Sunday. And this is, Beth Moore has left the convention, but this is, from what I understand, someone who is in the know told me this is an SBC church.

Now here's another, this happened at a SBC church plant on Mother's Day Sermon. This is Echo Church. They have locations in San Jose.

All right, well, we're gonna transition now to our time with the message and get to hear from Pastor Stacey Wood. And every time we hear from Pastor Stacey, you feel the passion through the screen. I always leave encouraged, inspired, and fired up.

And I truly believe that there's something that God is gonna 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.

This is, those of you at South San Jose, Sunnyvale, Crossroads, Fremont, here at North San Jose. And those of you joining us online, we are so glad that you chose to celebrate part of your Mother's Day here with us.

You know, we live in a culture.

The Baptist Faith and Message, John Brodus, and the SBC's Foundation

All right, so I'm gonna stop it there. But just giving you the flavor for, 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, 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. So that's, yeah. So that's what's going on there.

Al Mohler came out and said, here is Brodus getting right to the point. Is that the first one? Let me, I just wanna make sure I'm quoting the first one here. I think that is, no, that's not the first one.

Okay, this is John Brodus. He said, warning against the practice of women preaching and church worship. This is not a new belief or doctrine. Brodus wrote this in 1880. Beth Moore trolls him and says, happy Mother's Day, Al.

I mean, that's what I said. They're getting more brazen about it. And Al Mohler putting this quote out from John Brodus. Now, I think it's interesting Al Mohler's quoting John Brodus. Because Brodus is someone that is, well, I'm gonna 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 Brodus. So he's not quoting the Bible, which okay. I mean, you can quote other people, but John Brodus is an interesting person for Al Mohler to quote. So he said in an article in 2015, I just wanna take two clips from it.

This 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. One cannot hold to racial superiority and simultaneously defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Pretty serious, right? Pretty serious stuff there. However, he said that Boyce and Brodus were chaplains in the Confederate Army, the founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary, and they were racist defenders of slavery.

Now, the thing is, now whether that's true or not, whether he's just sort of taking more of an interpretation streaming from a new left perspective a little bit there, but Brodus was a slave master. So I find it interesting that he can quote Brodus.

He says these kinds of things, but then he'll also quote Brodus. Now, I just wanna throw that out there. Why is he doing that? This isn't something normally Al Mohler seems to have done in the last few years, because if you remember the Brodus gavel, which J .D. Greer wanted to get rid of, when Al Mohler was interviewed by the media, he said, oh yeah, maybe that's, basically I'm paraphrasing, but you can go watch my video, What Happened to Al Mohler?

And I put the quote there. Maybe that's not something we want. So make of that whatever you wanna 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, but you usually don't take quotes from people that you say, that you come out this strongly in a sense against on this level, or you really come out strongly against any ideology of racial superiority.

You say that Brodus had that ideology, and that would mean logically that he wouldn't be able to rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ, but now you're quoting him on this issue. That's what's weird to me a little bit.

Hermeneutics of Humility and the Limits of Knowing the Text

Inconsistent would be the word in my mind. 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 correct with this quote.

The quote is, the custom in some congregations of having a woman as a pastor is a in-flat contradiction to this apostolic teaching and his open rebellion against Christ our King and his high treason against his sovereignty.

Under no circumstance conceivable is it justifiable. B .H. Carroll. And Danny Akin says he is 100 correct. 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.

I had Bill Roach on the show on Monday. You hopefully heard his talk. Bill Roach said, when evangelicals talk about a hermeneutics of humility, more often than not, they are affirming epistemological skepticism.

How do I know? Ask those same figures if they believe in objectivity and biblical interpretation. The next day, 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, in interpreting the word of God, we can never know the text completely and exhaustively because it is the eternal word of God. But do not despair. Through regeneration, the ministry of the Holy Spirit and sound interpretive principles, 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 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.

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

So you can never know completely, but the thing is we live in God's world and God has a, 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.

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. You can't assess it from a position of not knowing.

You have to know somewhere along the line. This is consistent with postmodernism. It's a subjective approach to the word of God and to biblical interpretation. So he says he can't know. You can never know the word of God completely, can never know it completely or exhaustively.

And yet he says this, Bible is crystal clear, 100%, which is it? Which is it? So that's, I wanted to point that out as well. And this is why I think there's such a weakness in the Southern Baptist Convention on this issue, because when you undermine truth, when you undermine the positions of people like Brodus, you attack their character.

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. 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. Sorry, you're just not on good footing.

You don't have a firm foundation. And this is, I think, one of the reasons the SPC 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 Orthodox theology, and then you wanna then use them to support your argument, it's not gonna work. So I wanted to leave that with you.

The SBC's Drift Toward the Left and the Deeper Disease Behind It

That is my little assessment of kind of where the SPC's at on this issue. And they're gonna keep going, I think, towards the left. When you get to the convention though, I think that 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 I wanna communicate, symptom of a deeper disease. And if you give in to the critical race stuff, if you give in to the LGBT soft peddling stuff, you're gonna give in to this stuff.

How can you not? It follows the same kind of logic. All right, well, God bless everyone. I hope that was helpful by now.