The irony of Rick Warren being the main character in the fight for women pastors

Rick Warren, the retired pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, failed Tuesday to convince the Southern Baptist Convention to restore his church to its fold after his 2021 decision to ordain three women to the pastoral ministry. In a vote taken in New Orleans Tuesday, the approximately 12,000 messengers, as delegates to the convention are called, decided by a 9-1 margin to finalize the expulsion of one of the country’s largest Baptist congregations. The results were announced Wednesday.

Even more lopsided was the vote to formally expel Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, which Linda Barnes Popham has pastored for 33 years.

It’s significant that a woman was pastoring a Southern Baptist church for that long in Louisville — literally, the backyard of Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an activist against women’s ordination — and the church was only formally expelled this week. Warren’s recent about-face in favor of ordaining women pastors seemed to have finally brought her to the Southern Baptists’ attention.

Her church, along with Warren’s, was targeted for disfellowshipping by the SBC Executive Committee, and she, like Warren, made an unsuccessful appeal to the convention to remain in fellowship with her congregation. In other words, it was only because a Southern Baptist man spoke up on behalf of women pastors that we finally heard the voice of a Southern Baptist woman who has already spent more than three decades serving as a pastor. 

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Southern Baptists vote to ban churches with female pastors June 14, 2023 / 02:20

“I PUBLICLY APOLOGIZE to every good women in my life, church, and ministry that I failed to speak up for in my years of ignorance,” Warren wrote on Twitter Saturday. He said knowing he’d held back women “breaks my heart now, and I am truly repentant and sorry for my sin…. Christian women, will you please forgive me?”

While I am grateful for Warren’s pivot on women’s ordination, including his bold apology as he admitted his complicity in the subjugation of women, I can’t help but recall sociologist Allan Johnson’s description of patriarchy as “male dominated, male identified, and male centered.” In male-dominated spaces such as the Southern Baptist Convention, even conversations that are about women often are driven by men and center men.

Warren is obviously more famous than Popham. His book “The Purpose Driven Life” has been translated into 137 languages and sold more than 50 million copies, according to his publisher Simon & Schuster. In 2009, in a move that upset liberals and also upset conservative evangelicals, Warren delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Even so, it is striking how much more attention Warren has gotten than Popham.

In asking that the convention reconsider the expulsion of its church, Warren was effectively representing Saddleback’s women pastors, whereas Popham spoke for herself.  “We’re not here to seek to convince any of you to allow your church to have women pastors,” she told the SBC messengers. “But we should still be able to partner together.”

The overwhelming majority of those in attendance rejected both appeals, but while Popham’s three-minute address won her 806 votes of support, Warren’s appeal won 1212.  

Which means a man advocating for female pastors received more support than a woman pastor advocating for herself.

“The issue of a woman serving in the pastorate is an issue of fundamental biblical authority that does violate both the doctrine and the order of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Mohler told the convention Tuesday.   

Don’t dismiss this rejection of women in leadership as just a Southern Baptist problem. Even if it were, that would be no small thing. With a membership of around 13 million people, the Southern Baptist is the largest Protestant denomination in North America. But it would be naïve to believe that the hardening of Southern Baptist attitudes toward women’s leadership will stay confined to the Southern Baptist world. It’s already trickled outward.  

Retired Baptist Pastor John Piper, who co-authored the influential book “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” and launched the even more influential website Desiring God (for which Al Mohler writes guest posts), argues that women should not hold positions of “personal and directive” authority over men: neither in the church nor in the workforce. Not only should women not be pastors, according to this worldview, but they also should not have male secretaries, command men in military combat or even serve as police officers.

The collateral effects of such a large denomination telling its members that women shouldn’t hold positions of leadership are hard to quantify, but such a position does not benefit this country’s women and girls. Imagine, for example Southern Baptist men making personnel decisions based on Piper’s thoughts about women.

Add to Tuesday’s vote against recognizing women as leaders the convention’s slow pace toward sexual abuse reform. The advocacy of Southern Baptist women who are sexual abuse survivors has had some effect, but not nearly enough. Tiffany Thigpen, who told a Southern Baptist pastor in 1991 that another pastor, Darrell Gilyard, had attempted to rape her found her story ignored and dismissed. Gilyard was never charged with a crime against Thigpen but in 2009 pleaded to molesting two girls in his congregation and was sentenced to prison.

Megan Lively, who in 2003 was raped by another student when they were attending Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, said she was told by then-seminary president Paige Patterson to not report the crime to police and to forgive her rapist. Patterson, who was the president of another seminary when Lively went public in 2018 with what had happened, was fired from that position. Months later Patterson said his firing was unjust, but “I’m going to accept it, and I’m going to do my best to live for the Lord.”

Thigpen and Lively, along with other survivors, have spoken out against their initial abuse and also spoken out against the continued abuse perpetuated by the SBC in dismissing, ignoring, mishandling and even belittling survivors’ stories. It was only in 2022, after years of advocacy by women such as Christa Brown, that the SBC finally recognized the voices of survivors and approved abuse reforms. However, one year later, nearly 12,000 messengers, many of whom voted for the 2022 sexual abuse reforms, showed up to mostly vote against maintaining a relationship with churches that have female pastors. Only about 50 gathered for a breakout session discussing sexual abuse toward adults.

Colorado pastor Bob Bender summed up the 2023 mood well, asking, “What does it say when we’re slow on the take on sexual abuse of women but quick on the draw to disqualify them from non-lead pastor roles?”

The rejection of women as leaders and the collective indifference to women who’ve been harmed is consistent with research that suggests a correlation exists between conservative theology, such as espoused by many Southern Baptists, and beliefs that rationalize and enable abuse against women.

Since as far back as the 19th century, Southern Baptist women have voiced their calling to serve as ordained pastors, missionaries, and chaplains. And in our lifetimes we’ve seen Baptist women responding to God’s call on their lives: from Debbie Chisolm who was ordained in 1999 by Royal Lane Baptist in Dallas, Texas, where she served as the youth and adult education minister, to Geneva Metzger who served for 39 years as a campus minister at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The increasing limits placed on women in Southern Baptist circles disregards their ministries and reduces the opportunities for women to step into these leadership roles.

But the impact of Tuesday’s vote will not only be felt by women who feel called to serve as pastor. It will be felt by women in the denomination more broadly, women who are being told that they are to quietly accept the idea that, because of their gender, they’re not leadership material.

When it should be listening to the voices of women and lamenting the sex abuse scandal still rocking the denomination, the Southern Baptist world is ignoring those voices, ignoring the scandal and further increasing the power of men. I can’t begin to imagine the cost — to the women the denomination is shunning and to the denomination itself.