Saddleback's Rick Warren ramps up appeals to Southern Baptists to let church with women pastors stay

Retired pastor Rick Warren, author of the publishing phenomenon, “The Purpose Driven Life,” has been intensifying a media blitz in what he acknowledges may be a lost cause. He is trying to get the Southern Baptist Convention to reverse its ouster of the California megachurch he founded, Saddleback Church, for having women pastors.

With animated social media posts complete with all-capitalized words, Warren has even issued a statement, “My Apology to Christian Women,” repenting of blocking women's full use of their gifts and leadership skills until a recent change of views after a half-century in ministry.

“I wish I could do it all over,” said Warren, who is expected to speak on behalf of Saddleback on Tuesday at the opening of the SBC's annual meeting here in New Orleans. “Christian women, will you please forgive me?”

The issue is just one of the controversies facing the more than 9,000 SBC messengers, or church representatives, who had registered as of Monday in advance of their two-day annual meeting at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

The messengers will vote on how and whether to continue reforms in the wake of a sexual-abuse scandal that was the subject of a withering outside report in 2022 and has drawn a U.S. Department of Justice investigation.

The meeting will also feature a rare contested election between an incumbent SBC president, Texas pastor Bart Barber, and Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who is part of a group of Southern Baptists seeking to take the already staunchly conservative denomination further to the right.

On Tuesday, the messengers will hear from Saddleback and another church, Fern Creek Baptist of Louisville, Kentucky, which are appealing their expulsion in February by the SBC's Executive Committee for having women pastors. Three other churches ousted over the same issue are not appealing.

All Baptist churches are independent, so the convention can’t tell them what to do, but it can decide which churches are “not in friendly cooperation,” the official verbiage for an expulsion.

Warren's expected appearance on Tuesday will amount to a titanic faceoff — the nation's largest Protestant denomination receiving a challenge from someone long touted as one of its biggest success stories. Launched in 1980 by Rick and Kay Warren, Saddleback has grown over four decades to 14 locations in Southern California, with an average weekly attendance of 30,000.

In 2021, Saddleback ordained its first three women pastors. In 2022, Warren retired and was succeeded by pastor Andy Wood, whose wife, Stacie Wood, was named teaching pastor at Saddleback.

Those actions prompted some to call for Saddleback's ouster. The denomination's statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, says that while "men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

Wood has said Saddleback does maintain male authority with an all-men board of elders but that they can equip women for ministry — most recently in May when Katie Edwards, one of the three women ordained in 2021, was named campus pastor of the flagship Lake Forest campus.

Warren said he had a change of views — only recently supporting women as pastors — after taking another look at the Bible and its New Testament passages in the original Greek language. Not doing so earlier is his “biggest regret in 53 years of ministry,” he said in a lengthy Twitter statement.

“I don’t expect to win in New Orleans and I certainly don’t expect to change the mind of any angry fundamentalist,” he said. “They are responsible to God, not to me.” Then Warren issued a public apology to all “good women in my life, church, and ministry that I failed to speak up for in my years of ignorance.”

He has received both support and pushback on social media.

In meetings on Monday, SBC leaders continued to affirm that pastors should only be men, but questioned whether that ban needs to be encoded in its constitution, which already has a list of what disqualifies a church. Member churches need to identify closely with the denomination's faith statement and cannot engage in ethnic discrimination, be LGBTQ-affirming or fail to address sexual abuse.

The Executive Committee — which runs the day-to-day business of the denomination — recommended Monday that the full annual meeting reject a constitutional amendment that would add churches with women pastors to that list, saying there's already a mechanism to expel them for not identifying with the SBC faith statement.

Various estimates on both sides say hundreds or more SBC churches have women serving as pastors — either as leader of the congregation or, more often, in assistant ministry roles. Such estimates could not immediately be confirmed.

“Most of us believe there is a problem when certain Southern Baptist churches have pastors who are women,” said Josh Hetzler, a South Dakota pastor on the Executive Committee, who favors such an amendment.

“We’re at a cultural moment in which this issue of men’s and women’s roles is very confused,” he added. “We have an opportunity to speak clearly into this moment.”

But other members said the statement of faith speaks for itself and isn't needed in the constitution.

Also on Monday, officials said the SBC was phasing out its connections with Guidepost Solutions, the consultant that issued a blistering report in 2022 on how SBC officials mishandled reports of sexual abuse and mistreated victims. Guidepost has also been staffing a hotline to receive reports of abuse, and it was originally slated to develop a public database of abusers.

Those reforms, though criticized by victims’ advocates as too small, are also facing pushback from others, in part over a Guidepost tweet last year that it is “an ally to our LGBTQ+ community.” The denomination’s statement of faith opposes homosexuality.

Executive Committee Interim President Willie McLaurin said Monday that officials are lining up a different firm to develop the list and will also phase out Guidepost’s role in the hotline.

Incoming Executive Committee chairman Philip Robertson said that while there can be disagreements over how to respond to the scandal, “We need to continue that work to make sure every person in every church in the SBC is protected and safe.”

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