The SBC and the Law Amendment

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In case you missed it, the Southern Baptist Convention convened last week for their annual meeting, and it was not without controversy. Several things came out of the convention that I want to gripe about. This article is part one of that gripe.

Introduction

One of the major items that came out of the SBC this year was the rejection of the Law Amendment. Liam Adams with The Tennessean broke the story last week, stating that the SBC rejected a constitutional ban on women pastors. Opponents to the Law Amendment, named after Virginia pastor Mike Law, say that it is unnecessary because the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BFM2K) already opposes women pastors, and they feared it would be weaponized against churches that want to cooperate within the convention (which means money given to the cooperative program).

Two North Carolina pastors spoke against it, Spence Shelton of Mercy Church Charlotte who came from J.D. Grear’s church, and J.D. Grear himself. Shelton and Grear argue that the SBC already has a mechanism for dealing with churches that are not complimentarian and thus the amendment is unnecessary. It’s a polity issue rather than a complimentarian issue, they say. They wonder, “Who has the authority to determine why a church should or should not be part of the SBC?”

The reason we are having this conversation is because, in this day and age, there is a war over dictionaries and definitions. There are many voices, almost always loud ones, that say a man can give birth to a child, a woman can be a pastor, and a fetus is not a human. The culture says complimentarian (or even worse, patriarchal) Christians are backward, women-hating bigots. Therefore, the Law Amendment is needed precisely because we are in a time where the voices are loud and we need a clear voice affirming truth. When Matt Chandler thinks wearing a pink cat sweater is cute and playful in a time when men are wearing dresses, or less, in front of children, that shows how out of touch some of our pastors and leaders are in the SBC. We could get away with that in the 90s, but not the 20s.

Below I interact with an article written by Grear ahead of the convention. You can read Grear’s well-written article here. He addresses several other major issues, including the sexual abuse task force, but I’m focusing on only the Law Amendment section in this article. I argue that this whole issue stems from the polity, or method of governance within the SBC, and an over-emphasis on cooperation rather than confessionalism.

Let me caveat everything here by saying I don’t have a problem with Grear. Though now I am a confessional presbyterian, I was an ardent Southern Baptist for 15 years and went to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I’ve also worked with several churches that were planted out of Summit Church where Grear preaches. I don’t have beef with him at all and respect him as a pastor. However, I do disagree with him on several things in his article.

Polity

Grear says,

My objection [to the Law Amendment] is that it rewrites the rules of our cooperation and attempts to fix, with a sledge hammer, something that isn’t really broken. It assumes that what we have in place now—that is, the BFM and our principles for defining cooperation—are insufficient in dealing with doctrinal deterioration among our churches.

Well, it seems like the current mechanisms are insufficient since the SBC has been battling this issue for a long time. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been big news to disfellowship Saddleback Church last year. This is a similar battle for inerrancy back in the day, and with critical theory a few years ago. Seems to me like their defining principles of cooperation have already deteriorated.

He continues:

But is that assumption justified? Didn’t we pull off (and successfully maintain) the Conservative Resurgence with these very instruments? And just a year ago, didn’t the messengers overwhelmingly vote to remove two churches—Saddleback (by 94 percent!) and Fern Creek—that were not closely identified with our faith and practice in this area?

Furthermore, egalitarianism is not seeping into our institutions. All of our agencies and state conventions embrace and practice complementarianism. And no significant contingent in the SBC has mounted a challenge to our clear and uncompromising affirmation of complementarianism in the BFM.

The question is who we agree, a priori, to kick out. … So, here’s the million dollar question: Who maintains the list of which ‘deviations’ are tolerated and which should lead to disfellowship?

Fair point. And as he says, that’s the kicker. The SBC doesn’t have a list of prohibited deviations because the SBC is soft on confessionalism in favor of cooperation. He says as much in this sentence:

For decades, we have left space for varied applications of the BFM, even applications we believe are in error, as we stand united around its normativity in Baptist life.

This really is the rub. Baptist polity is autonomous. The Convention is not like a reformed Synod or Presbyterian General Assembly where there is a stronger focus on organizational authority. The Southern Baptist Convention is all about cooperation. Resolutions are proposed and voted on in the convention, but each member church can decide to abide by them, or not. This polity allows for the varied applications of the BFM2K that Grear states above.

Later in his article, Grear says that if we can make an amendment prohibiting women as pastors, we can make an amendment about anything.

If we adopt this amendment strategy, it will become the new norm. How many constitutional amendments are we in for? Where will it end? If so, what’s our BFM for?

First, is that really a problem? Further, that’s the risk of this sort of polity and proof that missional drift can occur in authoritative denominational structures like the Presbyterians or the autonomous “We think this is a good idea but you do you” approach of the SBC. This is the bed y’all have made, so live with it and deal with it.

Pastoras in the Hispanic Church

Grear says the Law Amendment would create “collateral damage” with churches who are complimentarian but apply it differently.

Several of our minority leaders (like the National African American Fellowship and California Southern Baptist Convention Executive Director Pete Ramirez) have told us as much. For Hispanics in particular, it really is an issue of nomenclature:

“What worries me is that we make decisions without thinking about the consequences for ethnic churches,” Ramirez said in Spanish. “There are many ethnic churches that, for translation reasons, use the title of pastor for a person. But it’s a matter of translation. It’s not that the person is ordained. It’s not that the person has a [ministry] license.”

“I pastored for 17 years in California,” Ramirez said of his bilingual pastorates. “People would always try to say that my wife was a pastora, which is the female way of saying pastor. They would use this title for her even though she is not ordained, she’s not licensed, she has not once preached from any pulpit.”

“And now we are, as a convention, putting ourselves in the business of churches” and saying, ‘If you don’t change this, you can’t be part of us,’” Ramirez said. This “is a radical change as Southern Baptists that I think we could regret long-term as we fulfill the Great Commission.”

“Dr. Ramirez wants us to maintain the freedom to discern if Hispanic Baptist churches are calling ladies in leadership ‘pastora’ because they serve in the office of elder/overseer (and some may indeed fall into that category), or if they call her that (as in the case with his wife) through linguistic tradition.

So the argument is that a constitutional ban on women holding the office of elder within the SBC would threaten the missional cooperation with ethnic churches, pointing to the example of the term “pastora” in Hispanic churches used for wives of pastors, even if they are not ordained pastors.

Ok, but isn’t that assuming people can’t comprehend a concept beyond cultural tradition? Why not disciple them to use correct biblical and theological terms with biblical understanding?

Excusing the fact that the Bible transcends cultures and that I have lived in San Antonio, Texas nearly all my life, let it be known I am a white male, so what do I know about the pastoral context of Hispanic churches?

So I asked some friends at Storehouse Community Church in the Rio Grande Valley city of McAllen, TX. I asked their pastor, Marco De Leon, and two of their leaders, Alan Morales and Eric Reyna.

Marco said, “We should just disciple them. Also, ‘pastora’ as a term for a pastor’s wife isn’t a translation issue, but one of respect in Hispanic churches. We have many families coming from Pentecostal churches and some of them are working through the term, but struggle to not call [my wife] ‘pastora’ out of respect for me. It’s generational for sure.”

Alan said there is a tendency to idolize the family in Hispanic culture, and that there is the concept of a “pastoral family” where the dad is a pastor, the mom is called pastora and she is second in line, and then the kids are expected to become pastors and leaders in the church.

But, and I want to stress that a Hispanic person said this, not me, he said, “I don’t think it’s just the missions issue. It’s just an overall governmental and cultural issue as well. I think it’s kind of shedding of responsibility. I think it’s sometimes even being lazy, but also at the same time I think it’s ignorance like a lot of people don’t teach this. … It’s almost like a First Corinthians type issue.”

Eric said that it comes down to whether the speech is shaping understanding. If it isn’t then we shouldn’t worry about it if we can understand the meaning of the communication accurately without getting bogged down in the details. However, “If the speech is shaping their understanding (and we can faithfully point to the use of less that ideal language is the root cause of this, or can actually help or correct the bad theology) then I say, yeah, correcting the language is useful.”

Grear says,

Second, do we actually think that after putting this issue into the Constitution we’ll just move back to the Great Commission? Some of the most strident voices in this discussion weren’t talking about the Great Commission before this came up, and I am not convinced they will be talking about it afterward. … My fear is that one day we’re going to wake up realizing we never talk about the Great Commission anymore.

Dismissing the Law Amendment for the sake of the Great Commission is a dog whistle in big eva churches. It’s the “We don’t need to talk about politics, we only need to focus on the gospel” argument. All that has done is created a further gap between secularism and the church because the church is not being taught how to apply the gospel to things like politics. Grear’s statement here is just another way of saying that.

We can’t forget that part of the Great Commission is teaching followers of Jesus to obey the Lord (Matt 28:19-20). That means we obey his Word. Paul is clear in 1 Timothy 2:12, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to remain quiet.” (I used the Christian Standard Version since it’s the Baptists’ NIV). That means something like the Law Amendment, whether necessary or not, should have been a slam dunk. Instead, it showed us just how bad the SBC is at zone defense.