After appointing a woman as pastor, one of the largest churches, where many famous people go to church, got into a lot of trouble.
The Southern Baptist Convention kicked out one of its biggest churches, Saddleback, because it hired a woman to be its pastor.
In 2000, the Faith and Message doctrine, which is the SBC’s statement of core beliefs, was changed to say that women could not be pastors.
The SBC may have been happy that they acted on their beliefs, but the other 47,000 churches that are part of the convention have not been excited or positive about the decision.
In this day and age, when church membership keeps going down, it seems like a bad idea to kick out a very popular church for a small reason.
The wife of the church’s senior pastor, Andy Wood, was named a teaching pastor by the Saddleback Church.
The senior pastor of the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, Dwight McKissic, tweeted about how upset he was.
I’m burdened by the attempt to disfellowship Saddleback for this very reason; it’s not about Scripture, or adherence to BFM2K that does not address women’s ordination, or wmn serving as associate pastors. It’s driven by power, male supremacy; and it stinks in the nostrils of God. https://t.co/OGbVCzUXRa
— Dwight McKissic (@pastordmack) February 21, 2023
He said that “disfellowshipping” Saddleback had nothing to do with the Bible or the Baptist Faith and Message. “It’s about power and male supremacy, and it stinks in God’s nose.”
Even though women have reached the top of every field in the world today, the SBC sees female pastors as a huge threat to biblical authority and a slippery slope to liberalism and drift.
Saddleback, a big church in California, was said to “not be working with the convention in a friendly way.”
The convention’s decision was based on the fact that the Bible says only men can be pastors, even though both men and women are welcome to work in the church.
Last September, the SBC executive committee voted to cut ties with a North Carolina church that had voted to leave the denomination in 1999 because it was accepting of LGBTQ people.
In the past few years, the SBC has been at the centre of many arguments. Last year, there was a s*x abuse investigation at the convention for seven months. The investigation showed that leaders kept the victims of clergy sexual abuse in the dark and talked badly about them.
For years, a few top executives decided how to respond to these kinds of accusations. The main goal of the responses was to keep the SBC from having to pay anything.
In order to reach this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, told they were crazy, or told over and over again that the SBC couldn’t do anything because of its policy on church autonomy.
This meant that people who had been convicted of sexual abuse could still serve in ministry without their current church or congregation knowing about it or being warned.
The South Baptist Convention seems to care more about their reputation than the people who have been abused sexually.
To save its “reputation,” the convention ended up making decisions that they might regret in the future.
Our Team DCS includes 5 different writers proficient in English and research based Content Writing. We allow them and encourage them to follow the Entertainment news all day long. Our posts, listicles and even the exclusives are a result of their hard work.