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Ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in New Orleans this week, Saddleback Church founder Rick Warren stressed that he agrees with all of the denomination’s beliefs — except for its stance on women pastors. “The SBC Constitution was changed in 2015 after 170yrs of Baptist cooperation. Now churches must be ‘CLOSELY’ identified with our confession. NOT ‘completely’ Our BF&M2000 is 4,032 words. We disagree with only 1 word: men. We're 99.9999999999% in agreement! Is that CLOSE ENOUGH?” Warren tweeted on Sunday."I'm not making this stuff up," he added on Monday. "This is the history of the SBC: After...

Earlier this week, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) cut ties with Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. The influential Southern California-based congregation had been part of the SBC since its founding, but the denomination dismissed Saddleback over a decision that founding pastor Warren made shortly before he retired.In 2021, Warren ordained three women as pastors, which caused the SBC to consider disciplining the church or kicking it out of the denomination. One of those women, Stacie Wood, the wife of lead pastor Andy Wood, is a “teaching pastor.” On Tuesday, the SBC Executive Committee deemed Saddleback to be “not in friendly cooperation...

The Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday ousted its second-largest congregation — Saddleback Church, the renowned California megachurch founded by pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren — for having a woman pastor.

FLOWER MOUND, Texas (BP) – The Village Church announced Sunday (Aug. 28) that lead pastor Matt Chandler will take a leave of absence from teaching and preaching following his admission to “inappropriate messaging” with a woman on Instagram. Chandler admitted the messaging was “unguarded and unwise” though the messages were neither “romantic nor sexual” in nature, but the “frequency and familiarity” was not wise for someone in his position. Chandler said the church’s elders determined his “inability to see this for what it was revealed something not right and unhealthy,” adding that The Village “cannot be a place that does...

If you’re Southern Baptist, you should know that the federal government is looking into your organization.As relayed by Fox News, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has announced it’s under investigation by the Department of Justice. And though the Convention is being a bit vague, the revealed reason is particularly disconcerting.Apparently, the DOJ’s probe is related to how the largest Protestant denomination in America has managed allegations of sexual abuse. From the SBC Executive Committee’s statement posted online:[The Committee] recently became aware that the Department of Justice has initiated an investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention, and that the investigation will...

Baptist Press reported yesterday that the Justice Department has informed the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention that it has initiated an investigation that will involve multiple SBC entities. This comes after an independent investigation (full text of report) of sexual abuse allegations against clergy and Executive Committee members commissioned by SBC. A Release by the SBC Executive Committee (quoted in full in the Baptist Press report) says in part: Individually and collectively each SBC entity is resolved to fully and completely cooperate with the investigation. While we continue to grieve and lament past mistakes related to sexual abuse,...

Prominent Southern Baptist theologians have published a statement clarifying the meaning of the word "pastor" amid controversy within the United States' largest Protestant denomination stemming from Rick Warren's Saddleback Church ordaining female pastors last year. The document "A Statement Concerning the Baptist Faith & Message and the Word' Pastor'" was released last week by two Southern Baptist seminary presidents and the former head of the denomination's public policy arm. The signatories are Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Chuck Kelley, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary; and Richard Land, who served as the president of the...

In a video released Sunday, June 12, former Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham endorsed current presidential candidate Tom Ascol — a move shocking to some convention insiders and a potential game-changer in this week’s contest for leadership. Ascol and Graham hold divergent theological views, with Ascol being a staunch Calvinist and Graham being a more traditional conservative evangelical. And by endorsing Ascol, who is a Florida pastor, Graham bypassed another candidate, Bart Barber, whose church is located 37 miles away from Graham’s. Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Texas, is considered the institutionalist candidate in this year’s...

Top administrative leaders for the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, said Tuesday that they will release a secret list of hundreds of pastors and other church-affiliated personnel accused of sexual abuse. An attorney for the SBC’s Executive Committee announced the decision during a virtual meeting called in response to a scathing investigative report detailing how the committee mishandled allegations of sex abuse and stonewalled numerous survivors. The committee anticipates releasing the list Thursday. During the meeting, top leaders and several committee members vowed to work toward changing the culture of the denomination and to listen more...

(RNS) — Leaders at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee released a formerly secret list Thursday (May 26) of sexual abusers, which had been kept by SBC staff since 2007. The 205-page list includes details about 700 cases of abuse by pastors, Sunday school teachers, camp counselors, music ministers, bus drivers and missionaries, with about 400 tied to SBC churches from Alaska to Alabama. In almost all of the cases, the abuse had led to arrests and jail time. According to a description from Guidepost Solutions, the firm that uncovered the list as part of a multimillion-dollar investigation into how...

PART 2 OF 3. The Hunter Biden Files Hunter Biden and his business partners were involved in discussions about possible deals in dozens of foreign countries, often corrupt backwaters, at times invoking official channels like ambassadors, emails reviewed by The Daily Wire show. While most attention has focused on Ukraine, where a gas company paid the now-president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month while he was in deep crack addiction, and China, Hunter and his partners at a consultancy called Rosemont Seneca were eager to do business in a vast array of other places. The map below highlights...

The Christian cold war will mean an increase in church splits, takeovers, and other power struggles as people choose sides on existential questions, including theology.Along with the rest of the country, American Christianity is in the middle of a cold war. As this war heats up, it will mean church splits, takeovers, fights over denominational resources, and other power struggles as the Donald Trump era has increasingly brought clarity and pushed people to choose sides on existential questions.The Southern Baptist Convention, the United States’ largest Protestant denomination, is one key example of this dynamic affecting American Christianity as a whole....

PART 1: EVERYTHING BUT THE FUNDING. THAT IS COMING IN PART 2. NOTE: IF THIS ARTICLE IS TOO LONG TO READ FOR YOU, TRY OUR MUCH SHORTER VERSION, DOCENT FOR DUMMIES, PUBLISHED HERE. Imagine a headline in which the newly elected president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination was caught – within hours of his election – committing theft. This theft, a clear violation of God’s immutable Moral Law (Exodus 20:15) is fairly unique in that it contains within the stone tablets carved by God’s own anthropomorphic finger no explanation or asterisk. The 1st Commandment contained the reason for not...

This year, the nation’s largest Protestant body focused on three interrelated issues: the aftermath of Russell Moore’s resignation, the denomination’s presidency, and critical race theory.The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and other outlets published major articles previewing the 2021 annual Southern Baptist Convention. Now that the convention is over, here’s a more detailed overview of what happened from an insider’s perspective. As a lifelong Southern Baptist, a graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and an observer of Baptist politics over the last decade, I offer the following thoughts.The 2021 SBC was essentially a family squabble worked out...

Like just about every other Western Christian body, as well as the United States, the SBC is left to squabble over shrinking slices of a dwindling pie.The New York Times put out a lengthy preview of the Southern Baptist Convention’s top controversies heading into their annual meeting this week in Nashville, Tenn. Members of the nation’s largest evangelical denomination are weighing the future of their religious body amid numerous theological controversies.The way the SBC goes will significantly influence Christianity in the United States, which has since the nation’s inception been Protestant-dominated. As the Times notes, “About a third of the...

As Southern Baptists prepare for their biggest annual meeting in more than a quarter-century, accusations that leaders have shielded churches from claims of sexual abuse and simmering tensions around race threaten to once again mire the nation’s largest Protestant denomination in a conflict that can look more political than theological. More than 16,000 voting delegates are pre-registered for the two-day gathering that starts on Tuesday in Nashville. Southern Baptist Convention members have been a powerful force in conservative Republican politics for a generation. This year’s convention follows weeks of internal controversies stoked by leaked letters, secret recordings and video rebuttals....

A year after reporting the largest single-year membership decline in more than 100 years, churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, lost more than 400,000 members in 2020 and set a new record for the single-year decline amid the coronavirus pandemic and a bitter culture war. The Annual Church Profile report shows membership in SBC congregations declined by a staggering 435,632 in 2020, more than 50% higher than the 287,655 members the denomination reported losing from 2018 to 2019. While the number of SBC congregations increased slightly by 62 to 47,592 over the previous year, the...

Some things are rather coincidental and also predictable. For Beth Moore, leaving the SBC in a coordinated announcement with the help of the pagan Religious News Service is one of those things. The coincidence being that one year ago she gave a sermon on a Sunday morning at a Southern Baptist church.In this video I do a walkthrough of the sermon that Beth Moore gives at the aptly named Progressive Baptist Church where Charlie Dates preached. The sermon is pack full of bad exegesis. In December 2020, Charlie Dates would leave the Southern Baptist Convention because it was not adopting...

Greear, who pastors The Summit Church, a North Carolina megachurch, defended his three years as the denomination’s president and the convention’s growing diversity. But he said political divides were distracting the convention from its mission work. ...In recent months, Southern Baptist leaders have been embroiled in a debate over critical race theory, an academic framework that seeks to explain systemic racism ...While he said that he agreed with some of the concerns about CRT, he also lamented that criticism of it had alienated people of color and he pledged to work harder on racial reconciliation. Some Southern Baptist leaders, including...

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, has blasted leaders and pastors who’ve made “closet racists” and “neo-Confederates” feel more at home in their churches than people of color. His criticism came during an address at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee meeting on Monday. “Let me state this very clearly, as clearly as I can, critical race theory is an important discussion and I am all for, as I hope you would be, robust theological discussion about it,” Greear said. “For something as important as what biblical justice looks like in the world today, we need careful,...