Free Republic

As the Credentials Committee continues to rule that egalitarian SBC churches with women pastors are in friendly cooperation with the denomination, showing yet again why the Law Amendment is needed, we wanted to highlight an SBC church that just took the record for most pastrixes on staff. A few days ago, we highlighted a Southern Baptist Church with five women pastors and another with eight. Now, we present a church that has them both beat. Fielder Road Baptist Church, aka Fielder Church, is a Texas-based multi-site, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual church that the Baptist Press has previously highlighted for having 30...

The Southern Baptist Convention is looking to take advantage of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House to finally strip federal funding from Planned Parenthood.The SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission has launched a campaign calling on Congress to remove federal funding from the nation’s leading abortion provider.ERLC President Brent Leatherwood told The Christian Post that the strategy is centered on having the funding cut as part of the reconciliation process presently occurring in Congress.This process allows for measures to be passed by a simple majority in the Senate, rather than the usual 60-vote minimum threshold. Presently, Republicans hold 53 seats...

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) is, at this point, nothing more than a self-righteous speed bump on the road to actual justice. And at the helm of this sputtering, compromised machine sits Brent Leatherwood, the kind of soft-handed bureaucrat who would rather offer moral platitudes than wield the sword of justice. This is the man who, time and time again, has worked to kneecap real anti-abortion efforts under the guise of “strategy.” The man who, rather than pushing for an uncompromising end to child murder, has instead spent his time crafting open letters to politicians...

What do you get when you have a gaggle of female pastors in support of Kamala Harris? The answer is numerous attempts at justifying abortion. In a recent Evangelicals For Harris women’s “prayer call,” abortion became a top priority on why Evangelicals should support Kamala Harris for president. Evangelical Dark Web infiltrated the prayer call and has clips to unveil. The call was hosted by Lisa Sharon Harper who is a theologically liberal author with pronouns in bio. She runs the company Freedom Road which conducts struggle sessions. Panelists include Sandra Van Opstal, a female pastor; Patricia Ruiz Cantu, a...

The political action committee Evangelicals for Harris rolled out an over $1 million ad campaign Thursday that features footage of the late evangelist Billy Graham and suggests former President Donald Trump exhibits the character of evil men in the last days. The ad, which will play out over the next three weeks in battleground states, features a sermon Graham preached from 2 Timothy 3:1-5 , in which Paul describes the terrible nature of the last days and warns "men will become utterly self-centered and greedy for money, full of big words."The ad interspersed brief clips of Trump making comments that...

In the modern landscape of American Christianity, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) finds itself grappling with internal conflicts that reveal the troubling infiltration of leftist ideologies. A prime example is the dual alignment of some Southern Baptist churches with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), a group that epitomizes the complete and total apostasy from biblical truth. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship emerged in the early 1990s as a reactionary movement against the Conservative Resurgence within the SBC. This Resurgence aimed to return the SBC to a firm commitment to biblical inerrancy and conservative theology. In contrast, the CBF was birthed from...

A proposed amendment to the Southern Baptist Convention's constitution, known as the Law Amendment, that would have permanently banned women from serving as pastors "as qualified by Scripture," fell 5 percentage points short of the required two-thirds support from messengers on Wednesday.Some 5,099 — or 61% of messengers who cast ballots at America's largest Protestant denomination's Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana — voted in favor of the measure that needed 66.66% of the votes to be ratified. About 38%, or 3,185 messengers, opposed the motion.The amendment received much less support than it did when it was proposed by Pastor Mike...

The Southern Baptist church has narrowly rejected a proposal to ban women as pastors. Members voted 61.4% to 38.3% in favour of a ban. However, a two-thirds majority was required to amend the church's constitution. The proposed amendment, which stated that “only men” could hold the role, would have affected women at hundreds of the church's 47,000 places of worship. The Southern Baptist Convention and its nearly 13 million church members are mostly a conservative voting bloc in American elections. The vote's failure is a blow to the group's hard-right faction, which has been vying for influence. In a written...

INDIANAPOLIS — Before an audience of 400-plus Southern Baptists, former Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday raised warnings about the shifting direction of the Republican Party but stopped short of denouncing a far-right religious movement rising amid former President Donald Trump’s candidacy for president in November. "There’s also a very healthy debate within my party about whether we’re going to stay on the course…traditional moral values, a right to life, an affirmation of religious liberty or whether we’re going to start to move in a different direction," Pence said during a luncheon organized by the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy...

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced Thursday to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam in the country’s largest financial fraud case ever, state media Vietnam Net said. The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP. Lan illegally controlled Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank between 2012 and 2022 and allowed 2,500 loans that resulted in losses of $27 billion to the bank, reported state media VnExpress. The court asked...

In 2014, Russell Moore, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) advised Southern Baptists to attend a “gay wedding” reception as a gesture of affection towards a homosexual friend or relative. Moore was criticized for this stance, and rightly so, yet this stance was quickly adopted by the progressive stream of Southern Baptists and Evangelicals and has become the norm within movements such as Revoice. Yet, Moore’s advice is inextricably entangled with a fundamental flaw—it tacitly endorses what Scripture explicitly identifies as an ungodly union. The Bible’s portrayal of marriage as a sacred covenant...

A Texas megachurch has been slammed for its extravagant Christmas service, which featured nearly 1,000 performers, several camels and flying angels. Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas has gone viral on social media for its yearly The Gift of Christmas show - a Vegas-style spectacle that retells the story of the birth of Jesus. Footage of the event on Sunday shows real sheep walking across the stage before flying angels appear over the crowd, followed by hundreds of performers and three live camels entering the scene. A TikTok video posted by Lawson Martin - titled 'They say everything is bigger in...

On March 27, 2023, a mass shooting occurred at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, which resulted in multiple fatalities. The attack was carried out by a transgender leftist who had written a “manifesto” which has currently been withheld due to public records requests made by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department as well as the activism of Southern Baptist Convention ERLC head, Brent Leatherwood. Brent Leatherwood, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), is calling on TN lawmakers to back a proposal by Governor Bill Lee for an extreme risk protective...

Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and arguably one of the most influential theologians in the Southern Baptist Convention has been repeatedly criticized for his failure to lead in a timely manner by conservative Christians. As a matter of fact, most of the time Mohler ends up landing on the right side of theological issues, from Ed Litton’s plagiarism to homosexuality in the Church—but his voice is always too little too late. The term coined to describe his leadership is “leading from behind.” If you’ve been following the Andy Stanley saga on social media and the blogosphere,...

A Tennessee church has announced they have voted to disaffiliate from the Southern Baptist Convention after nearly 70 years of partnership, warming the cockles of our hearts with this wonderfully thrilling news. Monte Vista Baptist Church, a 150-member congregation in Maryville, TN, issued a press release announcing the unanimous vote of the community “in response to the convention’s recent decisions that only men are qualified by Scripture to serve as pastor of a local congregation and the subsequent exclusion of some churches where women were serving in a pastoral position.” They explain: “Monte Vista has ordained women to serve as...

At the 2023 Annual Southern Baptist Convention, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission gave their report which was an emotional affair laced with embellished contributions to legislative achievements whilst omitting the one policy they are on record for supporting: gun control in Tennessee. At the end of the report, Brent Leatherwood was asked a single question and the questioner made it count. Brent Leatherwood was asked if he believed whether a woman who murders her child outside of the womb should be prosecuted for murder. Brent Leatherwood gives a longwinded answer, claiming to champion Southern Baptist values. He goes on...

In recent months, following the Covenant School Shooting, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission head Brent Leatherwood has been outspoken in support of gun control legislation, throwing the lobbying power of the Southern Baptist Convention behind the gun control proposals of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. Leatherwood, whose three children attend Covenant School, supports the governor’s bid to bring red-flag gun control laws to Tennessee, which would result in the removal of guns from the possession of citizens without due process. But actions have consequences, and this move could be used in the future to nullify the second...

North Carolina megachurch Elevation—known for its popular music and charismatic pastor—is withdrawing its affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention effective immediately, according to a letter sent to the SBC’s Executive Committee and the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina. “We would like to thank the Southern Baptists for the privilege of partnering with you, especially through the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina for nearly two decades,” says the letter, which was published by the official SBC publication Baptist Press. It goes on to thank the Conference for “the privilege of having been affiliated with the SBC all these years”...

The more than 10,000-member Elevation Church in North Carolina, led by celebrity preacher Steven Furtick, has withdrawn its affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention after more than 20 years of cooperation with the nation's largest Protestant denomination.While Elevation Church did not appear to make the decision public, a copy of a letter published online dated June 26 shows that the church informed the SBC Executive Committee that its withdrawal from the denomination was "effective immediately.""This letter is to inform you that Elevation Church is withdrawing its affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention effective immediately. You will find that our Statement...

Southern Baptist Convention Ejects Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. CREDIT: Twitter Wednesday, the membership of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), voted to defenestrate Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch. Saddleback, whose 23,000+ weekly churchgoers make it the second-largest congregation in the SBC, along with a much smaller church in Kentucky, was “disfellowshipped” for violating the 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith & Message by ordaining three women pastors. According to that document, “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” At that moment, the SBC may not only have held firm against the Luciferian...