Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1100: Women Pastors and Saddleback Getting Kicked out of the SBC: Dr. Rick Warren

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Dr. Rick Warren is a pastor, author, speaker, and the executive director of "Finishing the Task"--a global network that exists to convene and to catalyze the global body of Christ towards the goal of ensuring that everyone, everywhere has access to a Bible, Believer and Body of Christ. In this podcast conversation, Rick explains why he shifted his view on women pastors and why he thinks the SBC was wrong to kick Saddleback church out of the denomination. Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is the one and only Dr. Rick Warren. He doesn't need an introduction, does he? Rick Warren? Just Google him. You can get your own introduction. We talk about lots of things related to his recent shift in his view on women in church leadership, which coincides with his, well, the recent exit or kicking out of Saddleback Church being kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention. We do talk quite a bit about both of those things. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Rick Warren. Rick, thanks so much for coming on Theology in the Raw.

This has been a long time in the making, and I really appreciate you carving out time. What I know is a very busy schedule to have a conversation. Well, I love you, Preston. And the reason I love you is so many different things. But one of the things is you're not afraid to ask questions. And you're not afraid to just say, you know, what's, uh, is the party line, the party line? Uh, is it really true? Um, when I was 16 years old, uh, it was in the middle of the Jesus movement. I was licensed to preach by a little church in Northern California,

immediately hired by the California Baptist convention to do youth evangelism. And I did 120 harvest crusades up and down the West Coast before I was 20. I was going to high school during the week. I was class president, student vice president. But on the weekends, I was doing these crusades. As soon as I graduated high school, I moved to Nagasaki, Japan to start a church. And it was actually there that I started asking the questions you've been asking. And that is, how much of what we do is really Christianity and how much of it is culture, American culture? And being in a different culture, it's easier to see what's the American part.

Now, Newbingen said, it's impossible to actually get the pure gospel because every gospel comes to us through a culture, whether it's the Roman and Greek or Middle Eastern culture of the New Testament. When as a mission expert and as a missiologist, we're always looking about contextualization. How does the culture, how do you get the gospel into that culture? But you got to realize that the gospel you're sharing is already enculturated by the culture you're in. And so it's not the pure because it's always been having culture in it. And so it's okay to ask those questions and to say, what we believe about this, what we believe about that, is that really what scripture teaches or is that what tradition teaches or is that what tradition teaches, or is that what culture teaches, and what

I grew up with, and what I'm comfortable with. So this latest, I've been questioning that for years, and a lot of the stuff that we did in the early years at Saddleback in the 80s and 90s, no other churches were doing that everybody does today, and they're not even questionable. But when I was starting Saddleback, there were questions like, can you have drums in the church? Nobody questions that anymore. Can you have guitars in the church? Don't you have to have a choir? And don't you have to have a come forward invitation if you're a Baptist or Methodist? And a lot of things like that, that don't you have to put the name of your denomination in the title of your church.

And those are wars that actually we won decades ago and nobody, everybody takes it for granted. Just like when I started Saddleback, there was some things I took for granted that had been won by the previous generation and stuff like that. The background is that when I doing all those crusades, when I was doing all those crusades, when I was 18, Billy Graham heard about this long-haired, skinny kid with wire-rimmed glasses preaching up a storm on the West Coast, Washington, Oregon, and California. And at 18, he took me under his arm and mentored me for the next 42 years.

Wow. So I got to be a part of all of the big training events that Graham did, Lausanne, Amsterdam 83, 86, 2000, things like that, help plan them. And in Amsterdam 2000, Billy came to me and said, Rick, I want you to do a conference within the conference. I'm going to invite 15,000 evangelists to come to this, but I want you to invite 650 world leaders of missions around the world, and let's do a conference, one in a conference on why haven't we finished the task? Why is the Great Commission still unfulfilled? And so I had 76 tables, and actually I got Paul Eshelman to, we partnered on this, and then I told him, I said, Paul, you're going to have to lead it because I'm pastoring a pretty complex church right now. But I just did Paul's funeral on Saturday. He was a wonderful man, the founder of the Jesus film and great, great guy. But we put the 76 tables, there was a table in the middle called table, we call it table 71, where I put

the leaders of the largest mission agencies. It was the founder of Youth with a Mission, Lauren Cunningham, the president of Campus Crusade for Christ, Steve Douglas, the president of the International Mission Board of Southern Baptist, Jerry Rankin, the head of United Bible Societies, the head of Wycliffe Translators. I put them all there. I call them the gorillas. They were the big, big mission agencies. And out of that conference in 2000 in Amsterdam, we decided, that table decided to keep going, and we formed a little thing called Finishing the Task. And it was very low-key, but the idea was to reach the tribes in the world that have no

Bible, that have no known believer, and that have no known church, or as I call it, Bibles, Believers, and Bodies of Christ. And we thought that there were maybe 600 tribes in that list, we found 3,600 tribes. And so over the last 23 years, we've met twice a year and consistently year by year, we've been taking about 50 to 75 of those tribes off that list every year for 23 years, getting Bible translated for that tribe, getting a church planted and getting a group of believers going. So that was going along. And then in 2018, Paul said two things. He said, I need to retire. He was about 15 years older than me. And that year, his wife had passed away.

And he said, I want you to take the thing. And I said, well, I told Billy I could take it when I stepped down from Saddleback. I've still got a couple more years, but I can do it part-time. And then when I find my replacement, my successor, then I can do it full-time. Well, that all happened. And then in January of 2020, I was planning to step down because that was the 40th anniversary of my starting Saddleback. Kay and I went away. Kay and I went away on a retreat, prayer retreat, and we just didn't get a word either way. Should we step down or should we

not step down? And so we just said, I don't know why. I don't have any unfulfilled dream for this church. It's gone way past what I ever imagined it would be. But we'll stay here. And I don't know why. Well, eight weeks later, COVID hit. Then I knew why. And that if we put a brand, you know, because in California, we're very, very strict. We went a year and a half without services. We were all online. I was doing a weekly service from my farm. And so during COVID, that period of time, I decided I would read every book I could find on the Great Commission and on the early church. And I read over 100 books. And it was that that caused me to reassess and reevaluate my stated position on women in ministry. position on women in ministry. And what happened is I discovered, for instance, that in the first 350 years of the church, it was our fastest period of growth in history. We grew from 140,

120 people in the upper room to over half the Roman Empire by about 360 AD. The Roman Empire had 30 million people in it. 15 million of them had been converted. It was massive conversion. I have in my library two coins, a denarius from 87, which has Caesar's picture on it, and a denarius from 360, which has Jesus' picture on it and the Cairo. That's culture change, Preston. When all of a sudden Jesus is on the money, okay, something's happened. And so they didn't have all of what we, they had no planes, trains, and automobiles. They had no printing press. They had no internet, radio, TV. They didn't have ocean bearing vessels to go to overseas. Everywhere you took the gospel, you either walked or rode a donkey or maybe a camel.

How did they grow so fast, growing 50% a decade for 350 years? So I've spent, since COVID hit, asking two questions. What did they do right in the first 350 years of the church? And what have we done wrong for the last 1700 that slowed the growth of the church? And one of the things that was wrong was there was no clergy-laity split in the first 350 years. Everybody was a priest, the priesthood of every believer, every member is a minister. Women were as valued in the ministry as men were were and you can see this not just in the new testament but also in all the early christian writings the significance and so i start thinking we're trying to complete the gospel and telling 50 of the church to sit on the bench

and so what what is that all about? Well, I started studying and people had come to me many times that, why don't you have women pastors at Saddleback? And I said, I'm a Bible guy. Just show me a verse. Just show me one verse. All I need is one verse, but I can't just say it makes sense practically. It makes sense. That's not enough to me to go, well, everybody else is doing it. That's not a good reason to change your theology. You have to have scriptures. I had been in 165 nations, training over a million pastors for 40 years. And so I had seen churches in Asia of 30,000 and 40,000 people led by women. But that wasn't enough for me. I had to have a scripture. I had to have a verse. And so in studying the New Testament church,

the first verse that I saw actually that caught my attention was in Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. Now, we know one of the things we say in finishing the task coalition is the church at its birth was the church at its best. The church at its birth was the church at its best. There are people who want to take the church backwards right now, many denominations back to the 1950s, because they think that's the golden age of the church where white guys ruled. Women are in the home and ethnic groups had no voice at all. And that kind of madman culture, they think the 50s is the golden age of the church. There are others who think the Reformation. They want to go 500 years back because they think the golden age is Luther and Calvin.

I say, you're right. We ought to take the church back. You're just not going back far enough. You need to go back to the first century that the antidote to the 21st century is what they did in the first century, particularly about a dozen things they did in the first two chapters of Acts, which actually deals with stuff like nationalism and things that we're seeing today that are actually harming the global witness of the church. Well, we know, for instance, as I studied that passage, we know that women were in the upper room on the first day of the church. We know that there were these tongues of fire on men and not just men. We know that they were all filled with the Spirit, women and men. And we know,

a lot of people don't realize this, that women were preaching on the day of Pentecost, on the first day of the church. They were some of those that were speaking in the tongues that people understood in their own language, maybe different from a prayer language, but they were speaking in a, women were preaching on the day of Pentecost. How do we know that? Because Peter felt obligated to explain it in his sermon. And instead of quoting Isaiah, he quotes Joel. Now, Peter says, hey, you guys, these people aren't drunk. It's only nine o'clock in the morning.

They're not drunk. He said, this is a fulfillment of prophecy. Now, he could have quoted Isaiah, which says, and they will, there will come a day they will speak in a new tongue in strange languages. Okay. That was a fulfillment on the day of Pentecost. When that happened, God was making the church multicultural from day one, from day one, it wasn't going to be one culture. It was going to be multicultural. They'd come from all around the world. They heard it in their own language. Nobody should have to learn a

new language to hear somebody say, Jesus loves you. And so they need to hear it in their own language. Well, that happened on day one. It would be multicultural. But he didn't quote Isaiah. He quotes Joel, who talks about women preaching. And in Acts 2, 17 and 18, it says this, this is that that Joel spoke. In other words, what we're seeing is the fulfillment of prophecy. In the last days, now let me pause there. That means Peter believes the last day started on the day of Pentecost. We're in the latter of the last days. We don't know how many more latter ones there will be, but according to Peter, the last days started on the first day of the church. In the last days, you're seeing this. So he thinks he's in the last days. In the last days, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy.

and your daughters will prophesy. Now what's prophecy? Prayer is talking to God about men. Prophecy is talking to men about God. It's preaching, okay? It's preaching. It's not just foretelling, it's forth telling, it's both. And so he says, your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your young men will have visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Upon all my servants, on all flesh, both men and women, he's redundant, I will pour out my spirit and they will preach. So you look at that, and Peter's saying that on the first day of church, sons and daughters, young and old, men and women. Who gets left out? Nobody. In the church, we all get to play the game, every member's a minister. The Old Testament priesthood of the hired holy man, that's sacerdotalism, is done. You see, neither you or I could have been priests

in the Old Testament. We were male, but we're not Levite. That was not just a gender restriction ministry. There was an ethnic restriction, and only Levites could be priests. So it was very specific. Only men could be priests in the Old Testament, and only Levite men could be priests. But now the veil in the temple has been torn. We don't need a priest anymore. Christ is our high priest, and we are, as Peter says, a kingdom of priests. And so he says, men and women, sons and daughters, young and old, everybody gets to play. That really blew my mind when I realized that Peter was quoting Joel because he's defending the women preaching on the first day. So from the very first day, God planned that women were going

to have as much say in spreading the gospel, gossiping the gospel as men. Then I started seeing it in other places. As I told you, I was studying the Great Commission. There are four commands in the Great Commission. Jesus says, all authority has been given to me, exousia, all authority. Therefore, he is authorizing four things. Everybody is to go, four verbs. Everybody is to make disciples.

Everybody is to baptize. And everybody is to teach, okay? Women are to go. Women are to make disciples. Women are to baptize. Women are to teach. Who authorizes women to do this? Jesus Christ. All authority is given to me. Therefore, go. Now, one of the reasons why Saddleback has baptized more people than any church in American history is because we have the rule that if you lead a person to Christ, you get to baptize them. Not the hired holy man. Okay. Anybody can serve communion. They're all priests.

Anybody can baptize. Anybody can preach. It's every member ministry. And so we have a rule that if a little girl leads her daddy to Christ, she can baptize him. If a wife leads her husband to Christ, she can baptize him. And because we let anybody who leads anybody to Christ, we baptized over 54,000 new believers, adult believers in 43 years. No other church has done that ever in America. Why? Because we opened it up. I would have killed myself. I've been waterlogged if I had to baptize all 54,000 new believers at Saddleback Church. So I've got Pentecost. I've got the last words of Jesus authorizing women to go teach,

baptize. And I've got the first words on the day of the church, men and women, sons and daughters. Okay. Then I just start seeing it everywhere. For instance, the first person to announce the incarnation was not a man. It was a woman. And in the temple, a prophetess called Anna, who lived in the temple, she was a widow. She sees the baby and she starts preaching to everybody in the temple. The Messiah is here. So God chose a woman to announce the incarnation. And not only that, God chose a woman to announce the incarnation. And not only that, God chose a woman to announce the resurrection. The first Christian sermon was not preached by a man.

It was preached by Mary Magdalene when Jesus says, go tell my disciples. And so Mary goes and the first Christian message, he's alive, he's risen, he's not here. And who's she saying it to? A group of men, not just a group of men, the apostles. She is a teaching the apostles. So I started looking through that. So then I go, well, if I'm seeing these, this clearly seems to contradict the four passages in scripture that appear to prohibit women from doing those very four things. And one of the things that I have to say about this is the Bible often says opposite things, and you have to look at the whole counsel of God. Tell me what you want to believe about women in

ministries, and I'll tell you which verses you have to ignore. Okay. And so you can pick and choose and ignore the others and explain away like the four I just gave. If you don't want to believe, if you're a complementarian, you have to ignore those verses or explain them away because they're there in scripture. And where Paul says, I tell women to be silent. He also, in Corinthians, says that women, when you preach, you have to cover your head. Okay. So which is it? You got to look at the whole gospel. Can I pause real quick?

I would say maybe I'm estimating 40 to 50% of my audience might be complementarian. And I would say the overwhelming majority in that crowd would probably be soft complementarian. And I would say the overwhelming majority in that crowd would probably be soft complementarian. I don't think I have too many listening that would be like women shouldn't basically do anything in church. I may have grew up in certain contexts, but it was largely that. What would you say to the pushback to all the passages you referenced so far that, yeah, I mean, Great know, Mary announcing to Jesus or announcing to the apostles. Like these are more in the category of kind of like individual discipleship and certainly in most healthy commentary and context.

They're not going to say women can't evangelize. How would you call preaching at Pentecost individual discipleship? They're preaching to 5,000 people. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's more than most pastors will ever preach to. The women at Pentecost preach to a bigger crowd of men than most pastors will ever preach to in

their entire life. 5,000. Yeah. So somebody could say, well, yeah, women can be evangelists preaching the gospel to one or a thousand people, but that still is not a one-to-one correlation with them occupying regular teaching roles in the church. Let me answer that. That's a really good question. Fantastic question. And first I would say, I am totally sympathetic to guys who are where I was for 50 years. Right.

Okay. So it's not like I don't get it. It's like, I was like, I heard all of the arguments and it didn't penetrate until I actually started doing the exegesis for myself. Instead of simply reading the commentaries of complimentarians or, or egalitarians. I actually reject both labels. I think both of them are wrong in some areas. I really do.

I don't consider myself an egalitarian because there's some things that they believe I don't happen to agree with. And I just as I I reject that, you know, if you're not a Calvinist, you're Armenian. I don't accept that. And this bipolar attitude of your either or doesn't really allow for the fact that there are shades in everything. or doesn't really allow for the fact that there are shades in everything. So I would say I'm totally sympathetic to a person who goes, that just doesn't feel right to me. It didn't feel right to me for years. I had to ask, is my feeling really based on exegesis?

Because here's a couple of things. The number one passage that complementarians first go to is the passage in Timothy, where he says, I do not allow a woman to have authority over a man or to teach. OK, now he says, Paul says, I do not permit. First, he doesn't say the Lord does not permit. I don't not permit. But let me skip that for a minute. The word authority. I do not allow women to have authority, is not the

word for authority. The word for authority in Scripture is exousia. It's used 120 times, at least, in Scripture. Paul, when he talked about authority, we don't actually know what Paul meant by the word oftentimes. That's the word there, oftentimes. And the reason we don't know is because it's the only time it's used in the entire Bible. For those who are scholars, this is called a hoppex legomena. A hoppex legomena means a word that's only used one time in a text, okay? This word oftentimes is not the word for authority. It's not exousia. When Jesus says, all authority is given to me, exousia. When it says he spoke as one having authority, exousia. When he says to the disciples, I authorize you, I give you authority to cast out demons, exousia. It's the word Paul uses over and

over and over again in his letters. This is a word Paul used only one time, and nobody else ever used it. So we don't really know what Paul meant by that. One of the things is you never build a doctrine on a hapax legomena. You never build a doctrine on a word that's only used one time in Scripture, because one of the principles of hermeneutics, first book I wrote was on hermeneutics, on Bible study interpretation methods when I was in my 20s. Billy Graham took that book, had it translated into 17 languages, and had me teach it in Amsterdam 86, the 15,000 there. So I've studied Bible interpretation all my life. And you never build a doctrine on a word that's only used one time, because one of

the principles of interpretation is correlation. Scripture needs to interpret itself. You compare scripture with scripture. How is it used in all the other ways Paul used it? Well, if Paul didn't use it any other time, how in the world can you compare it? You can't. So it's a sketchy thing to build a doctrine on that. Second thing then is, if it's not used in scripture, you have to go outside of scripture and say, how is it used in classical Greek? And you look at Plato and Socrates and all the classical Greek. This is going to shock some of the hearers right now. The number one use of the word oftentimes in Greek is murder. Like, a sister kills a brother, a brother kills a brother, Cain kills Abel. It's murder in kinship. The number three use of oftentimes in scripture is suicide. It is never used in a positive word.

Authority is a positive word and it's used. I give you authority. Okay. Oftentimes is a crime. It's a crime. It's never used in a positive sense. At the best, you might be able to interpret it as I don't allow women to violently attack men. I don't allow women to violently dominate men. It always has an era of dominance

and violence in it. So we don't really know what that word means. What in the world was he thinking when Paul threw that word in there? He's never used it in any other letter. And when you look at it in usage in normal Greek. It means basically to kill somebody. Okay, kill somebody. I do want to jump in to clarify that it's rarely used outside the Bible. It's a rare word, not just because it's only used once in the Bible. It's actually, when you go to extra-biblical literature, it's not widely used at all. So even then, we're not going on a lot of information.

We don't have thousands and thousands of examples of it. Right. What does it mean? I do want to clarify that it's the noun that's used as murder in many texts prior to Paul. The verb is very rarely used. But even then, and this is a big debate among scholars, is it positive, is it negative in those few occurrences we have of the verb? And I looked at all the papyri and everything that we have of the verb that's relative to the time of Paul. In most cases, it conveys some kind of like master-slave kind of domineering kind of authority.

Violent domineering. Now, Paul actually says in the very first verse in that paragraph, when men pray, I don't want them to pray with anger and disputation. There's a kind of a violent theme there going on. Now, here's the thing. It's been said many times, a text without a context is a pretext. So what is the context here? We happen to know very clearly that there was heresy in the Ephesians church. We know that we don't know. Evidently, Timothy wrote Paul and goes, I need your help,

Paul. We got heresy going on here. Paul writes two letters. He talks about it twice. We also know that the heresy was being spread by women. And he says that they're going from home to home, confusing, foolish women to buy into this heresy.

Now, we don't know what the heresy was because Paul never mentions it. But we got a couple guesses. First, it's Ephesus. Ephesus contains one of the seven wonders of the world, the Temple of Artemis or Diana, whether Greek or Hebrew, I mean, Greek or Roman. It's a sex cult. It's a feminist cult. They believe women are better than men. And so if Timothy has a church in Ephesus, it's full of people who converted from a feminist cult. It would not surprise me that they're bringing in some of their temple of Diana worship ideas into Christianity. Down

there in that passage where it says, and women will be saved through childbirth, which you have fun explaining that one. Saved what? Saved from death in labor? Saved from salvation? What does that save mean? Okay. We do know that women were taught in Diana worship to call out to the name of Diana in delivery. They were to call out to Diana and to Sophia to, it was supposed to give them a safe delivery. And they would be saved in their childbirth. So we know that. It could be he was attacking some kind of cult ideas that were being brought in from the Temple of Diana. But there's another one. There was another heresy

being spread among Christians at the time, which was misusing the word, you know, in scripture, where it says, it says, Eve is the mother of all living things. Okay. And so if you take that verse and you logically point it out, then they would say, well, if Eve is the mother of all living things, she was the mother of Adam and she came first, not Adam. And she must have given birth to Adam. And she must have given birth to Adam. Well, Adam wasn't born. Adam was created. Adam didn't have a mother.

But there were people saying Eve is more important than Adam. Women are more important than men. They came first. And Paul has to say that in those verses. Wait a minute. Hang on here, guys. Adam came first. And he actually corrects them in that passage. Adam came first. And so it could have been that. What we know is there's heresy in that church. Women were

spreading the heresy. And I wouldn't condemn Paul for saying, Paul, Timothy, just tell the women to shut up right now until we get this thing solved. Tell them to be quiet. Don't just say nobody talk. But here's another factor. Most people think this is thinking of when people think of a pastor today. First place, the word pastor is not in any English translation in the New Testament. The word pastors is used one time in the list of five gifts given to the church. But the word pastor is not used.

So when people say, you can't find the word pastor translated in any English translation. So when people say, show me a woman called pastor in the New Testament. I say, show me a man. Not one man in scripture is called pastor. It's the function, right? They shepherd. It's a description of what they do. The office is elder, and we have a description of an elder's office. And the office is bishop, and we have a description of that. And we have deacons, and we have a description of an elder's office, and the office is bishop, and we have a description of that, and we have deacons, and we have deaconesses, but we don't have the office of pastor. It's not an office. It's something that you do as an elder or as a bishop or as a spiritual gift. There are women, I believe, have the gift of pastoring, and it's a spiritual gift. I don't

think God chooses gender for spiritual gifts, in fact, so all of those things are there. Now, as I was saying, when people think of a pastor today, here's what they think of. A guy in a suit and a tie, standing behind a pulpit in a church building with an aisle in front and either pews or chairs sitting there, and it's 50, 100 people, and he's holding a Bible, preaching. None of that, not one part of that is in the New Testament. There were no church buildings until the fourth century. There were no pulpits until the ninth century. They were called amboes when they were first invented. There were no pulpits until the ninth century. There were no Bibles to hold until the 15th century. So when people talk about, we don't want women behind the sacred desk, there was no sacred

desk for nine centuries. That's a cultural thing. When you think of a pastor in the New Testament, you should think of a small group leader like Lydia in a small group. And so you think about a church gathering, and the Bible says in Corinthians, in New Testament worship, everyone comes with a psalm. Everyone comes with a revelation. Everyone comes with a scripture, a testimony. It was totally participated. It was a small group. Now, it is possible that when they're talking about, I tell the women to be silent, that women are doing cross talk.

You know, we talk about in celebrate recovery groups, no cross talk. That while one person's talking, you shouldn't be talking to somebody else at the same time. That could be what he's saying. I don't want people, I don't tell women to be silent. Okay. In other words, don't do cross talk. You're in a small group. Somebody's talking.

Give the respect. But it's certainly not a guy in a suit talking to 50 people. It just isn't there. There were no pulpits until the ninth century. So again, that's having cultural blindness on there. Now, a third problem with that text is you can't, when you got a paragraph, you can't pick and choose and say, this phrase is for all time and universal, and the other phrases are just for that time. In a paragraph, they're either all universal and timeless,

or they're either not all universal and timeless. They're given to that particular church, which we know is dealing with heresy. So if you're going to say, I do not allow women to, I'll let you choose that, and maybe you want to call it authority. I don't. There's no basis for it at all. But if you want to choose that or teach, if you're going to make that a universal for all time principle, then you got to make every one of the other eight instructions of Paul universal principles too. And the first one is this. Paul says, I want, again, he's given his desire, that men, when they pray, lift their holy hands. Every man has to lift his hands every time he prays.

You can't have one be a universal principle for women and not a universal principle for men. They're in the same paragraph. That is eisegesis. That's reading into the text. It's unfair and it's dishonest. You can't say every man doesn't have to raise his hand, but every woman has to be quiet. Okay. Then you go down to the other list, which are clearly local custom things. I do not allow women to braid their hair. I do not allow women, I do not permit women to wear gold. I do not allow women to wear gold. I do not allow women to wear pearls.

I do not allow women to wear expensive clothes. Well, expensive in Burundi or expensive in Neiman Marcus? What are you talking about? Okay. And so the person who says, I believe it's a universal principle, then you have to go home and tell your wife, honey, you can't wear gold anymore. You can't wear pearls anymore. You can't braid your hair anymore. And you certainly can't wear nice clothes anymore. That is inconsistent to pull one text out

and make a pretext and say the others were for that period in time. They're either all for that period of time or they're not. Now, I don't have time to go through all the other passages, but when you take them apart, you go, holy guacamole. I was embarrassed that I had actually just accepted that without doing the due diligence of going, what does that actually mean? Well, you've clearly done a lot. I mean, I know people are going to, what about this? What about that? There's going to be endless agreement, disagreement, whatever. I think we can all acknowledge, because I saw some stuff on social media, like, has he actually done the research? Clearly, you've done a bit of reading. You've read a book or two on this and thought through it. I've had four years of Greek and Hebrew. So I have my earned doctorate. So it's not like I'm

a novice at this. I took Greek in college, not just seminary. I'm curious. So I got this question from one of my—it was a top-rated question. And I do a Q&A every month, and I have my Patreon supporters send in questions. The number one question that they wanted me to answer is, what are my thoughts on the SBC kicking out churches like Saddleback that have women pastors. My quick response, I would love for, I should have contacted you before I responded. My response was, number one, I know nothing about the SBC and their policy. So I don't pretend to know what happened, what didn't happen. Number two, if there's a clear violation of what it takes to be in a

denomination, then yeah, I would have no problem. Wherever the denomination wants to draw the line, as long as it's clearly articulated. And if a church violates that, then I have no problem saying you no longer belong. The little I looked into it though, it seemed like from my vantage point, there was a lot of just unclarity on whether you had to not have women pastors to be part of the SBC. Can you help? I would love to know what happened in that whole showdown a couple months ago. Here's a history lesson because what happened is in this last convention, the SBC threw out four of the things that made the SBC the SBC. The SBC started for the wrong reason. We all know that.

It was because they believed in slave, owning slaves, and the Northern Baptists did not. So they formed for the wrong reason. And they formed because the Baptists as a whole, they were together. The Baptist board said, we're not going to appoint missionaries who own slaves. And so the Southern states pulled out and they formed. Now, they knew that Baptists don't agree on anything. You put five Baptists in the room, you get six opinions. So the founders of the Southern Baptist denomination in 1845 said, we're not going to have

a confession of faith. We're going to have our unity around a mission, not a confession. This was radically different. Every other denomination was formed on a confession, not a mission. If you read the original manifesto by the man who formed the SBC, who was the first president and who wrote the Constitution, he says, we are against having a confession. Every church should have a confession of faith because we believe in the autonomy of the local church. But we're not going to have a denominational confession because we'll just argue about it and we'll use it as a clout and we're against creeds. We're against creed. Now, what's the difference between a creed and a confession? A confession, and literally the

Southern Baptist Confession preamble says, it is generally accepted consensus of opinion. That's what the Baptist faith and message literally starts with. This is a generally accepted consensus statement of opinion. It is not to be used as a creed. When does a confession become a creed? When you weaponize it and you start kicking people out over it. I was a part of the conservative resurgence between 1979 and 1990. In that entire time when there was really a battle over the Bible, I'm an errantist. I believe the scripture is without error. I believe in the inerrancy of scripture. I do not believe in the inerrancy of your interpretation. I also do not believe in

the inerrancy of my interpretation, which is why I believe we have to say with everything, I could be wrong. I think whenever you share an interpretation, I think you need to be able to say, I could be wrong. That is something you will never hear a fundamentalist say. What makes a fundamentalist? They can't say, I could be wrong, because they believe in the inerrancy of their interpretation, not just the inerrancy of scripture. I believe in the inerrancy of scripture. I just don't believe any of us has full knowledge and we have to come to the Bible humbly, not arrogantly. And we have to let it shape us, even if it means going against our tradition. Jesus says to the Pharisees, you know your problem, guys? You don't know the scripture and you don't know the power of God. What an insult. To be a Pharisee,

you had to memorize the Torah. I mean, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, you got to memorize it. And Jesus says, you know what your problem is? You don't know the scriptures nor the power of God. Why? Because they used it for their traditions. They come to Jesus and say, why do your disciples break our traditions? He said, why do you break the word of God for your traditions? That's what Jesus said to them. Fundamentalism is Phariseeism. It's one and the same. It is making your law scripture and making your interpretation scripture. So the Southern Baptist Convention was formed not around a creed. They were formed around a mission. I've read the

first 1845 convention constitution. Article one is one sentence. It says this. The purpose of the Southern Baptist Convention is to promote home and foreign missions, period. That's it. There's not a single statement of faith in the original Constitution. There's not a single doctrine mentioned in the Constitution. It says we have formed, and this was brilliant because you were able to put different tribes together. There are Calvinist Baptists. There are General Baptists, which means they're non-Calvinist. They're the oldest, by the way. The oldest confession of faith of Baptists, 1609, by Thomas Helwes, is rabidly anti-Calvinist. The oldest Baptist confession is actually

anti-Calvinist. But we have, is actually anti-Calvinist. But we have in the Southern Baptist Convention, Calvinist Baptist, non-Calvinist Baptist, charismatic Baptist. We have dispensationalist Baptist. We have fundamentalist Baptist. We have liturgical Baptist who have a higher worship form. There's about a dozen different tribes. And for nearly 200 years, they got along together because they didn't have a common confession. For 85 years, the Southern Baptist Convention didn't even have a confession. Didn't even have one. All they had was a statement of purpose. And in 1925, during the modernist fundamentalist debates with Harry Fosdick and others, they adopted in 1925 a confession of faith called the

Baptist Faith and Message. They went another 80 years without weaponizing it. It was simply accepted a confession of faith. During the conservative resurgence, when liberals got all kicked out, not one church with women pastors were kicked out. So there were churches with women pastors. That was not... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the myth that Al Mohler and others have said,

well, there are only just a few churches. That's nonsense. I did my own due diligence, found over 2000 churches in the SBC, Anglo churches that have ordained women in various ministerial positions, pastoral positions, not all senior pastors, but, you know, pastor of music, pastor of worship, pastor of this and that, and that kind of thing. And so, and then there are 4,000 African American churches in the SBC. They have prophetesses, they have pastors, they have apostles and apostolates, they use all kinds, they're basically, the SBC is basically saying to the black Baptists, you're not welcome here anymore. And so over 2,000 that I know of, I've got a list of over 2,000 churches with Southern Baptists who have women pastors in some staff role.

And then there's 4,000 black. That's 6,000 churches right there. They're starting an inquisition that's going to decimate. The SBC has been losing a half a million people a year for the last three years. They've lost three and a half million since they changed the rule and weaponized the confession of faith. They did a constitute of the whole history of Southern Babbas. This is only eight years old. When eight years ago, they changed the constitution to say, you have to agree with the statement of faith. And even then it said, you must be closely aligned.

Yeah. That phrase is so vague. I don't, what does that mean? And so it closely aligned means generally agreed. It doesn't mean unanimously agreed with everything. And that's why at the convention, I stood up and said, there are 3,432 words in the Southern Baptist faith and message. Silentback agrees with every single word except one. Is that not close enough? And they said no. So real quick for clarity, Rick, the Baptist faith and message does say

women can't be pastors, but you don't need to be in full agreement with the entire thing. You just need to be closely aligned. Is that true? Exactly. In the entire, well, they were formed in 1845, so in the entire 170 plus years of

Vang. That wasn't even in there until the year 2000. Okay. So that's only a 15-year thing. And Al Mohler says, well, we did it to not split the denomination. He split it by doing that. And all those people left. Okay.

He split it by doing that. And all those people left. Okay. He split it by doing that. And then here's the interesting thing, Preston. In the year 2000, when they added that phrase, after like 160 years, in the year 2000, they added the phrase, the pastor must be male. After the vote and before the vote, both Al Mohler, Adrian Rogers, who was head of the committee, and Paige Patterson, who was president of the convention, said, this does not mean you can't have women associate pastors. It only applies to the senior pastor. They're on record over and over again in press release, stuff like that. But then this last year, Mohler changed it and said, no, it applies to everybody. Oh, stuff like that. But then this last year, Mueller changed it, said, no, it applies to everybody. They changed the rule. And so they themselves said it does not exempt an associate pastor being a woman. It means only the senior pastor. And they changed that rule. In fact,

they changed every rule this last year uh they sent me a set of rules and one week before the convention uh al moeller got all the rules changed and and crazy stuff like like i went when we got kicked out last february uh the president of the convention called me said rick you just got kicked out by the executive council. I said, OK, I got two questions. You can appeal it. Yeah. I said, well, we're obviously who gets to speak first at the convention of the churches that appeal it. He said, well, we'll go by who the president of the convention told me it will be by whoever appealed first. Well, Saddleback was the first one to appeal first, so I thought we'll be the first to speak and maybe that'll help other churches. And then I said, now in every court of law around the world, defense gets the benefit of the last word. The prosecution makes a case and then the

defense is given the benefit of having the last word. You get to make the last word. I said, that's true in every court of law. Is that true? Yeah, that the executive committee will present their prosecution against our church, and then I get to respond to it. Yes, that's true. Well, one week before the convention, they changed both of those rules. First, they said, it's not going to be whoever appealed first.

It's going to be by alphabetical order, which means Warren obviously is going to go last. OK, or Saddleback. Saddleback's going to go last. OK. And second, they said, you will make your statement first and then the executive committee will respond. Wait a minute. They're the prosecutors. OK. And so then committee will respond. I go, wait a minute, they're the prosecutors. Okay. And so then they will respond. I go, wait, you just flipped what everybody in the world does the exact opposite. And they go, well, that's the way it's going to be. And you get three minutes.

I'm going to go three minutes to explain anything. How can you explain what took me a couple of years to change my mind on. And so I asked the director of communications, I said, I've written a Bible study, simple Bible study, laying out why each of these scriptures, what we believe, why we believe. Since I'm only going to get three minutes, everybody at the convention is given a tote bag and you can buy advertisements putting that tote bag, and you can buy advertisements put in that tote bag. I'd like to buy space in the tote bag and put the Bible study in, and they refused to let me do it.

And so then I said, well, you have an app now that everybody at the convention gets. Would you mind putting that Bible study in the app? I would think that you would want every delegate, every messenger to actually see the pros and cons. They wouldn't let me do it. It was a total shutout. And so that's what I was saying. I don't have any problem with people who disagree with me. In fact, I told them, I said, I'm not asking you to disagree with me, agree with me.

I'm asking you to be a Baptist which believes in the autonomy of the local church. And this is not an issue. It's not a salvation issue. It's a secondary issue. The problem with fundamentalists is there are no secondary issues for fundamentalists. Every hill is worth fighting for. Every culture, everything's worth dying on. We should have a come forward invitation or we should whatever. like we should have a come forward invitation or we should whatever. And so it was a kangaroo court. The nice thing about it was like when I got there, there's 12,000 people. And it's like, they got the pitchforks and the, and the torches.

Here's what, here's part of the problem. The Southern Baptist convention should have taken Southern out of the name years ago, because there are churches all over America now. They're not just Southern white churches. Let me put this in perspective. Al Mohler, Southern Seminary President, who has been attacking me on this for years, his association is Louisville Association. There are 154 churches in Louisville Association. They've been there, Baptist churches, up to 200 years, even before the SBC. But today, Orange County Association in Southern California, the one I'm a part of, is larger than that. We have 164 churches in California. That means there are more Southern Baptist churches in Orange County than there are in the heart of where the SBC started.

And the difference is this, in Orange County, we speak 67 languages in our churches. Our director of missions is Thai. We have Laotian, we have Vietnamese, we have Chinese, Korean, we have every kind of Hispanic from Latin America, we have African American, we have Russian, Romanian, and that's the face of Southern Babassin Orange County, not a white Southerner. That scares some people. That diversity scares people. The head of the California State Convention is Hispanic. The head of the Orange County Association is from thailand is thai thai background and so that scares some people it's not southern white guys anymore uh who were opposed to slavery

originally uh and so there is a culture shift and when people get scared uh they they they they culture shift. And when people get scared, they have a hard time. And so really, a lot of this isn't even about what this verse means, because I could explain every one of the verses. And if you have motivated reasoning, it doesn't matter. I don't care what you say, okay? In fact, all it will do is just make you mad. Yeah, yeah. It's not really. I mean, what happened to you guys, it sounds just for me looking on from a distance and now hearing you talk. Yeah, it wasn't primarily about the theological shift. It was about the clarity or lack of clarity or the integrity or lack of integrity of what it takes to belong to the Southern Baptist Convention. Here's a fear that a lot of people have, and the fear is if you have women pastors today, you'll have gay pastors tomorrow. Okay, now,

that is verifiably able to prove, I can prove that's false. This last week, I met with, That's false. This last week, I met with, there are 280 plus Baptist denominations in the world, all around the world, 280 plus denominations. Southern Baptist is just one of 280 plus different denominations. This last week, as a director of finishing the task, I met with the leaders of 34 Baptist denominations in Africa, representing 40 different countries, representing 55,000 churches. Every one of those churches is adamantly opposed to gay ordination and gay marriage. Every one of those validates women in ministry. So it's nonsense to say the denomination is going to become liberal and they'll accept. Let me take you around the world and show you denominations in Asia who value women and reject gay ordination. Let me take you to Latin America and show you hundreds of denominations that value women and reject. The week after the convention happened, Preston, it was a nice little

healing thing for me. I literally didn't have time to even take a breath. I left the convention after we got kicked out and flew to Amsterdam where I had 6,000 Pentecostal pastors coming from 142 nations for four days of training. It was a love fest. Now, here's the interesting thing. Southern Babbists are proud that they're the largest denomination in America. But let me put this in perspective. In 1900, there were 5 million Southern Baptists. Today, there are 13 and a half million. Okay, there used to be 16 and a half, but they've lost three and a half million. They've gone from 5 million to 13 and a half million since 1900. In 1900, there were no Pentecostals, zero, none, zip, because the Azusa Street Revival started in 1907, which was the birth of Pentecostalism and Charismatic. Today, around the world, there are over 500 million Pentecostals and Charismatics.

That's growth. What should we be learning from them? What we should be learning from them is this. Every member is a minister. They don't have a problem with it. You don't have to agree with all their theology, but obviously God's hand is on them. Let me put this in perspective, give you a little good news.

Since the year 2000, the world population has been growing 1% a year. Every year for 23 years, we've grown 1% a year. The Christian church, that's all the different tribes, Orthodox, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Protestant, Indigenous, Catholic, all of the Trinitarians, what I'm talking about, not Mormons, Trinitarian, Jesus is the son of God, he rose from the dead, the creedal of the apostles' creed. While the world population has been growing 1% a year every year for 23 years, Christianity as a whole has grown 2% a year every year for the past 23 years. 2%. That means the church is growing 100% faster than the population. 100% faster

than the world population. Now, there are two tribes in Christianity that are growing 4% a year and have grown 4% every year for the last 23 years. They are, number one, Pentecostals, and number two, Evangelicals. Those two groups are growing at 4%, four times faster than the world population. When I hear people say, talk about, we're living in a post-Christian world, it's nonsense. We might have post-Christian Europe. We might have post-Christian parts of America. What we're seeing is not a shrinking of Christianity, but a shifting of Christianity from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern hemisphere. A hundred years ago,

90% of all Christians lived in Europe or North America. A hundred percent, 90%, a hundred years ago lived in Europe and North America. Today it's the exact opposite. 90% live in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. There are now more Christians in Africa on that continent than there are people in the United States. There are 400 million Christians in Africa. That's why they're sending out missionaries. The largest church in the UK is led by an African. The largest church in Europe is led by an African. The largest church in Russia is led by an African. The largest church in Europe is led by an African. The largest church in Russia is led by an African. There are 400 million Africans. America, Christians, represent 11% of the church whole worldwide. Africa represents 27%, just that one comment. So I need to tell pastors, get a bigger vision.

Okay? Stop just looking at, stop reading all the bad news on social media and on table network news. And lift up your eyes. You need to have global and local vision at the same time. God is at work. The church is literally exploding around the world. And that's really what finishing the task is all about, helping those people get the word out.

Rick, before I let you go, can you, since you came full circle back to finishing the task, can you point people to where they can find out more about that? And how can, especially church leaders, be involved in that? Okay, we have a website, but I'll tell you what, if you'll just email me, rick at finishingthetask.com, I'll send you a whole bunch of stuff. Okay, rick at finishingthetask.com.

And I'll close with this. If this really is, Preston, the year 2023, and the world accepts that. It means AD. It means 2023 years since the birth of Christ. Jesus was born in year zero, according to the calendar everybody accepts today. Jesus was born in that year zero. The book of Luke tells us that Christ began his public ministry when he was 30 years old. The Bible tells us that Jesus had a three to three and a half year ministry. So we know that Christ died in A.D. 33.

Christ was resurrected in A.D. 33. Christ gave the Great Commission in A.D. 33. Christ ascended back to heaven and promised he would return in A.D. 33. Christ sent the Holy Spirit to start the church in A.D. 33. That means in just 10 years, 2033, it's the 2000th birthday of Christianity. It's the 2000th anniversary of the church. It's the 2000th celebration of the resurrection. It's the 2000th anniversary of the church. It's the 2000th celebration of the resurrection. It's the 2000th

anniversary of the Great Commission. FTT is already a coalition of over 2000 denominations, agencies, and churches committed to completing the Great Commission by our anniversary. There's no eschatological significance to that date. It's just a date. But we've picked that as a goal to say, Bibles, believers, bodies of Christ, breakthrough prayer. Bibles. We want everybody to have access to the scripture in their language by AD 33. Believers. We want every person in the world to hear a personal testimony from a believer between now and the next 10 years. Bodies of Christ. We want every person in the world to have access to a church. That's going to probably be house churches.

They're not going to be what we call rabid churches by the year 2033. And breakthrough prayer, we want to have everybody on the planet Earth prayed for by name at least one time for their salvation in the next 10 years. I just recently did a Zoom call. It wasn't a Zoom. It was a conference call. And I had over 100,000 prayer network leaders from Indonesia and Bhutan and Kazakhstan and over 100,000 gathered to accept this goal of praying for every person by name between now and the next 10 years. You want information on that?

Your church wants in on it. It's going to be the biggest thing ever in history. It's already the biggest coalition. Never before have we had this many parts of the body of Christ joined together. So write me, rick at finishingthetask.com, and I'll send you the information. I can't believe you give out your email, but yeah, I'm sure you'll get a few emails. But Rick, thank you so much. I really, really, really enjoyed the conversation and getting to know you a bit more. And thank you for

finishing the task. Me personally, I love your heart for the global church. It'd be easy for somebody, you know, successful megachurch pastor, book sales, all that stuff to kind of forget about the globe. But I love that that is clearly front and center in your heart. And I just, it is for me too. And I just, I love that about you, Rick. So thank you for doing the work you do. And thanks for coming on Theology in a Row. Well, I love you. And I'll just close by saying I love complementarians.

Okay. I just tell you guys, we're on the same team, brothers and sisters, okay? We don't have to see eye to eye to walk hand in hand. And even on the Great Commission, okay, the four commands, go make disciples, baptize people. We're not all going to agree on baptism, okay? We're not all going to agree on what's a disciple, okay? Because your list may be different. We don't even agree on teach them to do everything I've commanded because your catechism may be different from my catechism, okay? But the one thing we can all agree on is that every believer is called to go. Everybody can do it.

believers called to go. We have unity not in our confection. We have unity in our mission. And the only way to have unity is to love diversity. God thought up diversity. The only way to have unity is to learn to love diversity and not to resent it or resist it, but celebrate it as a strength. That's such a good word to end on. Thanks again, Rick. Really appreciate you. God bless you. See you, Preston. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.