An evangelical star takes on Southern Baptists over ordaining women

On his path to becoming perhaps the best-known evangelical leader in modern American history, Rick Warren had a strategy: building a church for people turned off by church.

Before he became pastor of the 57,000-member Saddleback Church, before his “The Purpose Driven Life” became one of the best-selling nonfiction books in publishing history, Warren studied population and demographic data so he’d plant churches where big groups of secular people were growing. He read management theory about how businesses lure non-customers. To make people feel at ease, he preached in aloha shirts and sandals.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Warren mostly steered clear of culture war issues and partisan politics. In 2008, he hosted Barack Obama and John McCain as presidential candidates for a “Civil Forum on Leadership and Compassion.”

“The church was becoming very politicized, very known for what it was against, and what he did was revolutionary,” said Tom Holladay, Warren’s brother-in-law and a longtime teaching pastor at the Orange County, Calif., megachurch.

Now in 2023, when experts say religion and especially evangelical Protestantism have become synonymous with partisan politics, Warren, 69, has chosen to confront head-on one of the most divisive issues in conservative Christianity: the role of women.

How a book about evangelicals, Trump and militant masculinity became a surprise bestseller

The Southern Baptist Convention this year tossed out Saddleback — one of its largest churches — after Warren ordained several women as pastors. SBC officials ruled that Saddleback had gone against the SBC’s most recent statement of faith.

This month, Warren launched a website well-stocked with videos making scriptural arguments for women pastors and lambasting the SBC — his family’s denominational home for four generations. And Tuesday, he is scheduled to appear before thousands of Southern Baptists at their annual meeting and argue for an appeal, saying their size and influence in America has greatly diminished in recent years by focusing on, among other things, divisive secular and religious politics, purity tests and not on “the Great Commission” — Jesus’s instruction to spread the faith.

“We’ll never fulfill the Great Commission with half the church on the bench,” Warren said on a podcast in March with Russell Moore, a longtime SBC leader who left in 2021. “I believe millions of Southern Baptist women’s talents and spiritual gifts are being wasted.”

In one of his videos, posted June 5, he says Southern Baptists “have stopped making the main thing the main thing. … You won’t change the culture through laws. You’re not going to change the culture through politics. We bet on the wrong thing.”

With his booming voice and celebrity status, Warren’s ejection and subsequent reinstatement campaign have become the most talked-about issue ahead of the annual meeting, which begins Saturday in New Orleans. Some experts on American evangelicalism say his level of influence hovers near that of church giants Billy Graham and Francis Schaefer. Having retired as Saddleback’s leader a year ago, Warren has the air of an elder statesman, if a feisty one.

But the stakes of the discussions about women are complex and the impact of the SBC’s decision on his appeal is hard to predict.

Debates include questions of whether “pastor” is a Jesus-created office or just a job description? Are “elders” really the bosses rather than the pastors, and should elders only be men? And how strictly do Southern Baptists need to hew to the SBC’s statement of faith (called the Baptist Faith and Message)? Put another way, is the 13.2-million-member SBC a big-tent family focusing on evangelism, or is it more of a top-down, exclusive group where even longtime members can get canceled?

And has the issue of women pastors taken on outsize, symbolic significance and is standing in for the goal of beating back secular, liberal culture?

“If this is like the last vestige to stand against the culture, it’s tremendously hard to give up,” Baylor University evangelical historian Barry Hankins said. “For some people being Christian means bringing people into a relationship with Christ. To others it means bringing people into a world view. That’s a big difference.”

How women led to the dramatic rise and fall of Southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson

The standoff matters far beyond the SBC, Hankins says, because “right now evangelicalism itself is totally up for grabs.” Are American evangelicals defined by a specific theology? Secular politics? Both?

Southern Baptists might have “academic” debates about whether the Baptist Faith and Message is mandatory, “but the more important thing is that we need to realize that this issue is right where culture is pushing against us. And more than ever we need to push back,” Denny Burk, a biblical studies professor critical of Warren, blogged in March.

Debating the role of women

Southern Baptists have been debating the role of women leaders since the late-1800s. But until the 1960s, there were as many women in Southern Baptist seminaries as there were in liberal seminaries, said Mark Chaves, a Duke University sociologist who wrote a book about women’s ordination.

Then came a wave called the Conservative Resurgence or the Fundamentalist Resurgence. It began in the 1980s and has continued since in the SBC, the country’s largest Protestant group.

In 1984, the SBC passed a resolution saying scripture teaches that “women are not in public worship to assume a role of authority over men.” In 1998, they amended the Faith and Message statement to say a woman should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership, as “the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

In 2000, it amended the Faith and Message to say “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

That belief is mainstream in the SBC, the stronghold of White American conservative Christianity. There are about 47,000 SBC churches. This spring, an Arlington, Va., pastor named Mike Law, who opposes women pastors, identified fewer than 200 SBC churches that, he said, had women serving as some kind of pastor. Some longtime SBC watchers say there are probably hundreds of SBC women serving in roles such as youth pastor or women’s pastor, among others.

Experts say there are diverse views among Southern Baptists as to whether the 2000 amendment should only apply to a church’s singular lead pastor.

What is Christian nationalism anyway?

The SBC may also vote on an amendment offered by Law that bars any church in the denomination from appointing a woman “as a pastor of any kind.” The measure has to get out of a subcommittee Monday. If it passes and gets a full floor vote, that will be Tuesday or Wednesday.

Among White American evangelicals, just 3 percent said their congregation is led by a woman, according to the National Congregations Study, which looks at all faiths and is done by Chaves at Duke.

Four other churches along with Saddleback were told earlier this year that they were not in cooperation with the SBC. In addition to Saddleback, one other is appealing: Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, which has been led by the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham since 1993.

Women at Saddleback

Saddleback for many years had women in teaching and leadership roles, said Holladay, but didn’t give them the title of “pastor.”

“It’s been a thread from the start that was strengthened. We eventually said: ‘This is silly. Women are pastors, but we’re not calling them that.’”

After discussing it for years, Holladay said, in 2021 Saddleback ordained three women as pastors. This May, one of the three became pastor of one of Saddleback’s many campuses, arguably a position akin to being a lead pastor.

After Warren retired last year, he was succeeded by Andy Wood, whose wife, Stacie, is a teaching pastor.

Suicide of star pastor Rick Warren’s son sparks debate about mental illness

The Woods declined a request for an interview, but Andy Wood and Rick Warren don’t see the issue of women leaders the same way.

In a video he made after the SBC’s Executive Committee expelled Saddleback in February, Wood said the church’s “interpretation” of scripture is that husbands are the head of households and elders who oversee churches are male. Saddleback’s elders are all men, he said, but they can “empower a woman to use their spiritual gifts.”

In his March podcast interview with Russell Moore, Warren said he changed his views after three years of scriptural study and believes women can serve in any role in the church. However, he said the Bible offers contradictory language on the topic and he respects other interpretations.

“We all wished we’d gotten to it earlier,” Holladay said of the title changes at Saddleback.

A test of Warren’s influence

But there are reasons beyond disagreement over women pastors that some Southern Baptists are wary of Warren’s advocacy.

While his early life makes him akin to Southern Baptist royalty, for much of his time at Saddleback he wasn’t really involved in denominational life, some observers noted. And out of the three-hour class that new members at Saddleback take, said Holladay, about three minutes are spent explaining the SBC connection. The denomination “was not central to our lives.”

Warren has said in his videos that the SBC needs Saddleback, not the other way around.

When Warren got up to speak at the annual meeting in 2022, he spent much of his six-minute talk citing the gargantuan numbers he says Saddleback has produced: 56,000 baptisms, 27,000 overseas missionaries, 9,173 home Bible study groups, 1.1 million pastors trained.

“Sorry friends, that’s more than all the seminaries put together,” he said.

To some, his speech and videos come off as a combination of arrogance and a calculating, CEO-like approach to evangelism that celebrates numbers over a focus on the marginalized.

“Both Rick Warren critics and fans would both say: He is really driven by impact and that impact is measured in numbers. He perceives half the mission force is being unengaged. That means we need more. More people, more missionaries,” said Ed Stetzer, a scholar, teaching pastor and longtime friend of Warren’s. “I am surprised he shifted on this issue so decidedly, but this does fit a pattern.”

Shaun Casey, who served as Obama’s evangelical adviser around the time Warren hosted Obama and McCain, said he sees Warren as a savvy evangelist. Casey said he saw firsthand how Warren would become vocal or remain silent on key ethical issues to align with political leaders. The Obama-McCain event, Casey said, made Warren appear as a kingmaker.

“He is very astute politically,” he said. What Warren is doing now, Casey said, is “not radical. I think he’s trying to keep the denomination from going full MAGA.”

Richard Flory, of the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, said Warren is doing what he’s always done: “reading the culture and responding to it,” in this case regarding gender. But at the core, Flory said, Warren is offering evangelicalism in the politically conservative form that it has taken for more than a century, focused almost entirely on individual salvation rather than societal structures.

Casey said it’s unfortunate Warren didn’t take the gender issue up when he was still a popular cultural figure. “He could have had incredibly powerful influence on these issues at his peak,” he said.

Beth Allison Barr, a historian who wrote a popular 2021 book about modern North American views of the Bible and women, said Warren’s impact shouldn’t be underestimated.

“He is speaking to the ordinary people of the Baptist world,” Barr said. “It would be hard to find a Southern Baptist church that hasn’t gone through his book, with someone preaching from it, or using it in small groups, or mentioning it.”

Warren, she said, is trying to lead evangelicals, in general, away from their decades-long marriage to political power. In his videos, Warren hammers the steep decline in SBC membership since the early-2000s, calling it a crisis of “lost credibility and misplaced priorities.”

Barr calls this “a historic moment.”

Whatever happens with the votes next week, Stetzer says, the “floodgates are opening for women in conservative evangelicalism” in different ways, with women taking on new spiritual leadership roles in prominent congregations, even if not as lead pastor.

The Rev. Linda Smith preaches June 4 at Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss.

Calvary Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., was also rejected by the SBC this year, but it won’t be appealing next week. The Rev. Linda Smith, who grew up at Calvary and did SBC college, seminary and overseas mission work, said while she considers herself “Southern Baptist,” the meaning may be changing.

“What it means to me is faithfulness to stay in a hard place, the history, that we’d be able to do more together than we did alone,” she said. “I don’t know if we’re still there.”