In meetings on Monday, SBC leaders continued to affirm that pastors should only be men, but questioned whether that ban needs to be encoded in its constitution, which already has a list of what disqualifies a church. He has received both support and pushback on social media. “They are responsible to God, not to me.” Then Warren issued a public apology to all “good women in my life, church, and ministry that I failed to speak up for in my years of ignorance.” “I don’t expect to win in New Orleans and I certainly don’t expect to change the mind of any angry fundamentalist,” he said. Not doing so earlier is his “biggest regret in 53 years of ministry,” he said in a lengthy Twitter statement. Warren said he had a change of views - only recently supporting women as pastors - after taking another look at the Bible and its New Testament passages in the original Greek language. Wood has said Saddleback does maintain male authority with an all-men board of elders but that they can equip women for ministry - most recently in May when Katie Edwards, one of the three women ordained in 2021, was named campus pastor of the flagship Lake Forest campus. The denomination’s statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, says that while “men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Those actions prompted some to call for Saddleback’s ouster. In 2022, Warren retired and was succeeded by pastor Andy Wood, whose wife, Stacie Wood, was named teaching pastor at Saddleback. In 2021, Saddleback ordained its first three women pastors. Launched in 1980 by Rick and Kay Warren, Saddleback has grown over four decades to 14 locations in Southern California, with an average weekly attendance of 30,000. Warren’s expected appearance on Tuesday will amount to a titanic faceoff - the nation’s largest Protestant denomination receiving a challenge from someone long touted as one of its biggest success stories. Three other churches ousted over the same issue are not appealing.Īll Baptist churches are independent, so the convention can’t tell them what to do, but it can decide which churches are “not in friendly cooperation,” the official verbiage for an expulsion. On Tuesday, the messengers will hear from Saddleback and another church, Fern Creek Baptist of Louisville, Kentucky, which are appealing their expulsion in February by the SBC’s Executive Committee for having women pastors. The meeting will also feature a rare contested election between an incumbent SBC president, Texas pastor Bart Barber, and Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who is part of a group of Southern Baptists seeking to take the already staunchly conservative denomination further to the right. The messengers will vote on how and whether to continue reforms in the wake of a sexual-abuse scandal that was the subject of a withering outside report in 2022 and has drawn a U.S. The issue is just one of the controversies facing the more than 9,000 SBC messengers, or church representatives, who had registered as of Monday in advance of their two-day annual meeting at the Ernest N. “Christian women, will you please forgive me?” “I wish I could do it all over,” said Warren, who is expected to speak on behalf of Saddleback on Tuesday at the opening of the SBC’s annual meeting here in New Orleans. With animated social media posts complete with all-capitalized words, Warren has even issued a statement, “My Apology to Christian Women,” repenting of blocking women’s full use of their gifts and leadership skills until a recent change of views after a half-century in ministry. He is trying to get the Southern Baptist Convention to reverse its ouster of the California megachurch he founded, Saddleback Church, for having women pastors. NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Retired pastor Rick Warren, author of the publishing phenomenon, “The Purpose Driven Life,” has been intensifying a media blitz in what he acknowledges may be a lost cause.
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