Here is Michelle Boorstein at The Washington Post:
Thousands of Southern Baptists voted overwhelmingly to affirm the expulsion of Saddleback Church, the epitome for decades of a modern conservative evangelical megachurch, because Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren ordained women, Southern Baptist Convention officials said Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Warren and Rev. Linda Barnes Popham, of Fern Creek Baptist Church outside Louisville, each made three-minute pleas to the 12,700 SBC “messengers,” or church representatives, at the group’s annual meeting in New Orleans.Barnes Popham had led Fern Creek for 30 years when SBC leaders in February ejected it, Saddleback and three other churches for having female pastors. Only Saddleback and Fern Creek appealed the decision.
SBC messengers also affirmed Fern Creek’s ejection, SBC officials said Wednesday.
The nation’s largest Protestant denomination had been expected to sustain the decisionmade by its executive and credentials committees, and both churches said beforehand they would make no changes to their leadership if they lost. Warren and Popham had appealed for diversity and a big-tent evangelicalism based on a shared goal of bringing more people into a relationship with Christianity.
The SBC hadn’t voted on the topic of female pastors in more than two decades, but its right wing has been working assiduously in recent years to draw brighter lines on gender, and to enforce them.
The issue of a woman serving as a church’s pastor “is one of fundamental biblical authority that does violate both the doctrine and the order of the SBC. It’s inescapable,” prominent theologian Albert Mohler said to applause.
Warren, who is a fourth-generation Southern Baptist and whose best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life” is ubiquitous in U.S. churches, cast the disagreement as subjective. The celebrity pastor from Orange County, Calif., spoke from a crowded corner of the vast New Orleans convention hall, at a microphone used by the rank and file and wearing a casual black short-sleeved shirt.
“We should remove churches for all kinds of sexual sin, racial sin, financial sin and leadership sin — sins that harm the testimony of our convention,” Warren said during his allotted three minutes. But the hundreds of churches with women on pastoral staff “have not sinned. If doctrinal disagreements between Baptists are considered sin, we all get kicked out! You’ll never get 100 percent of Baptists to agree 100 percent on 100 percent of doctrine.”
Saddleback, Fern Creek and three other SBC churches were tossed out of the convention in February by a vote of the executive committee after complaints were filed. Saddleback ordained three women as pastors in 2021, and last year Warren retired, replaced by a male lead pastor whose wife was named a teaching pastor. Barnes Popham has served on staff of Southern Baptist churches for 51 years.
Warren’s argument Tuesday followed the lines of a multimedia campaign that he unleashed in recent weeks, arguing that Southern Baptists are supposed to be autonomous with respect for different practices as they work together to spread the Gospel. He noted there is diversity of belief and practice around topics including exactly how salvation works, and whether SBC churches should give Communion only to members.
Read the rest here.