The danger of worldly ideology infiltrating the church is a challenge for every generation. I think SBC churches are more united on gender ideology and pastoral gender than they are the applications of the Law Amendment. Jonathan Leeman and Juan Sanchez support the amendment on cultural grounds in their article “Stand Where the World Most Stands Against Us.” Their argument is simple and compelling. They say,
“Gender is where the world today arguably opposes Christianity the most. This amendment therefore gives us the wonderful opportunity to point the world to the good gift they’re missing. Plus, we don’t want to claim to stand up for Christ, but then sit down in that place the world most stands against us.”
Again, I think there is broader support for the amendment as a cultural stand. But Rob Collingsworth has written “Five Reasons to Oppose the Law Amendment” where he opposes the Law Amendment on semantic and consequential grounds. It’s in response to Rob I want to offer five practical reasons to support the Law Amendment.
What will the amendment actually mean for the churches currently in cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention? I feel the amendment actually strengthens our cooperation in practical ways.
1. It Clarifies Words
Rob suggests, “…it would be foolish to not acknowledge our cultural and linguistic history over the last 50-100 years, a period in which thousands of churches in our convention have separated title from office by granting a much larger semantic range to the word pastor than its two counterparts.”
It is foolish to disregard our linguistic history. But, this is precisely why the Law Amendment serves us well. We ought not be comfortable granting ourselves semantic shifts away from biblical terms because we mean well, hold related terms more ardently (especially amidst the current culture of the world), or especially because of pressure from the outside world.
Some have argued that the term “pastor” was never meant to refer to an overseeing office in the first place. They suggest it is a gift according to Ephesians 4. This would mean we’ve been wrong to use “pastor” as a title for the office of elder/overseer all along. There may be some credibility to this argument, but that is not the question which is being put before the convention. That argument actually ignores what the semantic shift means within the SBC.
Regardless, cultural semantic shift is not our authority. We should seek to connect every faith and practice with Scripture itself. If we desire to become more biblically faithful churches, the argument must be that a semantic is biblically warranted, not that we must acknowledge our own linguistic developments.
There is a danger of moving from accidental semantic developments over generations to knowingly leaving open a door for semantic confusion and worldly infiltration. Where a word becomes meaningless, there is a wide open door. This is why Heath Lambert commented on the amendment saying, “I do not believe Southern Baptists won a battle in the 1980s about biblical authority just to get to the 2020s and fight about whether we would obey that authority.” Baked into the amendment is the question of whether or not the Bible has any semantic authority.
Rob suggests, “By assuming every church that (incorrectly, in my opinion) assigns the title pastor to someone who does not occupy the office of church-wide authority is either in violation of or not closely identified with our confession of faith, we fail to acknowledge the spirit of Scripture’s decree which, I would argue, elevates substance over semantics.”
I agree in one sense. Pharisees can get semantics right. We don’t win souls or save the SBC just by defining some words. However, God clarifies substance by semantics in the Bible. To pit substance over semantics is a bit of a false dichotomy.
The Law Amendment sends an internal message within the convention: “Let’s let the Bible tell us what our words and offices mean.”
It’s true, as Rob mentions, that the amendment does not define pastor any further than our confession does. But we don’t need to do so, because the amendment intends to say something about cooperation, not the definition of the office. Our confession, as updated in 2023, couples “pastor” with “elder/overseer,” which connects the title to the office. The scope of the amendment, by its own terms, is the male and female distinction in the office. Rob is right when he says that “Scripture and our confession both seem to indicate that there is only one kind of pastor or elder.” The amendment says as much and so encodes cooperation around the BFM on a critical matter in a pivotal cultural and historical moment.
2. It Tightens Confessional Cooperation
It’s become a joke that the SBC fights every spring and then we hug it out when we get together. But there are consequential issues of cooperation in the amendment. How will the amendment affect our cooperation?
Rob asks that we “acknowledge the difference between a church that decides to install a woman as an elder and a church with clear complementarian convictions and all-male elders that uses the term pastor interchangeably with minister or director. Our convention has already spoken with astounding clarity regarding the former example. I hope we can make room for the latter, while continuing to contend with them to use titles in a way that removes the potential for confusion. This fight is better won through persuasion.”
I suggest the amendment is a means of persuasion. Calling churches to unite in clarity around our confession. A motion was made, and now a deliberative body of messengers must decide as each is persuaded. The vote in Indianapolis will be the culmination of years of persuasion in the public sphere as well. As Al Mohler mentioned in a recent video, “We’ve been talking about this for forty years.”
Furthermore, the contention that the amendment will stymie broad cooperation is a relative and subjective argument that is difficult to measure. Will we exclude people, and churches, who hold our confession and want to cooperate? How so, if the amendment simply states our confession without defining it any further? The idea that we should be jealous for “broad collection and narrow allocation” doesn’t apply as precisely as he might suggest in this situation. Do we not use our confession in missions, church planting, and theological education? It is a line drawing, fence erecting amendment. But the “broad collection and narrow allocation” algorithm, at some point, produces a confusing cooperation when major tenets of our faith are not expected for cooperation. Sure, women as pastors is not a matter of orthodoxy in theological triage. But as Leeman and Sanchez mention, gender is a front line on biblical fidelity. The broader cooperation extends, the thinner our doctrinal fidelity. Like a rubber band holding us together, it can only stretch so far.
Lastly, the amendment is a test of the doctrine we espouse in missions, what kind of churches we are planting, and what is being handed down in theological education. What is our cooperation if not an application of our confession? Are we cooperating on the basis of the BFM or not? If not that, then what? The constitution itself? The amendment is a chance for the majority to say that this is a bridge too far and that we want our constitution to tighten our cooperation by clarifying how we apply our confession. While denominations have split on this issue, I think the SBC has an opportunity to unify around our confession as we did in 2023.
3. It Keeps In Step With Our Convention and Historical Confessions
Amending the article cooperation is not the same as becoming an “enforcement mechanism for our churches.” The SBC does not own church buildings or employ pastors of any kind (pun intended). This amendment does not infringe upon the autonomy of the local church. All cooperation with the SBC is voluntary partnership , and the churches decide who they are and what they believe in a deliberative meeting two days a year. The annual meeting is an opportunity for the convention to define its own cooperation. I appreciate and recognize how the amendment feels like a historical shift in the nature of cooperation. I admit there may be fallout I cannot foresee, and while it may feel like we will begin to “enforce or impose a confessional standard among cooperating churches,” as Rob summarized, we simply aren’t doing that. A motion was made. Deliberation and persuasion have ensued. It’s time to vote.
In politics we tend to complain that nothing is happening because Democrats and Republicans can’t get along. But remember, the legislative process is actually working (at least in a sense). It’s a check on power. In a loosely similar fashion, the SBC messengers are now given the opportunity to define how big the SBC umbrella should be, in the words of the BFM, through “democratic processes.”
4. It Addresses an Observable Trajectory
When Mike Law originally offered this amendment his proposed language read, “Does not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.” That language was amended by Juan Sanchez to read, “Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
Rob suggests the phrase “as qualified by Scripture” could unintentionally encompass a wide range of subjective pastoral qualifications. But Juan Sanchez’s amendment ties the definition of “pastor” to that of “elder” in the BFM. In the amendment, the titles correspond synonymously as intended in the BFM. Structured this way, the sentence sufficiently demands its application be limited to the office of pastor/elder/overseer. The sentence reads, “affirms, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.” The sentence can easily be read narrowly so that “as qualified by Scripture” narrowly communicates the biblical basis that “only men” serve as “any kind of pastor.”
Could churches, or the credentials committee, use this amendment to bring forward charges regarding the more subjective qualifications? I suppose they could try. But this would be an expansion beyond a simple reading of the sentence, and it would likely bump into the convention’s understanding of the amendment. I could be wrong, but I don’t sense an appetite for that kind of use. But remember, the culture isn’t demanding that we reinterpret the meaning of hospitality as a pastoral qualification.
5. It Establishes a Foundation for Enduring Cooperation
Rob is concerned that the amendment will set a dangerous precedent. He has an important and valid concern. Any time a deliberative body sets a policy it risks later abuse of the original intent. Would we be bound by consistency, as Rob suggests, to begin removing male “youth pastors” who bear the title but don’t actually hold the office?
I believe Rob when he says, “I do not fear taking the unapologetic stance that the office of pastor/elder is reserved for biblically qualified men. I fear the implications of how this amendment portends our cooperative efforts for the future.” But we should not disregard a very necessary unapologetic stance, which our cultural moment demands, out of fear of possible precedent. Here is a juncture, as crazy as it sounds (having been to nearly fifteen SBC annual meetings in a row), where we are just going to have to trust each other. If the Law Amendment passes, we’re going to have to come back every year and hold one another accountable to what we meant in Indianapolis in 2024.
Let’s not be afraid of possible precedent that the language of the amendment doesn’t demand. The possible precedent argument is really a question of wisdom. On this I do not want to “Jesus juke” Rob personally. But to anyone who is concerned about potential precedent, I would say, “we don’t have to be that wise.” We should not be unthinking. We should be critical of ourselves and test our own views. But true wisdom is fearing the Lord (Prov 1:7) and dealing with those outcomes as they come.
Just as we are voting to respond to current challenges, we can deal with overreaches and unintended consequences—one yellow ballot at a time.
In Conclusion
I’m very grateful for Rob’s thoughtful engagement and for welcoming rebuttal. His humility on this makes me look forward to being in Indianapolis.
As with any decision, there will be an untold number of “what ifs” and “what abouts." Some of them concern me more than others, while some likely concern me less than they should. But, like Rob said, “words matter." Ultimately, that is what the amendment says: our cooperation is a cooperation around words, ultimately The Word. So we have to be careful about our words.
C.S. Lewis noted, “The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable: one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word.”
I’d rather encode our historic application of the term “pastor” than see it become useless.
Editor's Note: As a part of its commitment to fostering conversation within the Southern Baptist Convention, the Baptist Review may publish editorials that espouse viewpoints that are not necessarily shared by the TBR team or other contributors. We welcome submissions for responses and rebuttals to any editorials as we seek to host meaningful conversations about the present and future of our convention.
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Nathan Loudin
Nathan Loudin is the senior pastor of Milwood Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. He and his wife, Colette, served in Hong Kong, China for four years before moving to Austin in 2011.