The Time for Delay is Over. Conservative Baptists in Texas Must Now Affirm Their Commitment to our Confession of Faith On Who Can Be a Pastor.
The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention (SBTC) meets today and tomorrow in Houston, Texas, to consider the work of the convention and to praise God for His faithfulness. I have only ever been a member of an SBTC church during my Christian life in Texas. I am deeply thankful that, in 1998, courageous, conservative Baptists established the SBTC in response to theological liberalism and unbiblical practices that infiltrated the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT).
The SBTC was established to uphold adherence to biblical inerrancy, historic Baptist confessional doctrine, and a biblical understanding of men’s and women’s roles in the home and the church. The SBTC is a model Baptist convention of thousands of faithful Baptist churches who preach the gospel clearly and labor together for disaster relief, evangelism and missions, church planting and revitalization, and leadership development.
While the SBTC meets over the next two days, however, one issue is sure to get attention: The ongoing fight within the broader SBC to defend complementarianism, as affirmed by our statement of faith, and beat back efforts to liberalize the SBC and the SBTC through the introduction of unbiblical feminism and egalitarianism.
At the 2022 SBTC annual meeting, messengers approved a motion made by Cedar Pointe Baptist Church pastor Ben Wright to clarify Article IV, Section 1, of the SBTC Constitution regarding “Affiliation Qualifications.” The SBTC is a confessional denomination, strictly speaking, and its member churches must affirm the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 and five other factors, including that the church must “affirm the office of pastor to be limited to men.”
Wright’s 2022 motion specified that the phrase, “The office of pastor [shall] be limited to men,” would be interpreted to apply “not only to the titles of senior pastor or lead pastor, but to any role designated by the noun, ‘pastor.'” For churches already affiliated with the SBTC, this interpretation was set to take effect on January 1, 2024. The 2022 SBTC annual meeting messengers approved this motion.
However, at the 2023 annual meeting, the SBTC Executive Board recommended postponing the implementation date for currently affiliated churches to January 1, 2025. This recommendation was approved by messengers, but only after the justification given for the delay was that the then-SBC President Bart Barber—himself a SBTC-affiliated pastor—had asked the SBTC to pause the implementation by one year as the SBC worked through its own issues related to women pastors. The SBTC messengers acted deferentially to Barber’s request with no expectation that the implementation would be abandoned.
As the 2024 SBTC messengers gather in Houston this week, there are likely to be more power plays to try and prevent the implementation of the will of 2022 messengers. It is telling that some leaders in the SBTC feel the need to subvert the will of the 2022 messengers—and the 120 churches that established the SBTC in 1998. Faithful Baptists have long believed what the Bible clearly teaches and what Ben Wright’s motion clearly states: That both the office and the title of pastor must be reserved only for biblically qualified men.
If a church gives the title of pastor to a person who does not meet the biblical qualifications, then that church is in violation of Article IV, Section 1(a), (d), and (f) of the SBTC Constitution and should not be affiliated with the SBTC.
It is that simple. Those nonconforming churches are welcome to either change their nomenclature and practice to conform with the Bible and the BF&M 2000, or they are welcome to join another association that better serves its interests.
Yet the same leaders of the SBC who muddied the waters on this issue at the national level are the same leaders in the SBTC who are now attempting to subvert the will of the 2022 messengers and muddy the Texas waters in 2024.
Specifically, messengers to the SBTC must reject Rob Collingworth’s effort to play a subtle, semantic game with the Baptist understanding of the office and title of pastor. His proposed amendment is little more than a thinly disguised backdoor to liberalism, seeking to weaken our doctrine and allow for churches to have women “pastors” who do not exercise “church-wide authority and oversight.”
What Collingsworth is attempting to do here is semantic and theological violence to the word “pastor.” He wants the SBTC to differentiate between a “lead” or “sole” pastor or “church-wide elders” and “staff pastor” positions. To be clear, there is no such thing as a “pastor” who does not exercise church-wide authority and oversight. That is, by the biblical definitions and qualifications we find in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:6-9, exactly what a pastor does. And that pastor, in title and office, must be a man. No man, and certainly no woman, should hold the title of “pastor” in a church who is not a biblically qualified elder exercising oversight over the entire church.
Collingsworth’s amendment should be rejected outright. But if, for some reason, he prevails, Wright’s motion must go into immediate effect and without delay. The implementation of Wright’s amendment on January 1, 2025, would supercede Collingsworth’s efforts.
Therefore, the 2022 motion should not be amended, or rescinded, and certainly is not out of order. It should be implemented on January 1, 2025, without question.
This is not a time for compromise or retreat from our biblical commitments and our confession of faith. Now is a time when Southern Baptists of Texas should stand firmly and speak clearly against any attempt to make the SBTC the BGCT again.
