On Fools, Scoundrels, and Southern Baptist Bookstore Presidents
I was enjoying my Thursday morning until a friend sent me a (since deleted) Instagram clip from a recent episode of Marked, a podcast by “Lifeway women.” Since I am not the show’s target audience, I can’t speak to the quality of its regular content.
But I can say that their conversation featuring Lifeway president Ben Mandrell is a train wreck that forbodes dark days for the SBC.
Even though Lifeway deleted the clip after receiving well-deserved pushback (including a subtweet from SBC President Clint Pressley), the internet is, as they say, “forever.” Here it is from my initial post and response thread on X.
If you listen to the full conversation, you will hear Mandrell argue for functional egalitarianism, essentially claiming that the divine design for men and women is essentially irrelevant to the roles God has assigned to each.
He also “applauds” the defeat of the Law Amendment, distorts a plain reading of the Baptist Faith & Message, and uses the same logic and language that is frequently employed by egalitarians throughout.
In addition, Mandrell defends his claims with stories and emotional appeals instead of clear reasoning from the Scriptures.
In saner times, the issues in this podcast would be apparent to nearly all who hear them. But we do not live in sane times. Ours is an age when anthropological confusion reigns, even in the church. And clearly, even at the highest levels of leadership in the SBC.
But there was light in Goshen once, when those outside the nation of Israel met God’s judgment while the Lord’s own people were spared from a similar fate. It can be that way again for the church, but only if we have clarity about what God says and the courage to hold fast to the truth, no matter how much the world insists that we get with their program.
Modern Mandrells vs. Ancient Apostles
The basic problem is this: Mandrell’s position denigrates God’s design for the sexes, for he does not understand the reasons God has given for the gendered “rules” we find in Scripture.
To give one example, Mandrell insists that complementarianism—which holds that men and women are equal in value yet differently designed for the distinct roles God has assigned to each—not only permits but actually requires that “high capacity women need to be in the room where it happens,” by which he means “they need to be helping making [sic] the decisions.”
In context, Mandrell is not talking about the presence of women in congregational meetings. He is speaking about the presence of women on some kind of “advisory council” (his words) to the pastors, where major planning for the direction of the church is carried out by its leaders.
This is leagues removed from how the apostles speak about men, women, and leadership in the church. Paul said, “Women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says” (1 Cor. 14:33). And again, Paul writes, “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet” (1 Tim. 2:11–12).
If Paul did not permit women to teach or speak in the gathering, one wonders why they would be permitted to help direct the church at the highest levels.
We could add to these verses many others, which say that a pastor/elder/overseer should be “the husband of one wife” (1 Tim. 3:2) and a man who “must manage his household well” (1 Tim. 3:4). These verses show that the Lord has designed his household to be led by father-like figures (cf. 1 Cor. 4:15), that is, men who shepherd the church in a similar way that a husband is the head of his wife (Eph. 5:23). To be sure, Christ is the church’s true Head (Eph. 4:15) and Chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4), but pastors/elders/overseers are representative heads and shepherds who serve on his behalf (1 Pet. 5:2; Heb. 13:7, 17).
Either the apostles were wrong when they said these things—which is blasphemous since the Holy Spirit inspired their words (2 Pet. 1:21; 2 Tim. 3:16)—or they were right, in which case Mandrell’s insistence that women help the pastors lead the church undermines the implications of apostolic teaching on these matters.
Do We Know Better Than God?
I’m confident that Mandrell knows the verses I cited above, which is what makes his words on the podcast so dangerous. He says that God has limited the office of pastor/elder/overseer to men, but women should be permitted (even required!) to function in some kind of made-up, non-scriptural “advisory council”—like shepherds who shepherd the shepherds.
Yet this is akin to saying that God didn’t know what he was doing when he appointed (qualified) men to lead the church in this capacity. It’s like saying, “The apostles did not have women serve on advisory councils, but we know better, so we should do things differently now.”
I trust you can see how wrongheaded this is. The core issue is that Mandrell doesn’t like God’s design, even though he wouldn’t put it that way. Nevertheless, this is the logical consequence of his statement, whether he realizes it or not.
Simply put, God designed the church to be led by (qualified) men. You can hate this fact, try to get creative with it, and depart from “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), or you can embrace the wise designs of God with joy, even if you don’t fully understand them.
But these things are not beyond understanding. Both nature and the Scriptures show us reasons beneath the rules God has prescribed. The Lord did not appoint men to lead families and churches because he is sexist but because he knows why men and women are different in view of what He made them for.
Words Matter—Or So Don Carson Tried to Warn Us
Mandrell urges his listeners to “get away from nomenclature,” by which he means the church needs to stop debating whether women can be “pastors.” Instead, he wants churches to appoint women to pastor-like positions, even without the title, where they are “making the decisions” as they help “dream up what the future of the church is.”
Never mind that the Lord has already determined what the future of the church is (it looks like what we see in pages of Scripture). This move is precisely the kind of thing that D. A. Carson warned against in a lecture I heard him give many years ago.
Carson predicted that liberals in evangelicalism would not openly deny our creeds and confessions; instead, they would affirm these statements of faith while undermining them by changing the meaning and/or the logical implications of the words they claim to affirm.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Carson warned that liberals would do exactly what Mandrell does in this podcast. He does not quote Scripture and then openly deny it. Instead, he subverts the logic of the Bible by seeking a “workaround” solution that places women in positions of authority in the church, regardless of their title.
This strategy is doomed to fail for two reasons. First, God is not mocked (Gal. 6:7). He sees and knows what we are doing regardless of the label we put on someone. Second, when women are appointed to function like pastors/elders/overseers, leading the church in ways that such men are called to, it’s never long before they (rightly) ask, “Why am I not allowed to be a pastor? I am already acting like one.”
Gifts and Their God-intended Use
At one point in the conversation, Mandrell tells a story about when his family visited the church they planted several years ago. He encouraged his children to speak during the service, sharing a story or a memory from their time there. “My daughter got up there, notes in hand, and absolutely crushed it,” he says.
But after the service, he recounts that a “well-meaning church member” told his daughter, “It’s too bad you’re a girl.” The member seems to have meant something like, “You’d have made a good pastor, if only God had possessed the foresight to make you a man.”
“That made me so mad,” Mandrell explains—not because he was insulted by that member’s lack of faith in the providence of God but because “I do not want my daughter to feel like because she’s a woman her voice doesn’t matter, she cannot teach, she cannot be involved.”
Yet I know of no one—not even the strongest patriarchalists—who would say that a woman’s voice doesn’t matter at all, that a woman cannot teach in any context, or that she cannot be involved in the church in any way.
What those who hold to the church’s traditional view of the sexes actually say is that the Lord has established the places where a woman’s voice, teaching gifts, and involvement in the church are permitted (and needed). And the Lord has nowhere prescribed anything like what Mandrell envisions.
As the old King Jimmy put it, women are “helpmeets.” However, we cannot take the words of Genesis 2:18 (“It is not good for the man to be alone”), rip them out of context, and apply them willy-nilly to the life of the church.
It is far better to stick close to passages like Titus 2:3–5 and 1 Timothy 5:9–14, which clearly tell us where the voice, teaching gifts, and involvement of women in the church are vital blessings as we all learn “how one ought to behave in the household of God” (1 Tim. 3:15).
Yet none of these verses (or any others) come anywhere close to the kind of scenario Mandrell describes above. Therefore, to act as if a woman’s voice only matters if it can be heard from the pulpit or in a meeting with pastors/elders/overseers is absurd. It’s genuinely a denigration of the glory of woman in God’s design by trying to put her in roles that God did not equip her to fulfill.
Law Amendment Redux
Mandrell goes on to say that he “applauded” what happened in the SBC last year, referring to the relatively slim margin in which the Law-Sanchez Amendment failed.
Then he says:
“These decisions about how women function in the church are local church decisions, and people are going to fall all over the map on that. The one thing we agree on, Southern Baptists have agreed that the senior pastor is a man. Outside of that, churches have done a lot of different things with how they utilize women. And in every context, every church, by the Holy Spirit’s guidance, should make their own decisions here.”
This is not and has never been, the standard interpretation of the Baptist Faith and Message. And it’s shocking that the president of Lifeway either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care.
For one thing, the BF&M does not even use the term “senior pastor” (nor does the Bible, for the record). What’s more, men like Al Mohler, who was part of the committee that wrote the revision for the BF&M in 2000, have repeatedly stated that the BF&M’s drafters did not intend its restriction of the office of pastor/elder/overseer to qualified men to refer to the “senior pastor” only.
In other words, Mandrell is repeating a falsehood as if it were a basic point of agreement. He is saying that a church can appoint as many women to the office of pastor or elder as they like, so long as they don’t hold the (extra-biblical) designation of “senior pastor.”
To do this while invoking “the Holy Spirit’s guidance” is tantamount to saying that God is the author of confusion (contra 1 Cor. 14:33). For if his Spirit told the apostles to limit the office (and functions inherent to the office) of pastor/elder/overseer to qualified men, why would the Spirit now tell churches to “make their own decisions here”?
Emotional Sabotage in the SBC
On top of all this, it is worth noting the manner in which Mandrell makes his case. He begins by stating, “If I was a woman, I would feel hurt.” Later, he says, “This made me so mad.” In other places, he blames “insecure men who feel like if we give women more power they’re going to take our spots, rather than [thinking], ‘Isn’t amazing that some of the most prolific voices right now across the world are women?’”
This is emotional language, not biblical reasoning. Mandrell appeals to the potential hurt or anger that someone might feel when they dislike the wisdom of God’s design, as detailed in the Scriptures.
Ultimately, however, whether or not someone likes what God says does not change what God has said. The mention of “insecure men” is nothing more than the fallacy of Bulverism, which aims to discredit any contrary viewpoint by suggesting that his opponents are motivated by insecurity rather than clear reasoning about biblical teachings.
This smacks of an attempt to cow churches into alternate arrangements of leadership (read: unbiblical arrangements of church order). It’s stunningly similar to the manipulative tactic that Joe Rigney has called “emotional sabotage.”
Specifically, Mandrell employs a kind of “untethered empathy” that is divorced from the truth of God’s Word. In the process, he is bringing feminist assumptions about the nature of men and women into the church—assumptions that destroy the well-being of everyone.
“Moving Forward” by Going Back
Mandrell celebrates churches that are “getting creative” in their attempts to work around the long-standing interpretations of the church around the world, including the Southern Baptist Convention to which he belongs. Throughout the podcast, both he and the hosts use the language of “moving forward,” being “on a journey,” and being “brave” and “bold” as we encourage women to “the next step,” for we are “growing a lot in our cultural understanding [of men and women].”
The reader will be forgiven for thinking this cluster of words came from boilerplate progressivism instead of figures in the SBC with influence and authority. Alas, Mandrell sounds exactly like the pragmatic megachurch pastors who have all but caved completely to feminist thinking over the last several years. Those who follow his lead on this point are only setting up their churches for the kind of unfaithfulness that pleases the world while dishonoring the Lord.
Yet someone will say, “Perhaps Mandrell does not realize the implications of what he is saying.” That would certainly be better for his soul, but it’s actually more dangerous for the church. Indeed, few things are more harmful to any organization than the well-intended blunderer, the man who doesn’t even realize that he’s giving poison to his friends.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer rightly said:
“Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes men, at least, uncomfortable.
Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contract personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.
So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool therefore must be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel.”1
In the final analysis, Mandrell’s folly is just another addition to an increasingly long line of “thin” or “narrow” or “ideological” complementarians who are really just complementarians in name only.
He either does not understand or does not like what God has said about the differences between men and women, so he is trying to get around the letter of God’s law while denying the spirit of it.
And that course of action never ends well. Especially for leaders of Southern Baptist Christian bookstores.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” in Letters and Papers from Prison (Touchstone Books, 1953; repr. 1971), 8. (Sadly, Bonhoeffer was no stranger to theological folly himself, his beloved classic, A Call to Discipleship, notwithstanding. Nevertheless, he was right on this point.)
↩︎
