The Cleveland Plain Dealer coverage as picked up by MSN:
Nation’s largest Protestant denomination expels giant megachurch for allowing a woman role as pastor
The move to expel Saddleback Church with California’s largest congregation is part of a dispute that has festered since 2021 when the church’s founder, best-selling author and pastor Rick Warren, ordained three women as pastors.
With its vote, the Southern Baptist Convention has cut ties between the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — which officially opposes women as pastors — and one of the biggest church-growth successes of modern times.
At issue is the role of Stacie Wood, the wife of the church’s head pastor, Andy Wood. Stacie Wood has led services as pastor at least three times since her husband was commissioned at Saddleback late in 2022
The Executive Committee also expelled four smaller churches for having women in pastor roles.
Two of those churches have female senior pastors (New Faith Mission Ministry in Griffin, Georgia, and St. Timothy’s Christian Baptist in Baltimore, Maryland) and two others have female lead pastors (Calvary Baptist in
The New York Times Coverage
Southern Baptists Expel Saddleback Church Over Female Pastor
The convention, with 13 million members and 47,000 churches, has long served as a bellwether for American evangelicalism.
Saddleback was founded in 1980 by pastor Rick Warren, who built a national profile thanks in part to the church’s then-innovative posture as “seeker-sensitive,” attuned to the questions and preferences of those unfamiliar with or wary of traditional church experiences. Saddleback grew quickly during the 1980s and ’90s, and Mr. Warren also wrote one of the best-selling books of all time, “The Purpose Driven Life.”
Mr. Warren announced in 2021 that he was retiring from the pulpit at Saddleback after more than 40 years. He handed the church’s leadership to Andy and Stacie Wood, introducing them last summer as “the couple that will lead Saddleback into our future.”
The choice was immediately controversial in Southern Baptist circles.
While Mr. Wood heads the church, his wife, Stacie Wood, serves as a “teaching pastor,” a role that includes preaching, and that many see as a violation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s statement of beliefs.
Though Saddleback was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, the church did not use the word Baptist in its name or foreground any connection to the denomination. Mr. Warren rarely attended denominational meetings.
The role of minister or pastor can have many meanings in different Christian settings; children’s ministers, for example, are often women even in theologically conservative churches. The 19 “campus pastors” currently listed on Saddleback’s website are all men.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee includes about 30 staff members and a board of 86 elected representatives, comprising men and women.
In the World Values Study, the largest social survey every, which has surveyed many nations periodically over the last several decades, the question that is most highly correlated with nations that are high on both of its two dimensions: Secular rational values vs. Traditional values (correlated highly with industrialization) and Self-expressive vs Survival values (correlated with service economies) is the statement "Men make better leaders than women."
ReplyDeleteNations that agree with that statement are likely to have traditional values and survival values, and not be well developed industrially or as service economies.
So, we see why women's leadership in Christian churches is a very controversial issue. Accepting the leadership of women is very much correlated with all the socio-economic changes that have taken place in contemporary societies.
Somehow I doubt that Saddleback will be too upset.
ReplyDeleteThe Southern Baptists are facing a lot of problems these days. The sex abuse scandals,
https://tinyurl.com/juahrcuy
Thé departure of its most prominent woman preacher, Beth Moore (who couldn’t preach in actual church services),
https://tinyurl.com/52uz9byp
The departure of another high ranked Baptist, also named Moore but not related to Beth
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/russell-moore-sbc/619122/
racism scandals that have caused some prominent black pastors to leave etc.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/outgoing-southern-baptist-president-denounces-racism-annual-meeting-2021-06-15/
Of course since the whole reason that the SBC was founded in the first place was to support slavery, and then segregation , it’s surprising that there have been so many Black Baptists. Jimmy Carter left the SBC years ago due to the ban on women pastors.
In general, their PTB have something of a mess on their hands
https://tinyurl.com/28mxes5c
In the mid 1980s, I worshiped and was a music leader at Northwestern University's Catholic chapel, the Sheil Center. It was probably the most "liberal" faith community I've ever belonged to. It was staffed by archdiocesan priests, supplemented by any priests who happened to be studying or teaching at Northwestern, and further supplemented by Jesuits from Loyola, which was a few miles down the lakefront. Garry Wills was a member of that faith community. So was Rosemary Radford Ruether.
ReplyDeleteOne time I asked one of the priests, a diocesan guy who was "borrowed" from Loyola's university ministry staff, whether women could be priests. He said it obviously should happen. I asked him how it would come about. He said that, most likely, dioceses somewhere in the world - perhaps not in the developed world - would simply inform Rome that they had started to ordain women as priests, and Rome would accept it as a fait accompli.
Perhaps he was quite naive to think it would transpire that way; in the ensuing decade, Rome really started to crack down on 'unorthodox' ideas and practices.
I suspect, but do know know, that there are advocates in the German church who would like to proceed as this priest suggested: just start doing it, and dare Rome to stop them.
My own view is that this is one of those ideas that change intergenerationally. It's already inconceivable to my kids that women can't be ordained in the Catholic church. I would guess that, a hundred years hence, Catholics will be scratching their heads that the first-half-of-the-21st-century church still had an all-male hierarchy.
LOL, Jim. Yeah college kids are kind of naive sometimes. Does that university chapel still exist? Or did they get the usual smackdown in which the diocese transfers the priests who were serving there and puts in priests from the FSSP or the Legionaires of Christ to shape up those heretic students?
DeleteAbout some of the German bishops who are advocating women's ordination among other things, Pope Francis is quoted as saying that "why would they do that, there is already a German Protestant church." So he is evidently not receptive to the idea.
Unfortunately Pope John Paul II complicated things quite a bit by a pronouncement in the '90s that stopped just a hair's breadth short of being declared infallible, that the church was never, ever, ever going to ordain women. Because they can't.
So I'd give it at least 200 years.
I wonder how many educated women - how many women period- will still be members of the RCC in 200 years? Given current trends in the developed countries of the world, educated women in the RCC may be mostly gone in only 50 years.
Delete"Does that university chapel still exist? Or did they get the usual smackdown in which the diocese transfers the priests who were serving there and puts in priests from the FSSP or the Legionaires of Christ to shape up those heretic students?"
DeleteOh yes, it's still very much alive. Or so I hear; I haven't been back there in quite a few years. It has a special place in my heart for many reasons, not the least of which is, it's where we were married.
The smacking down doesn't really happen here in Chicago. Well, Cardinal George was capable of it, but he never did it to Sheil, as far as I know. I'm not a fan of smack-downs. And the Catholic church should be a big tent, with plenty of room for liberal, educated Catholics. This is their faith community. Why mess with it?
The thing about Sheil was, adults from the surrounding community outnumbered students by at least 5:1; it may have been 10:1. The students were less monolithically liberal than the adults.
The progressive young Catholics were already leaving by the time you were in college Jim. According to what I read, it’s mostly the young trads who go to Newman Centers and mass on secular college campuses these days. The official Catholic parish for Colorado University in Boulder is across the street from our son’s house. On our next visit I’ll check it out one Sunday.
DeleteJim McDermott at the America website has a review of a very interesting sounding movie called Women Talking. I think it’s up for an Oscar.
DeleteBack in the late 70's, I thought women would be ordained in my lifetime. When Saint Pope John Paul the Second started the big kibosh, that possibility became like a view looking backwards through binoculars. This whole male-only thing is for me much ado about nothing and not an essential to the faith. It doesn't dovetail with the "neither male or female" passage and is only barnacles on the arc. Saint Pope John Paul the Second became a big disappointment to me.
ReplyDeleteStanley, same.
DeleteOrdination of women as priests is happening on the margins already here in the states, and they are functioning as heads of their own independent communities, but the local bishop and Rome are disapproving.
ReplyDeletehttps://hildegardhaus.com/
Hildegard Haus, and the Community of Saint Hilgard, originally started in 2016 as a project by the then pastor associate of the parish at Fairport Harbor, about ten miles from me.
She bought a former Byzantine Church, remodeled it as a shrine to Saint Hilgard. It functioned in collaboration with the parish for almost two years when she decided to close it for a sabbatical. She resigned from the parish and got ordained in Europe by the Women's Ordination Group that claims valid ordinations from some bishop or bishops in Germany. She has now reopened the church as an independent Christian community. She also has a loose affiliation with another group including male clerics which claims apostolic descent from the bishops that separated from Rome over Vatican I.
Her pastor remained her friend, went to Germany for the ordination, and retired early from the priesthood when Covid came because of the lung condition which he claimed would prevent him from continuing to exercise his ministry. She has very good relationships with Protestant ministers in the area. Many of the people of the parish who liked her continue to take advantage of her "independent" ministry. Some of them probably have separated from parish life; others have not. Of course, some of her former friends want nothing to do with her.
The diocese has gone through its usual bureaucratic process, warning people that her ministry is not Catholic (she acknowledges all that on her website) and she is not a validly ordained priest. The latest has been an official decree of excommunication verifying that she actually incurred automatic excommunication when she was ordained.
https://gem.godaddy.com/p/2adca51?pact=2574-171950189-e8c02580-ea1d-49a2-a501-2dcf73ee9de2-712e5aad3851357e5b94a57b4b730186d8fc580c
The community seems to be doing well as far as I can see from my pandemic isolation. The pandemic actually helped since she now has a virtual community as well as a physical one.
There's actually quite a few of what would be called "ecuminical Catholic communities". I have a cousin who was ordained in one of them. By a bishop who claims apostolic succession. Of course they are proclaimed anathema and excommunicated and going straight to the bad place. But as far as I can see they minister to people on the margins who aren't welcome to full participation in the official church. And I can't say that God isn't calling them to do what they are doing.
DeleteOf course, they are proclaimed anathema and excommunicated and going straight to the bad place.
DeleteIt is interesting that the woman whom I described also considered becoming an Episcopalian. If she had, her pastor could have easily gone to her ordination and managed his relationship with her like that of all of our separated brethren. But as I said at the time "it takes centuries to become a separated brethren."
I think you are right. We simply need to recognize that they are doing a good service to some people who need them. We need to be supportive of both them and the people whom they serve.
Your exchange reminds me that the beguines were quite fluid in their denominational affiliations after the Reformation, though none of them, historically, aspired to the clergy. Instead, some of them functioned as "magistras" who amplified Christian ideas of prayer and charity for the community.
DeleteAs some Low Countries were Protestant and under interdict, and others remained Catholic, the implicit notion among beguines was to remain loosely unified with sister communities, if not by Communion, then in the practice of the corporal acts of mercy.
Where denominational authorities were busy drawing lines and excommunicating each other, the beguines continued to minister to everybody and to communicate across denominational lines. In fact, they could fly under the radar because they were "just a bunch of women" doing good works and therefore seen as irrelevant to the Big Debates of male clergy.
I suspect that if you poked a beguine magistra hard enough, you'd find that she felt the Big Debates were what was irrelevant to the Christian life. But with people getting burned up right and left, it was easier to keep quiet about it.
Both the blog post from Rev. Shanon Sterringer, and the decree of excommunication from the Diocese of Cleveland, are interesting in their own ways. Rev. Shanon is accepting of it but also acknowledges that it wounded her in some way. That is understandable.
DeleteThe institutional church never feels as institutional as when it issues these legal decrees. I don't know, maybe there is a nicer, or at least less impersonal, way to mete out discipline?
Or maybe not. It might be worth recalling that Benedict tried to spare ex-Cardinal McCarrick some public shame by disciplining him privately. It turned out to be disastrous, insofar as nobody else knew what a bad guy he was and how massively he was flouting the terms of his punishment. I don't claim there are equivalencies between McCarrick's case and Sterringer's, except insofar as both violated church law and incurred church discipline as a result. When punishments are handed down, they must be made public. It may be that the public shame is as painful for someone like Rev. Shanon as the separation from the faith she had lived in for most of her life.
I was interested in how the two newspapers titled their articles. The NYT talks about cultures (Southern Baptist vs. Saddleback) and the Plainer Dealer emphasizes organizations (largest Protestant denomination vs mega church). Neither title mentions Rick Warren who in some ways is at the center of this.
ReplyDeleteWarren is not at the center because he retired as pastor recently. He is famous as author of the Purpose Driven Life. According to Wikipedia:
The book topped the Wall Street Journal best seller charts as well as Publishers Weekly charts. The Purpose Driven Life was also on the New York Times Bestseller List for over 90 weeks.[8] It had sold over 18 million copies by 2008,[9] and 32 million copies within its first decade, by 2012.[10] According to both the author and publisher Simon & Schuster, 50 million copies had been sold in more than 85 languages by 2020.
A May 2005 survey of American pastors and ministers conducted by George Barna asked Christian leaders to identify what books were the most influential on their lives and ministries. The Purpose Driven Life was the most frequent response. The Purpose Driven Church, written prior to The Purpose Driven Life, was the second most frequent response.
Since the Southern Baptist membership peaked at around 16.6 million in 2005 and was down to 13.6 million in 2021, Warren and his book are more important than either the megachurch or the denomination. The book probably tells us much about religion, especially Evangelical religion, and America.
It is interesting that neither Warren nor Saddleback have emphasized their relationship to the Southern Baptists. Saddleback functions like many megachurches in emphasizing its community relationship rather than it denominational relationship. Saddleback is the geographic area where the Saddleback range of mountains is visible.
Have any of you read the Purpose Driven Life?
I have a copy of the book. I purchased it because some of the people in my parish were reading it. It is organized into 40 chapters for 40 days. Betty has read some or all of it. It seems to be a well- organized book with a lot of side bars so it could be easy to get through.
I haven't read it, but I'd be up for it. These successful pastors have a lot to teach people of any denomination.
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