Founding pastor Rick Warren appeals ouster of California-based Saddleback Church from Southern Baptist Convention

Rick Warren, the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, asked delegates of the Southern Baptist Convention during its annual meeting on Tuesday to “agree to disagree” in the debate over whether the mega church should be ousted because it has women as pastors.

“In 175 years, the Southern Baptist Convention has been a blend of a dozen different tribes,” Warren said during the three minutes he was allotted to appeal a February decision by the convention’s executive committee to remove Saddleback Church, which got its start in Orange County, for being “not in friendly cooperation” with the Southern Baptist Convention.

“What we share in common is a mutual commitment to the infallibility of God’s word and the great commission of Jesus Christ,” he said. “No one is asking any Southern Baptist church to change their theology; I’m not asking you to agree with my church, I’m asking you to act like a Southern Baptist who have historically agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines.”

Warren, who founded Saddleback Church in 1980 in Lake Forest, retired as its senior pastor in August after having grown the congregation to more than 40,000 people with 14 locations in Southern California and four international campuses. He was succeeded by Andy Wood, who came from the Echo.Church in San Jose.

Since preaching his last sermon, Warren has stayed out of the limelight until recent weeks.

On Tuesday, Warren was the congregation’s sole representative during the two-day convention meeting in New Orleans that included more than 12,000 messengers (church representatives). The Southern Baptist Church is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The California Southern Baptist Convention oversees 990 churches in Southern California, with 143 in Orange County, 247 in the Inland Empire, 401 in Los Angeles County and 69 in the Long Beach Harbor Southern Baptist Association.

Calls for expelling Saddleback Church began in 2021, shortly after Warren ordained three women pastors. The women led worship for children and students and provided visits to hospitals and funerals. Stacie Wood, wife of Andy Wood, was made a teaching pastor this summer.

Convention representatives also heard from Lynda Barnes, pastor of Fern Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky.

“Why now,” Barnes asked about the convention leadership’s decision this year to expel the churches, adding during her three-minute appeal that she has served Fern Creek for 30 years. “I’m more conservative than most Southern Baptists I know. Satan loves dividing us.”

While the Southern Baptists Convention’s statement of faith officially opposes women as pastors, each congregation is self-governing, so the main enforcement mechanism is to oust a church from membership.

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in a three-minute rebuttal, responded to Warren, saying that in the year 2000, the words “the office of the pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture” were added to the statement because “30 years ago this issue threatened to tear the denomination apart.”

Following the comments, the group of 12,011 convention representatives was asked to cast their ballots on the appeal. A decision is expected Wednesday morning.

In 2021, Warren spoke on the topic of women as pastors during SBC’s convention in Anaheim but recently launched a media campaign to underscore his beliefs, including in the last few days apologizing to women in a Twitter statement on Monday, June 12.

“I publicly apologize to every good woman in my life, church and ministry that I failed to speak up for in my years of ignorance,” he wrote. “What grieves me is that I hindered … and  I held them back from using the spiritual gifts and leadership skills that the Holy Spirit had sovereignly placed in them. I wish I could do it all over. Christian women, will you please forgive me?”

Warren said he came upon this “repentance” after he studied the Bible and specifically the New Testament – written in Greek, its original language  – more deeply and stopped taking the standard Southern Baptist line of thinking for granted, as he said he had for more than 50 years.

“No seminary told me that those commentaries even existed and Baptist bookstores refused to carry them,” he wrote in the Twitter post. “So I accepted the interpretation that was most comfortable for me as a man with my background.”

For the past few weeks, Warren has been releasing statements, including podcasts and videos, in a sort of media blitz to underline the reasons he is using to state his case to reinstate the Lake Forest mega-church.

There are sins over which a church should be removed, he said, “But the 1,928 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% of Baptists to agree 100% on 100% of every doctrine.”

And he brought in the late Rev. Billy Graham saying, “If this precedent is set, Southern Seminary will have to change the name of the Billy Graham School since Billy trained women pastors at our global training events and he endorsed the preaching ministry of his daughter, saying ‘Anne is the best preacher in the Graham family.’”

Also on Tuesday, the delegates reelected Bart Barber as the Southern Baptist Convention president over Mike Stone. Barber won 68% of the vote, he is viewed as the more mainstream of the two.