Rick Warren releases video and open letter to SBC

Rick Warren (second from left) with (left to right) Stacie Wood, Andy Wood and Kay Warren. (Photo courtesy of A. Larry Ross)

image_pdfimage_print

Author and longtime pastor Rick Warren released the first in a series of videos and an open letter to Southern Baptists in the days prior to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.

At the June 11-14 meeting in New Orleans, messengers will consider whether to exclude churches—including Saddleback Church in Southern California, which Warren founded—based on whether women serving those congregations are allowed to bear the title of “pastor.”

‘Denial is dishonesty’

In the video—the first in a four-part “SBC at the Crossroads: Denial or Revival” series—Warren points to a 17-year decline in the SBC and the loss of 3 million members.

 “Only by renewing the churches can we ever revive a declining denomination,” Warren says in the video. “Every denomination should exist to serve its churches—not vice versa.”

The “No. 1 topic for discussion” at the SBC annual meeting in New Orleans should be the loss of about a half-million members in one year, he insists.

“Denial is dishonesty. We should be worried about this,” Warren says.

While the convention has “shrunk to the size it was 44 years ago,” some leaders are distracting the SBC through “in-fighting over secondary issues, like what you call your staff,” he asserts.

Scandals, denials of wrongdoing, cover-ups, institutional overreach and mission drift have contributed to the decline, he says.

‘Southern Baptists have become less Baptist’

In an overview of upcoming videos, Warren says the second entry in the series will focus on seven historic Baptist distinctives “that once made the SBC a powerhouse of Great Commission growth.”


Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays


Warren links the decline in the SBC to the abandonment of historic Baptist principles.

“Southern Baptists have become less Baptist,” Warren says in the video. “We’re becoming more Presbyterian in structure and more fundamentalist in our actions and attitudes.”

He asserts the SBC has been “creeping toward a centralization where the local churches are losing their independence and autonomy, and we are increasingly controlled by our institutions and bureaucracies who have been systematically increasing their power to enforce uniformity.”

In the third video, Warren plans to present New Testament passages that support the “Great Commission ministry of women,” noting he personally was slow to recognize the biblical emphasis on the role of women in ministry and missions.

“For me, it was a difficult journey,” he acknowledges. “It was a difficult journey to have my biases and cultural traditions blown away by the word of God.”

In part four, Warren plans to explore the birth of the church at Pentecost in the first two chapters of Acts and to present a “pathway for renewal.”

United by mission, not conformity to a creed

In an open letter released to media and widely disseminated by email to pastors of SBC churches, Warren emphasizes the importance of uniting around a shared mission and the danger of imposing a creed on churches.

“From the start, our unity has always been based on a common mission, not a common confession. For the first 80 years of the SBC, we did not even have a confession, because the founders were adamantly opposed to having one,” Warren writes.

The SBC Executive Committee decision to withdraw fellowship from congregations that have women ministers on staff who carry the title “pastor,” will “open a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences unless we reject it,” Warren states.

Allowing the decision to go unchallenged will change the basis of cooperation in the SBC and the basis of Southern Baptist identity, centralize power in the SBC Executive Committee, take away local church autonomy and turn the Baptist Faith & Message confession of faith into a creed, Warren asserts.

“This should be the moment where 47,000+ autonomous, independent, freedom-loving churches say NO to turning the Executive Committee into a theological Magisterium that controls a perpetual inquisition of churches and makes the EC a centralized hierarchy that tells our congregations who to hire and what to call them,” he writes.

“This is a vote to affirm evangelism by saying NO to factionalism. This is a vote to refocus on the Great Commission and say NO to a Great Inquisition, which will waste enormous time, money & energy that we should be investing in revitalizing our churches. … This is a vote to prioritize Baptists working together to heal the hurts of the world in Jesus’ name, instead of nitpicking at each other over our many differences.”

Warren calls on messengers to the SBC annual meeting to reject the decision of the SBC Executive Committee and repeal the 2015 constitutional amendment revising the criteria for churches’ to be considered in cooperation with the convention.

If not, he predicts, “our Convention will continue to grow weaker and smaller.”

“We’ll keep having infighting and friction between tribes and factions; un-Christlike name-calling; wasted convention time, money & energy; loss of trust and credibility; continued membership decline; and the death of the basis for cooperation upon which this body was founded,” Warren writes. “That basis—a common mission, not a confession—was the founding genius that made the SBC great.”


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard