Most Southern Baptists hold to the complementarian position that prohibits women from being pastors. And yet, prominent leaders who agree with that position are opposed to ratifying the amendment that would further clarify this position. What’s going on here? I my latest piece for the Center for Baptist Leadership, I fairly represent both sides of the argument and provide my analysis.
Willy Rice vs. Jeff Iorg: Who is right on Mohler’s Truth & Unity Amendment?
Two of the top leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) have warned that we are facing a significant crisis, but they differ about the nature of the threat. Ultimately, the messengers who show up to the convention in Indianapolis next June will decide who we think is right and which threat we’d rather face.
The Threat of Moral Compromise
SBC President Willy Rice recently warned of the first existential threat. He argued that the SBC could fall into a “chasm” of moral compromise if we fail to pass the Truth and Unity Amendment, which clarifies our position that Scripture prohibits women pastors.
This is an argument from conviction.
Rice’s warning reflects the trend of other major denominations that have suffered moral and numerical decline after allowing women to be appointed to the pastoral office. There is a direct correlation between appointing women to the office of pastor and a steady exodus of men, not to mention the eventual affirmation of LGBTQ lifestyles.
Rice warned of falling into a “chasm” filled with “the bones of a thousand gospel movements and institutions that were once vibrant and strong, but they are now empty institutional shells, tragic monuments to a once-great past.”
Examples are not hard to find. The Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) ordained women in 1956 and approved same-sex marriage in 2015. The predecessor to today’s United Methodist Church (UMC) also decided to ordain women in 1956, fought over various sexuality issues in the decades that followed, and the UMC finally split apart over the issue in 2022. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) ordained women in the 1970s and ended up ordaining openly gay clergy in 2009. (The UMC technically didn’t exist until 1968 when the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren. The new UMC retained full clergy rights for women.)
Willy Rice doesn’t want the SBC to go down this same road, which is why he’s leading the charge to pass the Truth and Unity Amendment. Next June will mark the fifth consecutive year in which the SBC has voted on some version of an amendment to clarify our position that the Scriptures do not allow women to be pastors (ratification requires two consecutive supermajority affirmative votes).
To be clear, the SBC is, on the whole, a very conservative denomination. The Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M 2000) affirms the following: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
So what’s the issue? The issue is the inconsistent use of the word “pastor” across the roughly 46,000 churches in the SBC. Some churches use the word “pastor” more strictly, referring only to the pastoral office (i.e., the office of elder). Other churches use the word “pastor” more loosely, referring to someone on staff at the church, such as a “children’s pastor” or “women’s pastor.” Thus, a woman in an SBC church may be called a “pastor” but not function as a pastor in the sense prohibited by the BF&M 2000. On the one hand, a church may say, “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” while on the other hand say, “yes, we call her ’pastor Sally’ but she’s not a pastor pastor.”
It’s confusing. What does it mean to be a “pastor,” if First Baptist Church only uses the word to refer to men who oversee the church while Second Baptist Church four miles away has a staff of twenty men and women who are all called “pastor” but only some of them provide authoritative oversight?
These inconsistencies across the convention may lead people to erroneously conclude that the SBC affirms women pastors when our own confession says we don’t. Over time, this confusion conditions people to accept the feminist premise that men and women are interchangeable in the church. Additionally, there are some bad actors who gladly exploit this confusion to advance a feminist agenda.
Thus, the inconsistent usage of the word “pastor” has caused friction in the convention that could be resolved by simply clarifying what we mean. The Truth and Unity Amendment was written to provide that clarity. Ratifying the amendment next June should settle the issue.
If we fail to pass it, we face the potential “chasm” of moral decline of encroaching feminism Willy Rice warned us about. The confusion will spread, frustration will grow, and feminists will continue to exploit the confusion and push the convention into further decline and compromise.
To be clear, the SBC is not voting to affirm women pastors. The SBC is voting to clarify and strengthen our existing opposition to women pastors.
Some have argued that “there’s not a significant problem of women pastors in the SBC!” This isn’t true, a fact which has been documented. But even if it were true that the SBC doesn’t have a women pastors problem, it is enough of a problem for it to have been brought to the floor of the convention four years straight. It’s not going to go away. Besides, the best time to address a problem is before it gets too big to fix. And every year that passes without fixing it, the problem grows and becomes more entrenched, leading those who have been fighting to fix it to become discouraged. Many of them are reducing their Cooperative Program dollars in protest. Others are leaving the convention entirely.
This is how the SBC slowly becomes the UMC. And this is why President Rice sees failing to pass the Truth and Unity Amendment as an existential crisis.
But there’s another prominent leader warning of a different threat to the SBC.
The Threat of Litigation
The President of the Executive Committee Jeff Iorg made the opposite argument regarding the Law Amendment, a precursor to what is now the Truth and Unity Amendment. He believed the greater threat would have come from passing it, warning that it would increase the convention’s legal risk that greatly harm the convention.
Iorg has stated he personally holds to the complementarian position that Scripture prohibits women from becoming pastors. Yet he opposed the Law Amendment in 2024. In his view, the BF&M and our current processes are sufficient. No amendment or further clarification is needed.
What’s his argument?
To answer this question, it helps to know how the system is set up. The Credentials Committee evaluates concerns about whether a church remains in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC and then makes recommendations to the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee then determines whether these churches violate our constitutional standard and are ultimately responsible for the decision to remove them.
Iorg raised several concerns in a Baptist Press article, including church autonomy and how much doctrinal uniformity the convention should require. But his legal concerns are what turn this into a question of survival, and he makes two of them.
First, churches removed from the convention could lose real benefits, such as access to disability coverage and retirement plans through Guidestone (the SBC’s employee benefits entity, not to be confused with Guidepost Solutions, the firm hired to investigate the handling of sexual abuse allegations). He says those losses “increase the likelihood of litigation,” and that “if dozens of churches are excluded or removed from the SBC in an adversarial fashion, the legal risk may increase accordingly.”
Second, he worries about the “legal wall of autonomy” which protects the SBC from being held responsible for the actions of churches.” If the convention starts examining titles and job descriptions in local churches in order to enforce the amendment, then “some enterprising attorney with a cooperative judge may make the case that a convention with this much vested interest in the internal workings of its churches is responsible for their other actions as well.”
As Iorg said at the time, “If the amendment passes, it may be helpful to Southern Baptists in the long run… But I know it will be expensive.” That’s a revealing statement.
This is an argument from pragmatism.
The Executive Committee is understandably skittish about this, given the “sexual abuse crisis” a few years ago. The Executive Committee was responsible for responding to the SBC’s 2021 mandate to investigate its historical handling of sexual-abuse allegations. It waived attorney-client privilege, contracted with Guidepost (not Guidestone, see the above note), and ultimately assumed significant legal liability, including indemnifying Guidepost – that is to say, the Executive Committee agreed to pay for Guideposts’ lawyers and for any of its mistakes.By the end of 2024, the Executive Committee had spent roughly $13 million of its reserves on investigations and legal expenses. This forced it to seek additional financing because these costs had seriously depleted its reserves.
In short, the SBC got burned—badly.
Jeff Iorg was not president of the Executive Committee when these decisions were made (he was President of Gateway Seminary at the time). He inherited the consequences of these decisions and was the man hired to clean up the mess. This may explain his reluctance to do anything his legal counsel advises would expose the SBC to more litigation and financial harm.
Analysis of the Two Threats
Thus, we find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. Willy Rice believes failing to pass the amendment could greatly harm the SBC. Jeff Iorg believes passing the amendment could greatly harm the SBC.
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. So, who’s right? In my view, Willy Rice is right and Jeff Iorg is wrong.
Let me give you three reasons why.
First, the SBC needs more clarity on the issue of women pastors than we currently have. It’s come up for a vote four years running, and it won’t go away until the matter is settled, once and for all. If the Truth and Unity amendment fails next June, the status quo will be preserved and the confusion will keep growing. Failure to pass it would create the impression that the SBC doesn’t have the stomach to enforce our own stated convictions. This would further signal to the feminists that they can advance their agenda unopposed. That’s why the issue needs to be settled now while we have the momentum.
Second, Iorg’s legal argument doesn’t hold up. I’m not a lawyer, but Jon Whitehead is, and he addressed it on the Center for Baptist Leadership podcast. He began by noting that the legal case against the amendment has never been spelled out publicly. When you press those making it, he said, “nobody can quite say other than there will be litigation.”
So Whitehead took his best guess at the theory, and it matches what Iorg wrote in 2024. If the SBC enforces this belief, plaintiffs will argue it should have policed everything else its churches do, the way an employer can be sued for negligent supervision. Whitehead called that argument “bogus under current law.” Courts will not rule on whether a religious body was negligent in setting its own religious standards. Since Hosanna-Tabor and the cases that followed, religious organizations have “enormous protection in deciding who they associate with and who their leaders are.”
His conclusion: “if somebody sues, they’re going to lose.”
That doesn’t mean no one will ever sue. Whitehead granted that “sometimes you do get sued,” and defending even a winning case costs money. But that is true of everything the SBC does. The IMB takes on enormous legal risk every time it sends out a missionary. We buy insurance, take the normal precautions, and get on with the mission.
Whitehead also raised a point about process. If our lawyers believe Southern Baptists can state what we believe but cannot act on it, that “can’t be some kind of secret that’s hidden in a legal memo.” The messengers deserve to see the argument and weigh it for themselves.
The SBC already makes constitutional decisions about who qualifies for cooperation. If a Southern Baptist Church suddenly decided to baptize infants and was removed from the convention, it would have the same legal standing as a church removed for appointing women pastors. Clarifying our doctrinal requirements would not create fundamentally new legal vulnerabilities. In fact, the added clarity the Truth and Unity Amendment provides may actually strengthen the SBC’s basis for enforcing its own doctrinal identity.
Third, and most significant for me, Christians must ultimately stand on conviction, not pragmatism. Even if Iorg were right about opening the door to lawsuits (and I don’t believe he is), this is precisely the moment when our convictions must trump pragmatism.
Iorg has addressed the question of pragmatism in 2024, writing that proponents of the Law Amendment see the risks as “a price worth paying to preserve doctrinal fidelity.” That is precisely my position. I’m glad to own it. We should not shy away from clearly stating our convictions because it will be “expensive.” Our Lord himself told us to “count the cost” of being a disciple.
Would we be ashamed of Christ and his instructions for the church because we’re afraid of lawsuits? Does Scripture not command us to do what is right when it’s costly? Especially when it is costly? We should learn from our heroes of Scripture and church history who stood with their convictions in the face of much greater threats than lawsuits (cf. Heb 11:35b-40).
Conclusion
When I first planted an SBC church through the North American Mission Board, I did so having graduated from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which had earned a reputation under Dr. Mohler’s leadership for standing on the truth of Scripture even when it was costly. That inspired me. I wanted to be part of the SBC precisely because I was convinced we had the courage to do what is right no matter what perils we might face in the process.
The SBC exists to contend for and propagate our Christian convictions. If Southern Baptists do not have the courage to stand for the clear teaching of scripture, then what’s the point of the SBC? Are we really going to be bullied by threats of litigation?
That’s not the SBC I know and love. Ordinary Southern Baptists are courageous Christians, not cowards. Our entities should reflect that.
When faithful churches give their hard-earned dollars to the Cooperative Program, they do so ultimately to advance our convictions. I value our entities and want them all to succeed, but success is measured in faithfulness to God’s word, not mere self-preservation. If we have to compromise God’s word to save the SBC, then the SBC isn’t worth saving.
That’s Willy Rice’s concern, and that’s why he’s correct. The keys to the future of our convention are in the hands of the messengers who will vote next June. The surface-level issue is the Truth and Unity amendment. But the deeper issue is whether we have the courage to stand for the truth of God’s word even when it’s not popular.
Thus, the biggest threat facing the SBC is not lawsuits, but a failure of nerve. We can’t control lawsuits, but we can control our own faithfulness. Only the Lord knows the future, but I’m confident Southern Baptists will make the right call next year.
Well said as always.
Thank you for explaining the issue and need for SBC to be clear.