 Early this year, the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC, expelling Saddleback Church for having women as pastors. Saddleback Church is the largest church in the state and one of the largest in the nation. The founding pastor of the church, Rick Warren, appealing the decision at the Baptist Convention's annual two-day meeting in New Orleans, which started today. If you think every Baptist thinks like you, you're mistaken. Saddleback Church was founded more than 40 years ago and has grown to have several campuses in California and around the world. Two years ago, Warren started controversy by ordaining three women as pastors. I'm not asking you to agree with my church. I am asking you to act like a Southern Baptist. If you've been paying attention, you've heard what's happening with the SBC and then their ultimate disfellowship of Rick Warren's church, Saddleback Church out of California. He is pleading to not be disfellowship and if you listen to his argument, there's something grossly wrong with his argument. The SBC has been a blend of at least a dozen different tribes of Baptist. If you think every Baptist thinks like you, you're mistaken. What we share in common is a mutual commitment to the inerrancy and the infallibility of God's word and to the great commission of Jesus Christ. No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology. I'm not asking you to agree with my church. I am asking you to act like a Southern Baptist who have historically agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines in order to share a common mission. Since Southern Baptists have always allowed disagreement on doctrines of including the essential doctrines of salvation, why should this one issue cancel our fellowship? In 2013, when the Calvinist were under fire, Baptist agreed to disagree and the split was averted. Now 10 years later, will we treat egalitarian Baptist with the same grace we showed the Calvinist? We should remove churches for all kinds of sexual sin, racial sin, financial sin, leadership sin, sins that harm the testimony of our convention. 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 doctrine. That's why our constitution says that churches must closely identify, not completely identify with our confession. Now the Baptist faith in message is 4,032 words. Saddleback disagrees with one word. That's 99.99999999999 in agreement. Isn't that close enough? What was conveniently missing from Rick Warren's statements are scriptures. The Bible is clear about a woman preaching. As a matter of fact, the Bible gives qualifications and so let's look at them again. He says that it is a trustworthy statement if any man or a person, in this case it's a person, the word that is used there is teased as a certain person. But we'll see how it's a male. Aspire to the office of overseer is a fine work that he does to do, that he desires to do. And overseer then must be above approach the husband of one wife. The word is Andra, which is man, male. Andra of one wife, or me ask good night, Gdaikus Andra. So this is a one woman man. He has to be a man. It defeats the point and purpose of having qualifications if we're not gonna go off of the qualifications. Now, Dr. Mowler in his response is saying, if we've got the definition of a pastor, we're gonna go with that definition, that word, because it's the most easily understood. Let's not nitpick and try to figure out how we can move in or kind of undercut what the word means. In Genesis 3.16, we see God meeting out punishment for the fall of mankind. To Satan, to the devil, to man and to woman. Look what he says to the woman. He says, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth child children, yet your desires will be for your husband and he will rule over you. Well, he is setting up a hierarchy of leadership, male to female. It should never be that the church would ever be a tool used to usurp what God has determined to be the role of women, not that women can have a role in the church. That's not the point here. The point is though, the role they cannot have is as a pastor, as someone who teaches or has authority over men. Again, Paul says in 1 Timothy 2, verse 11, it's a woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. It's hard for people to understand it, to get a grasp of that with submissiveness entirely, but I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. I want you to look at this. I do not permit a woman to teach the woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man. She cannot teach a man, have that duty to teach over him, which is what a pastor does, or to exercise authority over a man, which is what a pastor does. She does not qualify, not that she's of a lesser importance, lesser value, lesser skill, no. What is happening though, you're gonna see this happen more and more. You're gonna see churches, different preachers, and so forth, leaning this way at the same way that Rick Warren is leaning, and he's not the only one, and they're gonna do so, not because they find something in the scripture that allows them to, as a matter of fact, quite the opposite. They're going to lean on their opinions. As he says, we only disagree with one word. If that word is important, if that word leads to something that goes against the scripture, then it's sin. And so to do so, to allow them to do so, to have them as pastors would be a sin because it directly contradicts what the scripture's mandate. You're gonna see this more and more. It's gonna be someone's feeling, someone thinks that this, or they feel like that. The woman has the ability to, and they will not cite a scripture, or they would twist one and say that this woman here wasn't a posse or that she was, and it's not the case at all. But again, but now, at least Rick has a tendency not to try to twist the scripture, although he might at some point time in the future, but the fact of the matter is, there is no passage that gives him the right to do so. Forget his dispute with Al Moller or what he thinks Al Moller says or should have said or anything like that. What does God say? And so because they are disfellowshipping them, moving them on, I can promise you this, that you are SBC, you are getting auditioned by subtraction. You are not losing anything. You are gaining something, one with heaven, but also in the eyes of the people because you seem like at least more. So now today that you seem more biblically concerned than you have before, because you seem more concerned with the scriptures than how things look.