Guest: Tom Ascol, Senior Pastor, Grace Baptist Church (Cape Coral, FL)

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is the largest Protestant church denomination in North America, with six seminaries, 47,000 churches, 13 million church members, and entities like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), Lifeway Christian Resources, the North American Mission Board (NAMB), and more.

Some of the most influential churches and pastors in America are part of the SBC. SBC churches are expected to give to the Cooperative Program (CP), which uses the funds for all their various entities and endeavors. In 2023, the CP budget was nearly $200M.

Any organization this size with this much influence and funding is going to be a battlefield of agendas. The SBC was once moving to the left theologically but made a “conservative resurgence” in the 1980s. In recent years, the SBC has becoming wobbly on issues related to social justice, Critical Race Theory, female pastors, and more.

At stake at this year’s upcoming SBC Annual Meeting June 9-12 in Indianapolis is a proposed amendment to the SBC constitution, called the “Law Amendment” (named after Mike Law, the VA pastor who submitted it), that SBC cooperating churches do “not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”

Many SBC churches currently do employ female pastors in clear violation of God’s Word that only men of high character be pastors and elders. We’ll read those passages during the program.

Tom Ascol, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, FL and president of Founders Ministries, joins us for the fifth year running to discuss issues within the Southern Baptist Convention that have impact across broader Christianity.