Rick Warren on Ordaining Women

Rick Warren is making a splash in recent days over something his church, Saddleback Church, did last year, ordaining women to the pastoral ministry. That happened on May 6, 2021. Subsequently, Rick Warren retired as pastor, installing Andy Wood as the new senior pastor with Wood’s wife, Stacie listed as a “teaching pastor” at the church. This set the stage for a confrontation with the Southern Baptist Convention, Saddleback’s denominational body. In the SBC doctrinal statement, the Baptist Faith and Message, Article 6 on The Church states:

Each congregation operates under the Lordship of Christ through democratic processes. In such a congregation each member is responsible and accountable to Christ as Lord. Its scriptural officers are pastors and deacons. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. [emphasis added]

A month ago, Feb 21, 2023, the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention voted to mark Saddleback Church as “not in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention.” The decision may be appealed by the church (and four others who suffered the same fate for the same reasons) at the annual Southern Baptist Convention, scheduled for June 13-14, 2023.

This decision received wide coverage, with reporting in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the UK’s Guardian, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Christian Post, and People magazine, to name a few. (Some of these links are behind paywalls.)

Following this news, Rick Warren appeared on Russel Moore’s podcast, the Russell Moore Show. Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief at Christianity Today, is a long-time Southern Baptist himself, though he left the convention in 2021. You can catch the podcast episode here, and get a partial transcript from Christianity Today here (may be behind a paywall).

All of that is background. What I want to do with this article is address the three passages Rick Warren uses to justify his position. I think you will see that Warren’s claims have no Biblical foundation.

The first passage Warren uses is the Great Commission, Mt 28.19-20. He says,

Now, the Great Commission: go, make disciples, baptize, teach. You can’t say the first two are for men and women [and] the last two are only for men—or maybe just ordained men. That’s eisegesis. You got a problem.

Who authorized women to teach? Jesus. “All authority is given to me; therefore, teach. All authority is given to me; therefore, baptize.” You got a problem with the Great Commission. I had to repent when I actually looked at the Great Commission. I had to say, “It’s not just for ordained men; it’s for everybody.”¹

Matthew 28.19-20 says:

^{Mt 28.19-20} “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

There really is only one imperative in the passage, “make disciples.” The “going,” “baptizing,” and “teaching” are activities that produce disciples. While some might object that I am making too fine a distinction, we need to let the Scriptures say what they say, not what someone imagines they say. There aren’t four commands, divided up among men and women. There is one command, “make disciples.”

One could argue the command was only given to the apostles, leaving the rest of us off the hook. (We presume Jesus spoke this directly to the eleven, and maybe told Paul the same sometime later.) One could argue that way, but no one in the early church thought this passage only applied to the apostles. “They went everywhere, preaching the word,” (Ac 8.4). And no one in church history has argued that the disciple-making obligation fell solely on men. Essentially, Warren is erecting a straw man here. The passage doesn’t command disciples to be pastors of churches, to be preachers of the word, but to be disciple makers. It really doesn’t say anything about pulpit ministry.

Warren’s next justification is rooted in Pentecost,

The second thing that changed my mind was the Day of Pentecost. Two things happened on that day. We know the first day of the church is its birth, is the church at its best. On that day at Pentecost, we know women were in the upper room. We know women were filled with the Holy Spirit; we know that women were preaching in languages that other people couldn’t [understand], to a mixed audience. It wasn’t just men—women were preaching on the Day of Pentecost.

How do we know that? Because Peter felt obligated to explain it. And so, in Acts chapter two, verses 17 and 18, he goes, “Hey, guys, these people aren’t drunk. What you’re seeing was foretold by Joel. It was gonna happen.” And so he explains why you’re now seeing women preaching on the very first day of the church. He explains it and he says, “This is that, that Joel predicted.”

And here’s what he says. “In the last days”—and clearly that means Peter thought the last days began with the birth of the church; we’re in the latter of the last days. Now, we don’t know how many more there will be, but the last days began with the birth of the church. Peter says, “In the last days, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” All flesh. “Your sons and daughters will prophesy.”

That’s different than the Old Testament. I’ve looked at over 300 commentaries on those verses, and it’s interesting to me that almost everybody goes, “Yep, in the church, everybody gets to pray, everybody gets to preach, everybody gets to prophesy.” And the people who don’t like that ignore that verse. John MacArthur doesn’t even cover that verse. He just skips over it.²

The passage in question (Ac 2.17-21) is an extended quotation of Joel 2.28-32a. The first thing to note is that, whatever was going on at Pentecost, it wasn’t leading a church or a formal teaching session as such. It was a supernatural phenomenon. There was a large group of people, both men and women, testifying about Christ and his resurrection in languages previously unknown to them. In fact, this startling phenomenon prompted the questions of the listening crowd, who confirm exactly what they were hearing.

^{Ac 2.6-13} And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language. ⁷ They were amazed and astonished, saying, “Why, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ “And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born? ⁹ “Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹ Cretans and Arabs– we hear them in our own tongues speaking of the mighty deeds of God.” ¹² And they all continued in amazement and great perplexity, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³ But others were mocking and saying, “They are full of sweet wine.”

Peter’s citation of Joel answers these questions, which could be summed up in one with this, “How are these Galileans able to speak of the mighty deed of God in our own language?”

The answer: they speak by the supernatural power of God; it is a supernatural gift.

In the Old Testament era, God gave individuals supernatural insight to proclaim his message. Joel prophesied that a day would come when the supernatural gift was widely diffused, among men and women, free and slave, on everyone in Israel. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter says this miracle indeed fulfills what Joel prophesied, implying that the hearers had better pay attention.

The surprising thing on Pentecost was not that men and women were speaking, but that they were speaking in languages they could not know. Their message was of prime importance.

Pentecost was a one-off event. There were two similar events in the Book of Acts (when the gospel came to Cornelius and other Gentiles, Acts 10.44-46a, and when the gospel came to the disciples of John in Acts 19.6). These events are exceptions to the norm. Supernatural tongues speaking and prophecy were not a part of the daily life of the ministry. Daily ministry in Acts and the early church involved men (elders, bishops, pastors – three names for the same office) leading local congregations and instructing them.

Warren attempts to make a supernatural event, unusual and therefore significant, a normative event for the life of the church. Nothing in the passage justifies that interpretation.

Warren’s third “justification” cites a very startling passage:

And then the third thing that changed my mind—see, none of this had to do with culture; it had to do with Scripture—and then all of a sudden, I noticed that the very first sermon, the very first Christian sermon, the message of the gospel of Good News of the Resurrection, Jesus chose a woman to deliver it to men.

He had Mary Magdalene go and tell the disciples. Now, that clearly wasn’t an accident. It was intentional. It’s a whole new world. Now he has a woman go tell the apostles. Can a woman teach an apostle? Evidently. [Jesus] did it on the first day—he chose her to be the first preacher of the gospel.³

This one seems almost preposterous, but let’s look at it. Here is Mary Magdelene and her “sermon,”

^{Jn 20.2} So she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him.”

For good measure, let’s add the parallels in other Gospels,

^{Mk 16.10-11} She went and reported to those who had been with Him, while they were mourning and weeping. ¹¹ When they heard that He was alive and had been seen by her, they refused to believe it.

^{Lk 24.9-11} and returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. ¹⁰ Now they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James; also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles. ¹¹ But these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.

First, Mary Magdelene had no clue about the resurrection at the point she reports to Peter and John in Jn 20. The message of the resurrection came later, after the women saw the angel at the tomb and reported their words to the disciples.

An announcement such as we see in Jn 20 is no sermon, it is sounding an alarm. It isn’t the gospel.

Now, on the basis of this flimsy interpretation, Rick Warren wants to throw over the clear instruction of the New Testament:

^{1 Tim 2.11-12} A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. ¹² But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

^{1 Cor 14.34} The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says.

These passages are unambiguous. They can’t be overturned by the three passages Warren cites. Warren’s passages must be interpreted in light of these passages, not despite them. The Bible isn’t double-minded. God doesn’t contradict himself. He speaks with one voice. Scripture must interpret Scripture.

The conflicts of the Southern Baptist Convention are not really a concern of ours. They have to order their own house. However, the teachings of men like Warren get wide play in the press and can cause confusion. We have to always go back to the Bible, search out what the Scriptures themselves are saying, and dismiss men like Warren who like to play fast-and-loose with God’s word for their own purposes.

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Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

Photo by: Steve Jurvetson on Flickr. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License. [Photo is from 2006, at a TED talk.]

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