Pastors need to remember that while evangelism is important, it’s not their first responsibility. Their first responsibility is to feed the sheep, to equip the saints. For too many pastors, concern for showing compassion to the lost means they’re not protecting the sheep from false teaching. They are, in fact, starving the sheep to appease goats.

In September 2019, in Mesa, Arizona, pastor Ryan Visconti was thrilled to find himself at a private dinner with Andy Stanley, pastor of what was then the largest church in the United States.
On any given weekend, Stanley’s North Point church has roughly 31,000 attendees across eight campuses in Atlanta, Georgia. Stanley is also the author of dozens of books, and his sermons are distributed through a vast digital ministry that includes not only podcasts and YouTube videos, but also traditional broadcasts on NBC, CBS, and radio stations across the country. Little wonder, then, that Preaching Magazine ranked him number eight on its list of the twenty-five most influential preachers of the last twenty-five years.
But perhaps over no group does Stanley hold more sway than other pastors. Stanley was in Arizona for his “Irresistible” tour, a conference that promised to teach church leaders how to “expand [their] influence.” Visconti was excited for the opportunity to pick Stanley’s brain, though, at thirty-four, he would be the youngest at a table of about fifteen men and expected to spend the majority of the meal quietly soaking up wisdom from Stanley and the more seasoned leaders. That plan went off the rails when the discussion turned toward homosexuality and how the men’s ministries were confronting increasing cultural pressure to compromise on clear biblical teaching. Stanley shocked the room by arguing that they shouldn’t so much confront it as accommodate it. “He said he would encourage any gay couples in his congregation to commit to each other,” Visconti recalled.
For the next hour and a half, he listened as Stanley went on to contend that modern pastors must make allowances for gay and lesbian couples to be married in their churches because “that’s as close as they can get to a New Testament framework of marriage.” Visconti remembered Stanley likening same-sex attraction to a disability, something that can’t be helped. An expectation of celibacy, he argued, would be unfair.
Finally, Stanley revealed that while he had never officiated a same-sex wedding, he could see himself doing so eventually, especially for a family member. “I know I shouldn’t let experience dictate my theology, but I have. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Visconti was dumbstruck: “I remember thinking to myself, if his church knew what he was saying right now, half of them would probably leave over-night.” He joined several pastors in arguing with Stanley as others “squirmed in their chairs, muttering, ‘That’s not right.’” Host Joel Thomas, then pastor of Mission Community Church, had gotten his start in ministry under Stanley’s tutelage. When the dinner was over, he moved swiftly to protect his former boss’s reputation. Thomas asked the pastors to “honor” Stanley for being willing to “be vulnerable” in front of them. By this he meant they were not to speak of Stanley’s views to anyone else.
Visconti felt torn. It had been a private event, which meant there was an expectation of confidentiality. But another part of him felt plagued by the knowledge that a man with so much influence on his fellow teachers was encouraging them in error. He prayed and pressed several of his mentors about it, trying to decide how to address someone as famous as Stanley.
The mentors didn’t think confrontation was the right approach, even though two weren’t surprised by what Visconti had told them. Stanley had already preached messages about needing to “unhitch from the Old Testament,” seeming to suggest he was laying the groundwork for more liberal theology. And a sermon illustration in which he reproved a husband in his church for committing adultery with another man but not for the homosexual acts involved had raised eyebrows as far back as 2012.
In short, Visconti, who wasn’t very familiar with Stanley’s ministry, discovered that the fact that he might have heretical views had been whispered about for years. Yet this had not prompted the doctrinally sound pastors in Stanley’s circle to warn churches not to host his conferences or to caution Christians not to buy his books or entertain his teaching.
Visconti held out hope that those witnesses who were on more equal footing with Stanley might be the ones to call him to account. He also hoped the famous pastor might just have been processing his ideas out loud.
Yet, as the months went by, there was no evidence that any of the more senior pastors who knew Stanley better had addressed the issue with him. Then, in 2022, clips of Stanley from his biennial Drive Conference—another event specifically targeted at pastors and ministry leaders—made the rounds on social media. In one, he heaped praise on LGBTQ individuals, saying their desire to come to church despite receiving judgment from Christians showed they had more faith than heterosexual church members. He went on to call 1 Corinthians 6, Leviticus 18, and Romans 1 “clobber passages,” echoing a phrase common among gay activists when referencing Bible verses that address homosexuality. At no point did he indicate that homosexual acts or desires were sinful.
When Stanley’s remarks had given rise to similar questions in 2012, a North Point spokesperson claimed he was being taken out of context, though the representative did not clarify Stanley’s views. Now that Stanley was being asked again to explain whether he believed, as the Bible teaches, that homosexuality is a sin, his church declined to respond entirely.
Amid all the speculation about Stanley’s meaning, another clip from the Drive Conference especially pricked Visconti’s conscience. In it, Stanley seemed to encourage pastors to lead their congregations carefully and strategically toward acceptance of homosexuality.
Visconti feared that further silence would allow Stanley to use his platform to sow error and confusion in many churches across the country. Fifteen pastors knew in which direction Stanley was trying to nudge evangelical churches. And for more than three years, none of them had said anything. Visconti decided enough was enough. He posted an explosive thread on Twitter revealing what Stanley had said and naming his views “overtly heretical.”
Two other pastors who had been at the dinner that night confirmed that Visconti’s account was accurate. But that was as far as they were willing to go.
One told me he didn’t feel comfortable providing details because the dinner had been private. The other shared this concern about confidentiality but added, “[I’m] not sure I want to get into a political battle on this.” The most unsettling thing about my exchange with this man was the implication that because Stanley’s unbiblical stance centered on homosexuality, raising any alarm about it would have been “political.” A highly influential pastor was compromising the Word of God and encouraging other church leaders to do likewise. If any matter could be classified as ecclesiastical rather than civil in nature, this was it. Especially as it turned out there was a lot more going on at North Point to spread LGBTQ ideology through America’s churches than just Stanley’s pastors’ conferences.
In 2000, Jon Stryker, gay heir to a one-hundred-billion-dollar surgical supply conglomerate, launched the Arcus Foundation, a grant-making institution that soon became the largest funder of LGBTQ initiatives in the United States. But after legislative defeats like the passage of a 2008 California law banning gay marriage, Stryker’s foundation began devoting tens of millions of dollars to, in its words, “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine” within every major Christian denomination. Between 2013 and 2018, for instance, it gave over two million dollars to the Reconciling Ministries Network to “secure the full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the United Methodist Church,” the last mainline denomination still resistant to full affirmation of the entire rainbow panoply. Given that the UMC went through a schism in 2022 over LGBTQ ordination and gay marriage, it seems Stryker’s money was well spent.
While evangelicalism’s decentralized and independent nature makes any wholesale attempt at reshaping doctrine unfeasible, it, too, came in for the Arcus treatment, albeit with more scattered outlays of cash. One particular expenditure proved strategic, as it managed to harness the influence of both North Point on the Eastern Seaboard and another internationally famous megachurch in the West, Rick Warren’s Saddleback.
Between 2014 and 2018, the Reformation Project, a brand-new organization led by twenty-three-year-old Harvard dropout Matthew Vines, received $550,000 in grants. The purpose of the funding, according to Arcus, was to “reform church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity among conservative and evangelical communities.” On the surface, the Reformation Project would have seemed an unlikely vehicle for making inroads with the most resistant strain of American Christianity. Anyone watching the viral 2012 YouTube talk in which Vines argues that God does not condemn loving, gay relationships, only same-sex rape and orgies, might have guessed he was a nervous high-schooler. But youth and inexperience were lesser obstacles than his overt branding as a gay-affirming evangelical. Vines has even called affirmation of homosexual unions “a requirement of Christian faithfulness.” For Vines and the Reformation Project to have any hope of fulfilling their mission, they needed partners who looked and sounded like the conservative Christians they were trying to convince but whose teaching was equally committed to the project of undermining Scripture.
Enter Greg and Lynn McDonald. In 2015, they founded Embracing the Journey, an organization for Christian parents of LGBTQ children, at the urging of North Point’s executive director, Bill Willits. They had recently relocated to the Atlanta area and had begun attending services at the church. Over a breakfast meeting with Willits early in the year, Greg happened to share that his son had come out as gay in 2001, and he described how his and Lynn’s process of acceptance eventually led them to become informal counselors to other parents of gay and transgender kids. Willits was “captivated” by their story and revealed that North Point had already begun exploring new ministries in that vein. He urged them to film a video for Stanley’s Drive Conference that May.
As Stanley introduced the McDonalds’ video to approximately two thousand church leaders from all over the country, he urged those leaders not to view homosexuality through a “political” lens. Instead of suggesting that ministers use the Bible as their foremost frame of reference, he urged the audience to approach the issue through a “relational lens.” His example for relational was the McDonalds’ story.
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It might have taken the feminist dissidents 30+ years, but they may at last be on the brink of getting their way in the SBC. And female pastors may be only their first win.

In May of 2022, Mike Law, pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Virginia, sent an email to the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. As the only full-time staff member of a church of about 100, he had never had any interaction with his national leadership before, so he began with a chipper greeting introducing himself and his congregation, followed by a straightforward question: Is a church that has a woman serving as pastor deemed to be in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention?
Home to some 47,000 churches and 13 million members, the SBC’s status as the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. is due in large part to its loose structure. Rather than a top-down hierarchy, it’s more of a casual association of churches who agree on doctrine and pool their money to fund missions, seminaries, and various charitable endeavors. Its leaders have no power to tell churches what to teach, where or how to operate, or who to hire. The only authority they have is to manage the billion-plus in unrestricted funds they receive and set the terms for who gets to be a member.
Though its contributions may have been small, Arlington Baptist was nonetheless a contributor in good standing. And its pastor was inquiring whether, since Article VI of the denomination’s statement of faith asserts that “the office of pastor is limited to men” based on 1 Timothy 2:9-14 and 3:1-7, a church could remain in the club if it violated this doctrine.
Law explained that his understanding was that a church with a woman pastor would not qualify for what the SBC calls “friendly cooperation” because that requires a “faith and practice that closely identifies with the Baptist Faith and Message” (the SBC’s name for their statement of faith). Churches that affirm homosexual behavior and marriage had been disfellowshipped for falling afoul of the BF&M in the past. Why would this point of doctrine be any different?
He finished by thanking the committee for its service and said he looked forward to their answer.
He would never get one.
Speaking Through Other Means
The response Law received from VP of Communications, Jonathan Howe, explained that determinations of friendly cooperation are made by the credentials committee, not the executive committee. So if he wanted to report a church for having a woman pastor, that was where he should turn.
Law wrote back, apologizing for not being clear the first time — he knew where churches could be reported but was only asking about the general principle. Did the committee agree with the BF&M’s position on women in the pastorate and did that belief guide their decisions?
Howe replied that he could not speak for the credentials committee and did not think the credentials committee was likely to speak for the credentials committee either. “They speak through their actions throughout the year,” he said.
He then pointed Law to a portal where he could report a church for review.
To Law, the confusion lay in the fact that the committee had not been speaking through their actions. “In just a five-mile radius of Arlington Baptist, I had noticed five other SBC churches that had female pastors on staff,” he tells me. Further far-from-exhaustive research turned up 170 more. Colleagues shared that when they had reported churches in their areas for the same issue, the credentials committee took no action. Then there were the whispers that various SBC leaders themselves attended churches where women act as pastors (in fact, one blog cited Howe’s wife as one of them).
In short, it seemed to Law it would be helpful if the committee could be prevailed upon to speak through other means. Namely, words.
But while Law’s next email to senior members of the credentials committee produced no better results, their response did clarify why his query was being met with stonewalling and unasked-for directions on how to report churches.
“I believe your question is in reference to Saddleback Church,” the registration secretary informed him. Because of this, he said the committee would be “unable to give a response.”
With 23,000 members spread across 14 campuses, not to mention extension groups around the world that “attend” services online, Saddleback could hardly provide a greater contrast to Arlington Baptist, where Law himself stuffs sermon outlines into Sunday bulletins and makes the spaghetti for Wednesday night bible study.
The megachurch’s founding pastor, Rick Warren, is the author of The Purpose Driven Life, one of the best-selling books of the last few decades. Known for rubbing shoulders with heads of state at the United Nations and World Economic Forum and for counting top bureaucrats like former NIH director, Francis Collins, among his personal friends, Warren has made it plain he considers himself more of an asset to his denomination than his denomination is to him. “We don’t need the Southern Baptist Convention,” he recently told Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief, Russell Moore, during a podcast interview. “They need the 6000 Purpose-Driven churches that are in our fellowship.”
In 2021, Warren had defied the BF&M by ordaining three women, leading to something of a crisis for SBC leadership. Media outlets like The Washington Post were covering Warren’s rebellion with subtle notes of glee, but much of the denomination’s membership was deeply upset. Would the SBC eject their celebrity son, the pastor who, according to his own website, is “America’s most influential spiritual leader”? Or would they overlook the tenets of their own statement of faith?
All of this conjecture was immaterial to Law, however, as he hadn’t been thinking of Saddleback at all. His experience with the churches in his immediate vicinity had simply convinced him that indifference to doctrinal adherence was leading to drift and confusion. He felt a bright line of clarity was in order.
Thus, a month after his initial letter to the executive committee, he determined to attend the SBC’s national meeting and propose a constitutional amendment. It would require Southern Baptist churches to conform to the BF&M on the question of women in the pastorate, just as they were required to do on issues of sexuality.
Delegates (known as messengers) to the annual convention would have the opportunity to consider the question solely on biblical merit, free from any wrangling over famous personalities or their media–boosted power plays.
But then, less than two weeks before the convention, Warren announced he was retiring and named as his replacement a husband-and-wife team. Though Law would not know it for some time, Warren’s decision would become the main obstacle to his hope of giving the SBC the chance to make a clear-cut, up-or-down choice.
Long Lines and New Committees, and Surprise Speakers
The first day of the convention started at 8 am. Law arrived at 7:45, stationing himself near one of ten microphones interspersed throughout a hall that would soon be churning with more than 12,000 attendees. Though he had pre-submitted his amendment by email the night before, there was no guarantee he would actually be granted an opportunity to make a motion as the process is, by all accounts, harrowing.
“There’s only two twenty-minute periods when you can make motions and long lines form for the mics, so they’re hard to get a hold of,” explains Sam Webb, an attorney from Houston who attended the convention as a messenger. “Even once you submit a request to a page and the page submits it to the platform, the platform may or may not call on you. If they do call on you, you only get a couple of minutes to speak. You have lights on you and the echoes within the hall can be incredibly loud, so it’s hard to see and hear.”
Given how easy it would be to miss his chance, Law resolved to continue standing near the mic for the two-and-a-half-hour wait even after Howe came by and pressed him to sit down. His persistence paid off — he wasn’t the first to make a motion as he’d hoped, but he did get his proposal in early and it was quickly seconded. At that point, the committee on the order of business could have scheduled his amendment for an immediate vote. Instead, they sent it to the executive committee, who would then decide whether to bring it forward at the next convention, in the summer of 2023.
At that moment, Law had a choice to make. He could have pulled the amendment out of the committee to force a vote on the floor (and, in fact, that morning friends had nudged him to do so). But senior leaders in the SBC persuaded him to be patient and trust the executive committee to shepherd it through a formal vetting process, something that would also give him more time to drum up support before the 2023 convention.
It was a decision he would later come to regret.
That didn’t mean the issue of women in the pastorate was tabled for 2022, however. At the 2021 convention, a pastor from Louisiana had submitted a motion calling for Saddleback to be disfellowshipped over its ordination of the three women. As with Law’s motion, the credentials committee had decided not to act immediately but rather take a year to consider the matter. They were now due to deliver a decision.
Instead, the committee chairwoman announced they were recommending the creation of a new committee that would spend another year studying the definition of the word “pastor.” After this proposal was met with howls of outrage, one of the six seminary presidents (himself the former chair of an SBC committee), stepped up to a mic to propose another option.
He felt that perhaps the problem was not with the word “pastor” but “cooperation,” and suggested the new committee could instead spend a year studying what it meant to cooperate with the statement of faith. The messengers did not think that word required a year of study either, however, and overwhelmingly rejected this proposal as well.
Then it was time for lunch.
When the meeting reconvened, then-president Ed Litton was announcing standard business from the platform when he was summoned to a hushed exchange with the credentials committee chairwoman. Upon returning to the podium he announced there would be a departure from the agenda to hear from a surprise guest. “We’re gonna take a moment to extend a courtesy to a pastor here from Southern California,” he declared to the darkened hall. “Rick Warren—we want to hear his heart for this convention.”
As The New York Times has highlighted, Saddleback has never “[used] the word Baptist in its name or [foregrounded] any connection to the denomination.” Indeed, at a 2005 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Warren conspicuously distanced his church from the denomination. When an NBC reporter asked if it was part of the SBC, he replied, “No — it was. In the early years, when we first got started, it was a part of the Southern Baptist Convention…basically we cooperated with them in their missions program, but now we’re doing our own missions program.”
Months later, Warren asked Pew to alter its online transcript, saying he misspoke. But The Baptist Standard observed that he has always downplayed any affiliation with the SBC because of “what Warren calls ‘widespread misperceptions about Southern Baptists.’” And sources who have been in SBC leadership for decades tell me that before 2022, they can only recall Warren attending the convention a couple of times in 35 years. Those occasions coincided with his being offered prime speaking roles.
Nonetheless, Litton gave Warren a VIP welcome, permitting him to make a speech that ran over six minutes — more than double the three-minute time limit imposed on everyone else speaking from the floor. In it, Warren cited a litany of statistical proof for his church’s success. He noted that he “grew [Saddleback] to become the largest church in this convention” and that “78,157 members of our church signed our membership covenant after taking our membership class.” He even contrasted the impact of his life’s work with that of SBC institutions, saying, “I’ve had the privilege for 43 years of training 1.1 million pastors. That, sorry friends, is more than all the seminaries put together.”
When he was done, Litton thanked him and said he believed Warren could “feel the warmth, love, and appreciation of Southern Baptists.”
Law tells me that in the many SBC conventions he’s attended over the years, he has never seen anything like the special privilege Warren was afforded.
“That never happens. The parliamentarian might let somebody step up on the platform to offer a word or two on a point of a procedure, but to clear the microphones and say, ‘We have a guest at microphone three,’ is unheard of as far as I know.”
He adds that as the question of Saddleback’s membership was not being debated, there was no mechanism in Robert’s Rules of Order (the classic parliamentary manual that governs SBC proceedings) for the platform to recognize Warren.  “At no point in time at that meeting was Saddleback under the threat of being disfellowshipped. Nor was that motion offered. So procedurally it was completely and utterly out of the blue.”
Webb was shocked by the decision on other grounds: “Here were SBC leaders pressuring people like Mike Law to sit down, telling him he can’t stand near a microphone until the agenda gets to motions, but all of a sudden Rick Warren is handed the mic to essentially give a grandstanding, defensive speech over an issue that wasn’t even being addressed by the platform? It was surreal.”
Additionally, Webb notes that the platform cut off other speakers mid-sentence because their time ran out or their comments were ruled out of order on technicalities: “So it was one of these really strange moments where you think to yourself, why is it that Rick Warren gets this partiality, this favor with seemingly no time limit? It was really quite discouraging.”
After Warren’s speech, the credentials chairwoman announced that the committee had “heard the messengers” and were withdrawing their recommendation to study any words for a year. But since they’d already confirmed that Saddleback would not be disfellowshipped then, they still had another year to consider the matter before they had to make a report to the denomination again.
Still, the seed of questioning definitions was planted. And the intramural debate that followed the convention, in which the meaning of particular words and phrases were minutely dissected to determine if the authors could have intended something other than their obvious meaning, would sound familiar to any Constitutional attorney. Those who wanted to open pulpits to females argued that “pastor” might have referred only to “senior pastor” or “teaching pastor.” Those who didn’t argued the plain-text, originalist position.
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There is no need to rehearse the litany of evidence that children raised apart from their married, biological mothers and fathers fare worse on all manner of social, educational, and developmental outcomes. But it might be necessary to start speaking forthrightly about the more specific emerging evidence that children conceived via donorship suffer from “profound struggles with their origins and identities” and that those raised in same-sex households are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and sexual abuse.

Learning this month that 12 Senate Republicans had signed on with Democrats to advance the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act left many Christians stunned. Most shocking was the “yes” vote from Roy Blunt, a practicing Southern Baptist who served for three years as president of a small, private university in the theologically conservative denomination.
How, many wondered, could a political leader with such deep roots in one of the most traditional branches of evangelicalism so publicly undermine the foremost human institution created by God? Those asking must not have been paying attention to the shift that has taken place in elite evangelical circles in recent years.
Christianity Today’s Initial Concession
One of the earliest signs that the commitment to defend biblical marriage was weakening came from Christianity Today CEO Timothy Dalrymple. In 2012, seven years before he took the helm of the publication founded by Billy Graham, he went on record arguing that it might be “time to stop opposing same-sex marriage as a matter of law.”
Dalrymple assured his readers that he’s among those who believe “it’s biblically and theologically clear that marriage was created and ordained by God for the union of male and female.” But he also encouraged them to “humbly acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge, and recognize the possibility that we are mistaken.”
Calling marriage an issue of “secondary importance,” he went on to say that Christians need to ask themselves “whether it is still wise to press for American law to recognize only heterosexual unions.” He worried that continuing to insist on marriage as founded by God would “harm our witness” and suggested the church’s credibility might be better spent on more important issues.
Note, Dalrymple was suggesting believers should capitulate on the issue of marriage three years before the Supreme Court discovered that gay partners have a constitutional right to have the government’s blessing on their affection (though, interestingly, only months after former President Barack Obama announced he had evolved on the question of whether the state should legalize gay marriage).
A key factor, Dalrymple said, is that homosexual unions don’t have clear victims, as abortion does. He closed the essay by intimating that he was still working out his views on whether it is worth continuing to argue for the biblical definition of marriage.
By February 2019, three months before he officially ascended to the top position at Christianity Today, there were signs he had settled those views. It was then that Dalrymple traveled to Mexico to attend the wedding ceremony of a gay co-worker officiated by prominent LGBT-affirming pastor and author Jonathan Merritt.
The pictures posted on a public website are festive, even reverent, showing Dalrymple and his wife participating in a candle-lighting processional and hitting the dance floor with abandon in honor of the two men. It seems worth reiterating that the wedding involved not a relative, but a co-worker. Thus, Dalrymple was presumably under no familial pressure to attend. The wedding was also in another country, providing a fairly obvious excuse to decline if he wanted to avoid hurt feelings. Yet still, he went.
Celebrating Sin
As the question of attending same-sex wedding ceremonies and celebrations has become more pressing, many theologians have said that Christians actually discredit the faith by agreeing to participate.
Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has written that Christians cannot celebrate what they know to be sin. “At some point, attendance will involve congratulating the couple for their union,” he said. “If you can’t congratulate the couple, how can you attend?”
Pastor and author John Piper has addressed the issue in likeminded terms. “To celebrate this lifestyle is to celebrate the destruction of human beings, and that is hateful,” he said. “It would be like saying, ‘Let’s all have a meeting and celebrate greed. Let’s all have a meeting and celebrate adultery.’ Anybody that joins in celebrating sin is sinning.”
What’s the relevance of Dalrymple’s decision to celebrate a gay union three years ago and write about abandoning the legal fight for traditional marriage 10 years ago? It is how his outlook may be influencing the framing of the Respect for Marriage Act in evangelicalism’s flagship publication today.
The only essay Christianity Today has published regarding the bill has been in favor of it as a necessary concession in a pluralistic nation. “All in all, RMA is a modest but good day’s work. It shows that religious liberty champions and LGBT advocates can work together for the common good,” writes law professor Carl H. Esbeck. (I reached out to Christianity Today to ask about Dalrymple’s views and his decision to participate in his co-worker’s same-sex wedding and did not receive a response.)
Like Dalrymple’s 2012 article, Esbeck spares little thought to how subsequent generations may be affected by this “good day’s work.”
Nor does the President of the National Association of Evangelicals, Pastor Walter Kim.
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In a recent op-ed for the U.K. Sunday Times, Douglas Murray observed that the reason the wheels have come off the #MeToo movement is that it discredited itself by overstating its case and conflating unmistakable instances of abuse with messy adult entanglements. “The MeToo movement had some cases that were very clear-cut. Others were not,” he wrote. “And the insistence that a historic reckoning was occurring made the line between the two uncomfortably easy to breach.”
The same line-blurring could describe what is happening in the second-largest religious denomination in the U.S. (and the largest Protestant denomination). Known for its theological conservatism that includes reserving the pastorate for men, the nearly 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is currently undergoing what many major media outlets are characterizing as a reckoning over sexual abuse.

Indeed, some go further, with ex-SBC leader Russell Moore calling it an “apocalypse” and evangelical pundit David French calling it a “horror,” proof the denomination does not merely contain some bad apples, but is, in fact, a “diseased” orchard.

While purple prose has been flowing freely in regards to the SBC, little of it has bothered to detail what the apocalypse looks like in hard statistical terms. That’s likely because, according to the recently released report generating all the coverage, a total of 409 accused abusers were found over the course of 21 years in approximately 47,000 SBC churches.
Bombshell
Lyman Stone, demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, told me the actual data contained in the abuse report, the result of an eight-month investigation by Guidepost Solutions, does not come close to meriting the hyperbolic terms that are peppering coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.
“Statistically speaking,” he said, “there were not that many cases. This is not actually that common of a problem in this church body.”
Stone went on to estimate that there are about 100,000 to 150,000 staffers in SBC churches, but many thousands more volunteer in their ministries. Of all the allegations that Guidepost investigators reviewed, they found only two  that appear to involve current SBC workers.
“If you wanted to argue that based on this report, executives of the SBC mismanaged the cases that were brought to them, then fine,” Stone said. “But if you want to say this shows that [the SBC] is corrupt, hypocritical, and rife with sexual abuse — the report doesn’t demonstrate that.”
Stone added that he was shocked that Guidepost investigators only found two current cases, given how many exist in the general population. “I mean, if I had been betting beforehand, I would have bet for a couple of hundred,” he said. “Because if you’re talking about 100,000 to 150,000 people who are disproportionately men, just your baseline rate of sex offenders tells you, you should have gotten a couple thousand sex offenders in there just by random chance.”
He concluded that while the report may show the need for reforms in responding to allegations, it does not show an endemic problem of sexual abuse, adding, “It is important to distinguish these.”
Corroboration
Advocates like attorney and Larry Nassar victim Rachael Denhollander have argued that misconduct within the SBC isn’t just a question of numbers. They also take issue with the executive committee’s resistance to creating a public database of the “credibly accused,” assembled by third-party investigators like Guidepost. But a deep dive into how Guidepost handled the most prominent allegation of abuse in its SBC report should set off alarm bells for anyone interested in maintaining a biblical standard of justice.
From the broad outlines of Jennifer Lyell’s story, it’s easy to understand why the members of the executive committee might have felt some hesitation to unquestioningly label her as a victim of abuse.
In 2004, Lyell was a 26-year-old master of divinity student when she met cultural anthropology professor David Sills, who is 23 years her senior, on the Louisville campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Shortly after, she became close with the entire Sills family, including David’s wife, Mary, as well as his college-age son and teenage daughter. She alleges that it was on a mission trip with Sills and his daughter that Sills first “sexually acted” against her.
That incident, she says, began a pattern of abuse that lasted 12 years until she was 38, continuing even as she moved to Chicago in 2006 and, later, Nashville, to further her career in publishing. During the time that Lyell was a publishing executive, she often worked with Sills, contracting with him for books, and, arguably, holding more power over his career than he did over hers.
In essence, Lyell was claiming that Sills was able to continue committing acts of sexual abuse against her even after she’d left the state because she would return to visit the family.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement and two years after her contact with Sills had ended, Lyell told her boss, Eric Geiger, at the Christian publisher Lifeway of the allegedly abusive relationship. Geiger, in turn, arranged a meeting with Southern Seminary’s president, Dr. Albert Mohler. In short order, Sills’ employment was terminated. A year then passed before Lyell provided her account to the Baptist Press for an article she hoped would present her as Sills’ victim.
As the house media organ of the SBC, the Baptist Press (BP) falls under the authority of the executive committee. When committee members read Lyell’s account, which did not contain any concrete description of violent behavior, in a March 2019 BP draft, they had doubts about framing it as she wanted, in part because they feared Sills might sue. They asked BP editors to replace the word “abuse” with “morally inappropriate relationship,” though the story retained a quote wherein Lyell accuses Sills of “grooming and taking advantage” of her. The editors informed Lyell of the change shortly before going to print.
Once the story was published, commenters on BP’s Facebook page criticized the fact that Sills had lost his job while Lyell had not, prompting her to demand BP restore the term “abuse” to the article or link to a statement from her rebutting their word choice.
Months of sporadic back-and-forth communications followed, in which committee members weighed options for coming to terms with Lyell. Then, at an October 2019 SBC conference on sexual abuse, Denhollander recounted Lyell’s story from the stage, identifying Sills by name and calling Lyell a “survivor of horrific predatory abuse” who was “cast away” by BP editors and the executive committee. Almost immediately after, Denhollander threatened the executive committee with a defamation suit on Lyell’s behalf.
Executive committee sources who agreed to speak with me anonymously say that the SBC’s insurance agency did not want to settle with Lyell, believing she did not have a strong case. But already facing bad press over Denhollander’s conference comments, committee members feared further fallout from dragging the issue out. In May 2020, the same sources say the committee paid Lyell just over $1 million, thinking that would be the end of the matter. It wasn’t.
When Guidepost issued its report on May 22, Lyell was by far the foremost accuser in it.
Again and again in the 35-plus pages that feature her case, Guidepost investigators claim Lyell’s version of events is “corroborated.” What that would mean in a police investigation is that witnesses offered other evidence against Sills. What it appears to have meant to Guidepost is that Lyell told her story to Geiger and Mohler, and both men said they believed it, according to the Baptist Press. In fact, Geiger, the first person to whom Lyell revealed the alleged abuse, told me Guidepost never even asked him to provide statements or evidence.
The report does briefly mention testimony from unnamed employees at Sills’ missions agency and his former pastor — referring to Dr. Bill Cook — but both Guidepost and the task force refused numerous requests to provide me with the agency staffers’ specific comments. And Dr. Cook told me that in his case, once again, all “corroborate” means is that he found Lyell’s story credible, not that he had any additional evidence to offer.
Guidepost defends its choice to refer to Sills as an “abuser” rather than an “alleged abuser” by noting that they didn’t find any evidence that “indicated that the interactions between Ms. Lyell and Professor Sills was anything but sexual abuse.”
Perhaps that’s because they weren’t looking very hard.
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