Scotland is both an example and a warning to other Western liberal democracies when the governing parties are taken over by the Woke progressives. Social “justice” issues – from their perspective – are their primary concern. Sometimes it seems as though when one “progressive” country goes so far, the next wants to go even further.

Transgender ideology is apparently an issue of some importance for the Scottish government. A government elected for the purpose of obtaining Scottish independence has double the number of civil servants working on its proposed Gender Recognition Act, than it does working on the proposed independence referendum, which it hopes to have done by the summer.
Part of this is because of the pushback against promises made by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP about allowing people to self-identify. Feminist activists and others are rightly concerned about where this is all going to lead. There has been significant opposition within the governing party itself – with the finance minister, Kate Forbes, herself a committed Christian, warning that many people are being silenced and intimidated from speaking.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) warned that the proposed GRA should be paused because not enough account has been taken of women’s rights.
Nicola Sturgeon denies, despite all the evidence, that there is any conflict between transgender rights and sex-based rights. Anyone who dares to question that is automatically labelled ‘transphobic’ – but when even the Guardian is warning the Scottish government that they are going too far, you would think that this might give pause for thought.
The Census where facts don’t matter.
Not that this has stopped the Scottish government from acting as though its policy were already law. In the upcoming census the government are allowing people to put down whatever sex they want (as far as I am aware this does not apply to whatever age you want, wherever you want to live or whatever ethnicity you want to be).
Given that government policy is based upon the census this is a serious issue. The Fair Play for Women organisation is taking the Scottish Government to court, arguing that sex is legally defined in law and cannot just be arbitrarily overridden by a government committed to this strange ideology. The government argues that we ‘need to evolve with the times’.
It is somewhat puzzling as to why this issue is seen as so important. But Scotland is both an example and a warning to other Western liberal democracies when the governing parties are taken over by the Woke progressives. Social ‘justice’ issues – from their perspective – are their primary concern.
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I can’t help but wonder if we are so drawn to charismatic preachers because of their obvious confidence. Perhaps what we call “charisma” is actually just confidence. I remember the first dozen or so times I watched John Piper preach. He certainly helped me see things in Scripture that I hadn’t seen before. But in hindsight, I think I was more drawn to the serious confidence he took in the pulpit. This stuff was real and it was important and he exuded a kind of confidence I was drawn to. He wasn’t posing questions without answering them. He wasn’t doing hermeneutical gymnastics to avoid offending people. He was confident about the person, work, and worth of Christ.

Attributes of a Good Pastor
One of my congregants wanted me to be more alluring, more charismatic, more humorous. He wanted me to hold his attention such that I would keep him coming back every week.
This is certainly understandable. Most of us enjoy listening to faithful brothers like Matt Chandler, John Piper, David Platt, or Kevin DeYoung. And for good reason. These brothers are charismatic. They’re funny, radiantly passionate, wicked smart, handsome, and/or comfortable in their own skin. I am none of these things. But the instinct to be those things in order to grow a church is strong, isn’t it?
But even as we feel this understandable pull, we need to more properly assess and orient ourselves. We need to understand what’s ultimately more stable and more alluring. As it’s been said, “What you win them with is what you win them to.”
Charisma is helpful, important even. But I want to focus on other attributes that are even more important for the pastor: character, capability, conviction, and compassion.
Character
When Paul was writing to the church plant in Crete, he told Titus to “appoint elders in every town” so that he might “put what remained into order” (Titus 1:5). In case Titus might be unsure what elders should be like, Paul continued:
. . . if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination. For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined. (Titus 1:6–8)
He then explains to Titus why character is so important:
For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” This testimony is true. (Titus 1:10–13)
Paul knows that if the church of Jesus Christ is going to testify to the holiness of God, it needs to be led by godly pastors. In other words, as Titus put what remained into order, he needed the character of the pastors to shine brightly against the dark night of the Crete skies. So it is with us.
Capability
For pastors, character is necessary but insufficient. They must also be “able to teach” (1 Tim. 3:2). Elsewhere, Paul says pastors need to “be able to give instruction in sound doctrine” (Titus 1:9).
The emphasis here is on clarity and biblical soundness. Is the pastor faithfully distinguishing between what is true and not true? A pastor’s teaching doesn’t need to be flashy, but it does need to be faithful and clear.
Conviction
Jesus was and is the truth (John 14:6). The church is the pillar and buttress of truth (1 Tim. 3:15). Therefore, every pastor-planter must have clear convictions about the truth.
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Last year, messengers to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention authorized an internal investigation of the convention’s Executive Committee (EC). The motion the convention adopted created a task force and directed the president to name sex abuse experts who would hire and oversee an outside, independent expert to investigate “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives” by members of the EC staff or board of trustees, going back to 2000. It also authorized them to recommend best practices.

Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention meets in Anaheim. Delegates (called “messengers”) will face two proposals relating to sex abuse. All evangelicals interested in healthy ministries should take note of what’s going on in the SBC.
As things stand today, the proposals ask for blank checks, secured only by leaders’ promises of a blue sky. But Southern Baptists should not vote for anything they don’t understand, and should not accept legal responsibility for a half-baked “process” that is not yet just and not yet complete.
How We Got to This Point
Last year, messengers to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention authorized an internal investigation of the convention’s Executive Committee (EC). The motion the convention adopted created a task force and directed the president to name sex abuse experts who would hire and oversee an outside, independent expert to investigate “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives” by members of the EC staff or board of trustees, going back to 2000. It also authorized them to recommend best practices.
The report and recommendations come to the task force, which would prepare and submit a final report and recommendations before the 2022 annual meeting. The president appointed his task force of Baptists (and some non-Baptists), called the SBC Sex Abuse Task Force (SATF), which contracted with Guidepost Solutions.
Two weeks ago, Guidepost’s report and recommendations were released. The report described a deeply dysfunctional organization. It presented the SBC’s lawyers as paralyzed by litigation risk, refusing to meaningfully engage information brought to them by abuse victims and advocates.
The report also presents the EC trustees as never asking hard questions, preferring for staff to solve any problems quietly and out of public view. The report also included a bombshell sexual assault allegation against a prominent pastor who was a former SBC president, and (until the report) a high official at the SBC’s domestic missionary entity, the North American Missions Board (NAMB).
Except for the bombshell about the NAMB leader, most of the incidents and individuals had been previously disclosed online or in print. Some people welcomed Guidepost’s recommendations, and others praised the narrower, and materially different, recommendations of the SATF issued on June 1.
But there was also widespread criticism of the recommendations as not biblical, not Baptist, and not just. Guidepost proposed that the SBC should maintain an “offender information system,” a public list of those “credibly accused” of sexual abuse and those who “aided and abetted” them. As Matthew Schmitz noted in the Wall Street Journal, this standard “trample[s] the rights of the accused.” In the American Reformer, one of us compared the process to federal Title IX tribunals imposed by the Obama administration on colleges, another “process” that was famously criticized by legal experts for lacking adequate fairness.
Independent Contractor Celebrates Gay Sex
Then, just after the report’s release, Guidepost kicked off a public celebration of LGBT Pride Month, announcing on Twitter that it was an ally of progress and equality, directly opposed to the declaration of the SBC’s “Baptist Faith & Message” that homosexuality and same-sex marriage is sin. Guidepost’s CEO is a graduate of Baylor University, a historically Baptist school, and it had purportedly hired a number of “Baptist subject matter experts,” but Guidepost evidently declined to reverse course.
Clearly, the Task Force has been caught off-guard, first by the Guidepost recommendations, then by its flagrant opposition to the convention’s theology of sex, marriage, and what constitutes an abuse of sexuality. Once touted as experts that understood Baptists, Guidepost is now excused as a mere private investigator.
Also, rather than forward Guidepost’s recommendations, the task force claims they were always tasked with reproducing recommendations to suit the SBC, even though only a few days separate the report’s release and the SBC’s annual meeting. Even the SATF’s recommendations appear tentative; the initial recommendations were published on June 1. A week later, the task force substantially revised them and deleted prior drafts from their blog.
So it is concerning that the task force is resorting to the same dysfunctional habits that Guidepost criticized in the old guard. The task force is letting legal risk aversion limit the experts’ recommendations. And it is trying to get carte blanche authority from messengers to do the sausage-making for them, out of public view.
Messengers should not give their SATF friends a blank check, any more than the EC trustees should have given their lawyer friends a blank check. Even good people with good intentions are poorly served by unaccountable systems.
An Extrajudicial Process for Judging Accusations
Enter Matthew Martens, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for death row inmates and a former clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Martens is a gifted advocate, but, by his own description, not an SBC insider nor a messenger to any prior convention, so perhaps he is not as familiar with the culture of dysfunctional SBC experts asking to be trusted to do the right thing in the back room.
Writing for the SBC’s in-house news service, Martens says SBC messengers should approve the SATF’s Recommendation II, including blanket authority to “create a ministry check website.” This appears to be a much-reduced version of the “offender information system” recommended by Guidepost.
The “MinistryCheck” site proposes to keep a permanent record of pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees, and volunteers who have been “credibly accused” (a minimal standard that the accusation is more likely than not true) of sex acts that violate local laws. If a judge or jury has not decided the question, the SATF proposes that outside lawyers could be hired, in some cases by the SBC, to write opinion letters after an investigation.
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