The system is broken, and it can’t be fixed.

I don’t say that lightly. I say it after years of watching Southern Baptists pretend the house is sturdy while the joists groan, the roof leaks, and the foundation sinks under our feet.

The SBC has a Credentials Committee whose stated job is to guard the front door, to say who is in friendly cooperation and who is out. In practice, it functions like a concierge—polite nods, soft answers, and a studied refusal to enforce what we all supposedly confess.

The national committee punts. The state committees mirror it. And the result is a denomination that brushes off disobedience, rebrands compromise as prudence, and then congratulates itself for “cooperation.”

The failure was formalized in June when the SBC couldn’t even muster the supermajority to add a plain-English line to the constitution that only qualified men may serve as any kind of pastor. A clear, biblical standard. A bright line. Sixty-one percent said yes. That’s a majority, but it isn’t conviction. It’s the lukewarm math of a denomination that wants deniability more than fidelity.

When two-thirds are required, a comfortable minority can keep the door propped open—and they did. The message to every state conventions was that they could do as they pleased, reinterpret the Baptist Faith and Message however they like, and if anyone complained, hide behind the failure of that amendment.

“The messengers have spoken,” we are told—by which they mean, “We will not be bound.”

Into that vacuum steps Fielder Church of Arlington, Texas, not as an outlier but as a case study. You’ve read my reporting on this church before. Fielder’s lead pastor, Jason Paredes, publicly celebrated having women pastors at his church while simultaneously serving the very denominational processes tasked with addressing the women-pastor problem.

That was not a rumor. It was documented, dated, and plain. The circle was complete—the fox was not merely in the henhouse, this same pastor was on the committee to study improvements to the henhouse lock.

When the heat rose, Fielder didn’t repent. They rebranded. The public staff page now reads like a thesaurus exercise in evasion—“Lead Shepherd,” “Executive Shepherd,” “Children’s Shepherd,” “College Shepherd,” “Foster Care & Adoption Shepherd.”

Pastor becomes shepherd but the substance stays put. The titles change to slip past the bouncer, while prior and parallel bios still betray the reality—“Girls Student Pastor,” for instance, remains in black and white. Words do not sanctify disobedience. They only make it smug.

Before:

After:

Then came the test of the state system. The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention met this week. The question on the floor was straightforward. Would the SBTC treat Fielder’s word games as repentance or as rebellion? Reports from inside the hall were unambiguous that the credentials process did not move to remove Fielder from friendly cooperation.

An effort to unseat messengers from this congregation fizzled. The committee met, talked, and—predictably—declined to act. If the national system is a bureaucratic cul-de-sac, the state system is its frontage road. Different lanes. Same destination.

No enforcement.
No discipline.
Just process.

This is exactly what happens when a denomination refuses to say what Scripture says and insists on saying it with margins. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 is clear enough for honest people that the office of pastor is limited to qualified men. The SBC constitution could have made that clarity operational, but it chose not to.

Now the state conventions have all the plausible deniability they need: “We’re following the BFM.” “We’re following our bylaws.” “We’re following the spirit of cooperation.” And churches like Fielder have all the semantic camouflage they want. “We don’t have women pastors—we have women shepherds,” which in practice means the same thing under a different label.

What does a broken system do when confronted with disobedience? It praises intentions, lauds “missional impact,” and changes the subject to numbers. We are told—often by men wearing the lapel pins of influence—that “we send more missionaries” than anyone, that “we give more money” than anyone, that our cooperative program is the envy of the evangelical world.

I’ve heard that speech before. The United Methodist Church boasted of global reach, storied institutions, and a missionary footprint larger than many nations. They bragged into their own collapse—splitting, bleeding out members, selling buildings, and catechizing no one in the faith once delivered to the saints. Bureaucracies are very good at counting. They are very poor at repenting.

Southern Baptists are on the same road, and the mile markers are obvious. When a majority will vote for clarity but not at the cost of controversy, the bureaucracy learns a lesson—wait them out, stall it in committee, weaponize procedure, and the heat will pass.

When state conventions see the national body shrug at enforcement, they take the hint—relabel, defer, interpret, redefine. When local churches learn that “pastor” can be massaged into “shepherd,” they keep the structure and trade the sign on the door. And when critics point out the game, they are told to stop being divisive—while the actual division is happening at the level of doctrine and practice.

The point of discipline is not to flex power. It’s to guard a gospel people. If the office of pastor is defined by Scripture—and it is—then to ignore that definition is not a quarrel about nomenclature. It’s rebellion against the God who gave the office and the qualifications. That’s why this matters so much. It isn’t because titles make us twitchy, but because obedience is not optional. “Did God actually say?” is still the oldest mantra of such rebels, and the modern version is:

“Did He really mean pastor, or could He have meant shepherd?”
or, “Did He only mean ‘lead pastor’?”

When the line is this bright, the hemming and hawing is its own confession.

And so we come to the 800-pound gorilla in the room that nobody seems to want to acknowledge. The system cannot be fixed because the people running it do not want it fixed. The votes prove it. The committees prove it. The state conventions prove it. If Southern Baptists wanted a clean, enforceable standard on the pastorate, they would have it already.

Instead, they chose the warm bath of ambiguity, to keep churches like Fielder in the tent while they kept women in the office—so long as the nameplate says “shepherd.” They chose larger numbers over a faithful congregation. They chose to please the world, to keep peace with the platforms, to keep budgets humming and metrics shiny. And they will have their reward, which is nothing more than the applause of men and the slow evaporation of our integrity.

I am not impressed by missionary headcounts recited as absolution for doctrinal compromise. God isn’t either. He rejected Saul’s sacrifices when Saul refused to obey. He leveled Israel’s boasts when Israel bowed to the high places. He does not grade on a cooperative curve.

If we send ten thousand missionaries while teaching our sons and daughters that God’s order is negotiable, we are exporting our rebellion under the banner of cooperation. The United Methodists learned that too late. Southern Baptists are determined to learn it on schedule.

Fielder Church should have been the easy case. Public statements. Public titles. Public practice. Instead, it became the perfect demonstration of our allergy to clarity. The national committee dallied. The amendment failed. The state committee shrugged. The church re-labeled. And the people cheered “unity.” Unity it may be, but not the kind we’re called to. It is unity with the world’s demands dressed in church clothes.

Again, the system is broken, and it can’t be fixed because fixing requires repentance, not rebranding. It requires men who fear God more than headlines, who prefer a smaller, holier convention to a larger, hollower one, who would rather be faithful with five than famous with fifty thousand.

Southern Baptists have voted, repeatedly, to remain unfixed, and have told the Lord with their procedures what they will and will not obey. And He has heard them.

You can keep the committees. You can keep the word games. You can keep the missionary statistics rolled out like incense to sanctify our drift. Personally, I’d prefer something far simpler and far scarier: a denomination that tells the truth and obeys it.

But who am I?

Until then, the door stays open, the shepherds wear borrowed robes, and the watchmen on the wall trade their trumpets for calculators. The numbers look great—right up to the cliff.