Willy Rice is right: Southern Baptists need a gender statement

Newly elected Southern Baptist Convention President Willy Rice, addressing the SBC Executive Committee's fall meeting, proposed amending the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, the convention's official "confessional statement." He told the Executive Committee he is asking it to recommend that the convention add "an article [...] to address the specific issue of gender and human sexuality."

President Rice went on to say:

"It will send a message externally, and it will send a message internally, that Southern Baptists will not bow down to the music of this age. We are not eroding. We are not evading. We are not equivocating. We are enduring like a mighty tree planted by a stream of water."

He then offered an example of what he had in mind, modeled after a statement adopted by First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida:

"I believe that God creates people in His image as either male or female and that this creation is a fixed matter of human biology, not individual choice. I believe marriage is instituted by God, not government, is between one man and one woman, and is the only context for sexual desire and expression."

The SBC Executive Committee will decide at its February meeting whether to bring a proposed amendment to the convention's annual meeting in June. To pass, the amendment would need a two-thirds vote at both the 2027 and 2028 annual conventions.

In making this suggestion, Rice stands well within the Baptist confessional tradition. Ever since Baptists emerged as a recognized group of Christian believers in the 16th century, in the earliest days of the Reformation, they have been a confessional people.

When the Southern Baptist Convention adopted the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, having adopted earlier versions in 1925 and 1963, the revision committee, on which I served, opened the proposed revision with an introductory statement:

"Baptists are a people of deep beliefs and cherished doctrines. Throughout our history we have been a confessional people, adopting statements of faith as a witness to our beliefs and a pledge of our faithfulness to the doctrines revealed in Holy Scripture."

Baptists issue confessions "concerning those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us."

Historically, Baptist confessions have served two purposes. First, they proclaim to the world what Baptists believe and bear personal testimony to Baptists' adherence to those doctrines.

Second, confessions teach each new generation of Baptists what Baptists believe and what makes them Baptist.

Baptist confessions also reflect the issues in dispute in the society to which Baptists are called to witness. Rice is proposing an emphasis on gender and marriage because significant elements of our society are questioning, or outright denying, clear biblical teachings.

The debate over gender is, in reality, the ultimate rebellion against God. In Genesis, the book of beginnings, the Bible declares with succinct clarity:

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:26–27)

If God created us male and female, then consider an individual human being who says, "No, I don't want to be what God made me! I am going to decide for myself what I am going to be. In essence, I am going to be my own God and recognize no other God, no matter what my biology dictates to me" — that is the ultimate expression of rebellion against God and of the desire to be our own God.

It is the same temptation that felled Lucifer in Heaven (Isaiah 14:13–16) and that Satan used against Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1–8). Satan "said unto the woman, 'Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil'" (Genesis 3:4–5).

Adam and Eve believed the lie that they would "be as gods," and Satan tricked them into the same sin that caused his own fall — the desire to be his own God.

In this age, Rice is right to ask Southern Baptists to emphasize both the sovereignty of God and the sanctity of holy marriage.