Just when we thought the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) couldn’t possibly fail harder than it already is, Heath Lambert has arrived on the scene to help them decline some more. This hardline Old Guard pastor demonstrates exactly why the SBC is in decline—and why it won’t be leaving decline any time soon. Today, let’s explore his latest attempts to tank his own denomination.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 3/27/2026. I’m still recovering, but I’m getting there. I hope you like today’s post!)
SITUATION REPORT: I can just imagine Heath Lambert twirling his mustache while he suggested this dumb idea
I laughed out loud when I saw this news story recently: On February 5th, SBC pastor Heath Lambert announced that he just might formally suggest the SBC change its name at their big Annual Meeting this year. He wants the SBC to become known as “Baptists Debating the Existence of Women Pastors,” or “BDEWP for short.”
A lot of people might have assumed he was one of the Pretend Progressives faction of the SBC, griping about the Old Guard hardliners’ nonstop focus on this issue.
But NOPE! Dude is as Old Guard as it gets—and as sexist as one might expect, too.
And he’s very proud of this idea of his. Around the time he made that video, he put out Instagram reels and did interviews with local press about the “name change.”
Obviously, Heath Lambert doesn’t really want the SBC to change their name. He just wants the Pretend Progressives to shut up already about women pastors, which is the current huge important culture war that his faction has decided matters way more than the SBC’s ongoing sex abuse crisis.
A quick rundown on Heath Lambert
As I always do when I run across WTAF stories like this one, I immediately looked up this guy’s name in my archives. And yes, in 2023 we talked about him twice! He gets a brief mention here as the leader of a “biblical counseling” organization. (In a moment, we’ll go into more detail about what that is.) He got a coveted guest-star spot here. In that post, we went into great detail about his background, but here’s the skinny:
He’s a Calvinist who graduated from what’s probably an SBC seminary in 2009. Right away, he began writing books about “biblical counseling” and teaching that topic at that same seminary as an associate professor. The organization he leads now, ACBC (Association of Certified Biblical Counselors), made him its executive director by 2014. Seriously, this guy snagged that role young! Nowadays, he leads an SBC church in Jacksonville, does a podcast, and struggles along with the Old Guard to take control of the SBC at last.
“Biblical counseling” is an extremely evangelical form of faux-therapy. It focuses on correct Jesusing as the solution to mental illnesses and life’s problems. That’s exactly what he thought in 2014 would have saved Robin Williams’ life. As he wrote then:
I don’t know if Robin Williams ever heard these words from Jesus summoning from despair to hope all those who would trust in Him. Now that Williams has died, I find myself praying for a church that will stand up with strong resolve to point people laboring under the burden of depression to Jesus Christ, who alone gives rest.
This guy is repulsive in every single way. But don’t worry about him suffering due to his own ideology. When it comes to his own real-world problems, like nerve compressions in his brain, he seeks out cutting-edge medical care repeatedly. He knows when to put down the Happy Pretendy Fun Time Game when need be.
Heath Lambert really despises women
Like a lot of these Old Guard guys, Heath Lambert views women as his enemies. He talks nonstop about his ideal world, where women always “submit” to their menfolk, particularly their husbands, and never dare to dream of leading any group that includes men.
That’s why he and his faction, the Old Guard, want another Conservative Resurgence. The first one erupted in the 1970s because women were making dangerous inroads to pastoral power. By 1999, the hardliners had won: the SBC adopted a new creed that specifically forbade women from being SBC pastors.
And yet somehow, women continued to become SBC pastors. The civil war began looking more and more like it had failed in its primary goal.
By the end of the 2010s, SBC hardliners began agitating for another Conservative Resurgence. The first one clearly hadn’t gone far enough to trample SBC women’s callings and burdens. (These are Christianese words that mean, respectively, divine marching orders and divinely-given feelings of obligation.) Clearly, women needed another messy object lesson about their real importance level to their male overlords.
Unfortunately, at the same time journalists exposed the SBC’s huge sex abuse crisis to the entire world. These journalists called it “Abuse of Faith.” Since the story dropped in 2019, the SBC has done next to nothing about it. The Old Guard wants to ignore it. It’s not their problem, even though they knew full well it was happening and did nothing to stop it. No, it’s a local church problem. Everyone just needs to focus on evangelism. Well, and male pastors. Always, always male pastors. Never forget the power of penises.
The result is an ongoing purity spiral as the hardliners demand everyone in the SBC either submit to their vision of the denomination—or leave.
(Their enemies, the Pretend Progressives, aren’t a whole lot better. They are also misogynists-for-Jesus and want desperately to ignore the sex abuse crisis. But they win elections by making SBC-lings think they’re totally going to fix things. The rot goes all the way to the core, here.)
Hardliners like Heath Lambert want to make the SBC even more extremist—but there’s a wee little problem there
Subtitle this one “A heathen wielding a spreadsheet.”
Unfortunately for the Heath Lamberts of the SBC, demographics nowadays are in a whole different place than they were during the last civil war.
See, the Old Guard would absolutely love another huge Conservative Resurgence. They thirst and hunger for it. They’re positive that once the new one ends, the SBC will finally be the utterly fundamentalist hardline evangelical engine of their dreams.
There’s just one problem with that idea, and it can be easily seen in a spreadsheet of their own self-reported stats.
The first Conservative Resurgence ran from roughly 1975-1999. During those years, the SBC grew consistently from 12.7M to 15.8M members. Obviously, as the SBC drove out less hardline churches things bounced around a bit, but overall it experienced very strong growth. Its number of churches grew from almost 35k to 41k. More importantly, Cooperative Program giving, which funds all the SBC’s denomination-wide ventures, grew from USD$41M in 1975 to $167M in 1999. At the same time, total receipts, which were their go-to money metric for a long time, grew from $1.3B in 1975 to $7.7B in 1999. (The SBC’s reporting of undesignated receipts wasn’t set in stone yet, but it went from $2.9B in 1985 to $5.6B in 1999.)
All of these are great numbers for the SBC. Despite the huge civil war going on in the denomination, it was still solidly growing—at least until 2006, when it began to decline in earnest.
This time around, though, things look extremely different. One might even say they look damning.
An utterly untenable situation for the SBC
After the Conservative Resurgence ended, hardliners largely owned the SBC. Their latest kicked-up fight began around 2018. From 2006 till 2024 (the last year of metrics we have right now), membership fell from 16.3M to 12.7M. Church numbers grew at first from 44k to a height of 47k, but after 2018 fell to 46k. Cooperative Program giving went from $200M in 2006 to $463M in 2018 to $446M in 2024, while total receipts apparently tanked so hard that the SBC’s leaders just stopped reporting it in 2023. Instead, they’re using undesignated receipts, which started well in 2006 with $8.3B, then saw a bumpy decline from $9.6B in 2018 to $9.5B in 2024.
Bear in mind none of these figures are adjusted for inflation—which just makes the current picture look worse for these guys. If we adjusted their 2006 undesignated receipts ($8.3B) to today’s dollars, it’d look like $13.4B today. They haven’t kept up with inflation any better than SBC membership has with America’s natural population growth.
This is a shocking shift from the first civil war. The SBC in general is on the back foot now and in a position of great weakness. Worse, they’re likely staying there for the foreseeable future. So let me be crystal-clear here for any SBC leaders who might have rolled in from the street:
The Southern Baptist Convention cannot afford another civil war.
Sowing division and demanding purity tests is the dumbest imaginable thing any SBC leader could possibly do right now. As it is, they don’t have enough hardliners to keep the SBC alive. Nor are there enough hardline churches to maintain the SBC in the manner to which it has become accustomed.
(You know, it’s kinda nice that they don’t ever listen to ickie heathens like me, because I’d hate to interrupt them while they’re making such critical mistakes.)
A name change? Yes, please, say all the rest of us!
Now let’s circle back to Heath Lambert’s coy, dumbass, pinky-to-corner-of-his-mouth suggestion. Should the SBC change its name to indicate its nonstop focus on women holding pastor positions?
Why yes, that’d be lovely!
Absolutely!
I’d love to see it. It would be the rotted cherry on the shit sundae that is their entire denomination. PLEASE make every single SBC-ling in the group aware of exactly what their leaders are all about. That’d be absolutely incredible. The effect it’d have on metrics in the 2027 Annual Report would be the stuff of legend. I’d probably be writing about it from the summer’s Annual Meeting till roughly, um, Thanksgiving.
Yes, Heath Lambert, make sure you don’t leave a single thing to chance when it comes to the SBC’s decline. Please.
This is one wrasslin’ federation that is on its way down
But he doesn’t need my encouragement.
I don’t know that much about wrestling. But I’ve known a lot of people who loved their smaller-scale local wrasslin’ scenes. And that’s really how I see the SBC. To me, it’s a wrasslin’ scene full of villains, or heels.
Years ago, they drove out all the faces, or heroes. In fact, there really aren’t any opponents anymore. The heels are all basically the same. So now, they fight against each other in a series of invite-only vanity tournaments.
Fewer and fewer people care about these matches. They sigh, and they get up, and they leave for good. Maybe the next town over has a better scene, they think as they drive away. Or maybe it’s time to take up a new hobby. Remote-control car racing sounds fun.
But as the audience dwindles more every Saturday night, the management only seethes. None of them are actually good managers. Rather, they’re all just heels with delusions of adequacy, like Heath Lambert up there. Possibly because of that ineptitude, they refuse to consider creating a new federation with a different focus. They think their brand is so perfect—and so much of a moneymaker—that they can’t possibly abandon it now. So their response to the increasing number of empty seats is to blame the audience for not knowing a great show when they see it. No, their heels must be even more heel-ish! They need more heel action! More! MORE!
And that is why their brand will be completely, utterly dead before they ever consider that maybe, just maybe, a wrasslin’ federation of nothing but heels and closed-door fights isn’t a good idea.
NEXT UP: The salespeople continue to try to set the rules of engagement with their marks. See you soon! <3
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