“I was an angry young man growing up and had a lot of hostility in my heart and mind toward my father,” Ascol reflected. He went on to say, “I mean, you look at this, if you’re looking at it rightly, and to take a yahoo like me and turn him into an instrument and a tool, all the praise goes to God.”
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Popham said, “You don’t hate people to Jesus. You love them to Jesus.”
“I’ve heard different folks say, ‘If we let a woman be a pastor, the next thing we know, we’re gonna have homosexual pastors,’ and this and that and the other. But guess what? We’ve never slipped a bit,” she added.
“It’s God’s world,” said Ascol. “He sets the rules. It’s Christ’s church. We can’t make it up as we go. Somebody needs to be holding the line.”
At the end of the documentary, the screen faded to black over the sound of Ascol shooting arrows.
“In the past five years, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost nearly two million members,” read a message on the screen. “It’s the denomination’s biggest decline on record.”
“Linda Barnes Popham is no longer affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention,” the message continued. “Her church is growing.”
Following the documentary’s release, Denny Burk, a fellow Southern Baptist and president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, criticized the film’s framing of the story while praising Ascol’s contribution to the film.
“The documentary is not neutral. It’s designed to give the impression that the SBC is shrinking because of our belief in the Bible’s prohibition on female pastors,” said Burk. “Of course that explanation for decline isn’t true, but that doesn’t stop them from giving the impression that it is.”
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“The overall presentation is very manipulative, but I am grateful that @TomAscol represents our convictions so faithfully,” he added.
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