Home Podcast Beth Moore, Part 2—What It Was Like to Leave the SBC

Beth Moore, Part 2—What It Was Like to Leave the SBC

“In a church world where not once…had they, the victims and survivors been put first, to just put them first. It’s not that it wasn’t costly and that I couldn’t regard the cost…but I’m simply saying that to me, it was like, you know what? They have never once been put first in these conversations where their lives were deeply, deeply cut and brutalized and scarred.”

“I had this argument with a number of guys from [the SBC] world…I said a couple of times I loved the SBC more than you did and you know, I’ll sort of stand with that. And by that, I mean I fought so hard because it was like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, this is not who we are. This is not who we are. This is not what I was taught as a young servant.’”

“It has been like a death. I loved the SBC. It was my whole heritage.”

“[My decision to leave the SBC] was not a loss of love. It was a loss of belonging. It was facing up to the fact that somehow, I no longer belong. And, you know, it began instantly with speaking out back in the fall of 2016. It was overnight.”

“I felt like this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, it was to me it’s the dumbest thing. It’s when I stupidly said something online to somebody else about speaking on Mother’s Day, at my church. And you know, I would have known that it would have annoyed somebody. But that’s not what happened. It dropped like a bomb.”

“I felt that many bore false witness because it was, it sounded like, ‘She’s led the women astray.’…You know me better than this.’”

“You know, I have never tried to be a senior pastor. I have never been a minister at a church. My payroll experience at First Baptist was teaching aerobics…It wasn’t true. And it was very widespread and it broke my heart.”

“Two years before I did step away, people were going, ‘Why do you stay?’ And they would just say openly…’So many of them hate you. Why do you stay?’ And I was like, ‘You know, I just I had not been led of the Spirit to do that. I just said no, I was going to stay and fight for it.”

“I didn’t step out a moment before I felt like God went, ‘Go.’ And…sometimes you leave because you love a people….and sometimes it is an act of protest.”

“This is not the SBC that I knew. This is not what I had believed. I believed, and I believed a lot of you, and I believed your motive was pure toward issues, for instance, in regard to women, I thought this was all about Scripture, and it proved not to always be all about Scripture.”

“We don’t just leave. We’re not consumers in the church. We stay, we invest our lives in it. We work through conflict. If we’re there long enough, we probably work through a couple of different pastors that have shepherded that congregation. Maybe we liked one better than we like the other. But we stay. We invest our lives. There comes a time, though, that we have to be very awake to the leadership of the Spirit. When is it time to go?”