Will the SBC keep Lakepointe after kicking out Saddleback?

Given how often Dallas megachurch pastors have been in the news for abuse scandals or for run-of-the-mill sacralized misogyny over the past year, it’s only fitting that the Southern Baptist Convention would host its 2025 annual meeting in Dallas.

When they meet next week, one of the most glaring hypocrisies will be their unwillingness to hold Josh Howerton, who is one of those Dallas megachurch pastors, and Lakepointe Church to the same standard they held Rick Warren and Saddleback Church in 2023.

Saddleback came under fire in 2021 after ordaining three women who were longtime staff members. When Saddleback named Andy Wood as successor to Rick Warren, they also named Andy’s wife, Stacie, as a teaching pastor. So the SBC removed Saddleback Church — its largest and most influential church by far — from the denomination

But that same year, Lakepointe Church invited Beth Moore to preach on Mother’s Day.

And just like Saddleback, Lakepointe’s affirmation of women preaching extends to calling female pastors as well. According to a former leader at Lakepointe, “Josh Howerton does believe in female pastors and Lakepointe does ordain female pastors, allows women to preach during weekend services, and allows women to hold the title of pastor as employees of Lakepointe.”

For example, despite the fact that Lakepointe’s leadership page is password protected, Tiffany Rutledge says on her social media profile she is the “central marriage groups pastor for Lakepointe Church.”

Additionally, Pamela Baltazar preached for Lakepointe’s Mother’s Day service this year.

The former Lakepointe leader who spoke with Baptist News Global said Lakepointe’s position “is bizarre because Saddleback was removed from the SBC for the very thing Lakepointe does openly.”

Of course, some may point to the fact that Lakepointe still holds to male headship in the highest levels of pastoral leadership. For example, when Baltazar preached on Mother’s Day, she said she was preaching “under the fathers of this house — our pastors, our elders.”

But Saddleback essentially holds the same position. In his 2023 interview with Christianity Today Editor in Chief Russell Moore, Warren said despite allowing women to preach, “In our church, we’ve decided that the senior pastor is to be a man, a married man of one wife.”

So why are Rick Warren and Saddleback Church removed, while Josh Howerton and Lakepointe Church allowed to remain? The only substantive difference seems to be Warren’s publicly kind demeanor in contrast to Howerton’s openly misogynistic demeanor. But now that Warren has retired, his public kindness is no longer a threat to the SBC. Instead, Lakepointe continues to be led by Howerton, while Saddleback is led by Wood.

And when we compare these two men, they are virtually identical in every bad way imaginable.

The Strategic Launch Network

Both Howerton and Wood were mentored by Steve Stroope, who was the congenial founding pastor of Lakepointe Church before the leadership transitioned to Howerton. Stroope also founded The Strategic Launch Network in 2007.

When Andy Wood started South Bay Church in California in 2009, SLN reportedly loaned them $600,000, with the intention that South Bay Church would pay the money back through supporting the launch of additional churches. When the new church expanded its reach beyond South Bay, it changed its name to Echo Church in 2018. Howerton’s Lakepointe Church took credit for Wood’s Echo Church in 2019, posting on social media, “Echo Church is a church that our team planted in the San Francisco Bay Area.”

Additionally, Howerton’s bio on Lakepointe’s website says one of the three things he’s most passionate about is “planting churches through the Strategic Launch Network.”

Today, the Strategic Launch Network has planted more than 70 churches, boasting a 95% success rate. Their 2025 annual gathering will be held at Lakepointe Church. And Andy Wood is one of the featured speakers.

Building churches with the rich

In a video for SLN church planters titled “7 Systems for Donor Development,” Howerton tells SLN church planters, “You cannot outgrow the provision that your church has … because vision requires provision.” He criticizes pastors who don’t know what their donors are giving. Then while admitting the Bible prohibits showing favoritism toward the rich, he says the Bible commands being thankful for and honoring those who give, and calls anyone who disagrees with him “stupid.”

Howerton says pastors need to check any team members who aren’t giving a full tithe of their income and then meet with them if they aren’t.

He says every church service concludes with a vision moment because “people don’t give to need. They give to vision.” In other words, while Lakepointe congregants think they’re being sent out to a particular theological vision, Howerton intends to bring in money. He says he often uses a stat or a story to accomplish this.

Then Howerton suggests automating your church’s giving like a Netflix subscription, saying, “You need to have a catalytic system where you’re consistently moving people to recurring online giving.” On every seat, they have a card that says, “Automate what’s important.”

“You need to have a catalytic system where you’re consistently moving people to recurring online giving.”

For those who give, Howerton says, “We send specific, handwritten notes with some specific language I craft to people who give a gift over a certain amount. … And then we have this unique tier where every now and then somebody will sell a business or have something unique happen in their life and they give like an obscene amount of money, and I’ll just make a quick phone call. And again, that’s not favoritism. That’s showing thanks.”

He says Lakepointe provides special “financial leader lunches” to honor the people who give the most money. He starts the lunch by saying he’s not fundraising. But then he says he asks three questions “that have been fine-tuned over the course of about 12 years” in order to remind them about why they gave and to address any concerns they may have that may “unlock a new level of giving.”

In an interview with Baptist News Global, former Echo Church Planting and Missions Pastor Jason Adams-Brown said Andy Wood had a similar approach.

“If someone in the church wanted to meet with Andy, he would check to see how much they were giving to the church to help determine if he would meet with them,” he said. “Echo had a category called ‘Key Influencers.’ It was almost always people who gave a lot to the church. They would be given gifts and big dinners and would yearly be told all the big numbers of things they had accomplished that year and what the vision was for next year or sometimes the next five years. It was always grandiose and many times never came close to happening.”

Lori Adams-Brown, who also worked at Echo Church when Wood was the pastor, told BNG: “The steak dinners with ‘Key Influencers’ never once included Karen, a woman who was of low socio-economic status and got to the church even earlier than I did on Sundays to prayer walk around the church. It was about money, and those who had it got treated like royalty. Those who did not were shown the door when they questioned.”

Embracing Mark Driscoll

The SLN’s big brother in the world of conservative evangelical church planting is the Acts 29 Network. By some estimates, Acts 29 grew exponentially to 800 churches in the early 2000s under the leadership of Mark Driscoll, who was ousted from Mars Hill Church and Acts 29 in 2014 after allegations of spiritual abuse from his staff and congregants.

Driscoll’s story was told in the 2021 Christianity Today podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.”

The podcast was brought back into the spotlight this week as Megan Basham began posting on X to critique the podcast in defense of Driscoll. Then Howerton jumped in, posting, “One of the most telling things about that pod is the use of multiple openly apostate enemies of the faith as central ‘trusted expert voices’ to evaluate the situation.’”

Those trusted expert voices included the likes of anthropologist Jessica Johnson, who wrote Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire, and historian Kristin Du Mez.

Then Howerton added, “This was always the weirdest thing to me: using a clip of a man yelling at men who abuse women… as evidence he’s abusive.”

Howerton’s fascination with Driscoll also was apparent last year when he posted photos of Driscoll preaching at the Stronger Men’s Conference when Driscoll was kicked off the stage mid-sermon by James River Church pastor John Lindell for claiming a shirtless, sword-swallowing male pole dancer who opened their event was part of the “Jezebel Spirit to seduce men.”

Similarly, Wood came under fire in 2021 for interviewing Driscoll at the Echo Leadership Conference. He later apologized, claiming he simply wanted to interview Driscoll about the mistakes Driscoll had made. But as Jason Adams-Brown told the Roys Report at the time, the topic Wood interviewed Driscoll about was actually titled, “Healthy Families.”

Saddleback Sam, Echo Eddie and … Lakepointe Larry?

With both Howerton and Wood having the same mentor, the same fascination with the rich, and the same affinity for Mark Driscoll, they also appear to share the same target audience.

Some of this mindset goes back to Rick Warren, who wrote in his bestselling 1995 church growth book The Purpose Driven Church that Saddleback’s target audience was “Saddleback Sam,” who among other things Warren said was “self-satisfied, even smug about his station in life.” At the time, this was considered a revolutionary way to imagine evangelism and was copied widely.

“Since we have Saddleback Sam and Echo Eddie, maybe Howerton should call his audience Lakepointe Larry.”

According to Jason Adams-Brown, Wood’s Echo Church had a target audience named “Echo Eddie.” He said, “They even gave salary expectations of Echo Eddie,” noting that led to some church members thinking, “they must not be a fit.”

While I haven’t heard a specific nickname associated with Howerton’s target audience, one former Lakepointe leader told me Howerton said in a sermon, “He writes every sermon with a dad who likes to drink beer and watch sports in his garage in mind.”

Since we have Saddleback Sam and Echo Eddie, maybe Howerton should call his audience Lakepointe Larry.

Toxic masculinity

In order to attract his men, Howerton turned Lakepointe Church into a Mojo Dojo Casa Church. He changed out the front lawns of Lakepointe’s campuses from grass to turf. Then he set up massive screens outside, on which they project ESPN between Saturday services. They also sell burgers and hotdogs for concessions.

Wood appears to be appealing to a similar kind of man. In recent weeks, he’s showed his congregation his new lion tattoo on his bicep, with someone yelling out, “Isn’t it great to have a buff pastor?” He posts Instagram videos of himself working out and posing in front of American flags. He’s also played a clip of himself wearing a “Ford Proud” hat, while eating cookies made for him by his daughter.

Howerton made headlines in 2024 when he told Lakepointe women to “stand where he tells you to stand, wear what he tells you to wear, and do what he tells you to do” on “his wedding night.” He also told Lakepointe women, “You cannot disrespect a man into respectability. Here’s how it works. Give him a crown and then he becomes a king.” In other words, it’s the woman’s responsibility to call out their husband’s inner king.

Similarly, Andy Wood’s wife told the women of Saddleback last Sunday, “Your job is to bring out the lion in him.”

While Andy Wood talks about daughters baking cookies, he talks about sons attending an event called Man Card, which he says is a “rite of passage event for men as they’re stepping into manhood.” The Saddleback dads took their sons, dressed in camouflage, to the forests of East Washington. After teaching the boys a bunch of survival skills and stories about war heroes, the dads left the boys to roam the mountains “with lions and bears and all kinds of crazy animals” in teams of four for 30 hours. After carrying a boat and a log back to camp for the final mile, the instructor told the boys to climb a mile up a mountain with the log pole to plant an American flag at the top of the mountain.

Christian nationalism

Speaking of American flags, after President Donald Trump’s 2024 inauguration, Wood celebrated on Instagram, “There is a divine window of opportunity with this shift in power. Government cannot change the human heart, but the new administration will definitely make more space for our work.”

Although he apologized to his staff for the pushback they had to deal with, his view of politics is quite clear. Prior to the election, he instructed Saddleback congregants that following Jesus “directs and determines how you vote,” and then set the criteria so that the only option would be voting for Trump.

When Wood preached at a church in Florida, he joked, “I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area, the socialist Republic of California. It’s great to be back in the United States of America, the land of the free, the home of the brave.”

These are the kinds of partisan comments Rick Warren never indulged.

Howerton recently went to Washington, D.C., for a worship gathering led by Paula White and Sean Feucht. He also posed for photos with Trump’s Tesla. He’s written on X: “The vast majority of the time, ‘Christian nationalism’ is a scare-label whose subtext is, ‘You can’t advocate for your values in the public square, but I can advocate for mine.’”

Instead, he promoted the myth of Deuteronomy being the basis for the U.S. Constitution, claiming “50 of the 55 men at the Constitutional Convention were orthodox Christians,” and appealed to an 1892 US Supreme Court ruling which said, “This is a Christian nation.”

Church abuse allegations

Men who are attracted to the likes of Driscoll and Trump tend to come with their own abuse stories as well.

“It was very much a key rule on staff after Howerton became lead pastor that you were not to speak negatively about the church to anyone other than your supervisor,” one former staff member at Lakepointe told me. “It was said you were ‘honoring’ the church and others by not creating discord and encouraging ‘gossip.’”

When this staff member was co-leading a program and was trying to process how they could improve some issues they were noticing, they said, “We couldn’t even communicate with our co-lead about the program unless it was positive.” Looking back, they noted, “It was incredibly hard to be on staff with that mindset, and it created an environment where staff members were struggling, overwhelmed, over worked, stressed out, but we couldn’t talk to each other.”

Another knowledgeable source told me: “Josh gutted the staff when he took over. So many long-time employees were given ‘exit packages.’ He brought in his own yes-men and leveraged the ones that were already there.”

This is completely consistent with the other claim about only being allowed to be positive.

Meanwhile, accusations of abuse against Wood were so extensive that they led to a third-party investigation from Vanderbloemen Group. Lori Adams-Brown told BNG: “Andy Wood has manipulated many into viewing him as pro-woman when, in fact, he has one of the most toxic views of women of any man I have ever been around. I grew up as an SBC missionary kid in Venezuela and I worked as an IMB missionary under Sharia law in Indonesia, and no man has ever treated me as poorly as Andy Wood did in his office when I was a pastor at Echo Church. His carefully cultivated persona on stage is one of a hero who saves women and ‘fights for them’ against the SBC which doesn’t acknowledge them as pastors. However, he belittled, bullied, coerced, intimidated, gaslit and name-called me in his office behind closed doors.”

She went on to share how Wood privately referred to women on staff as “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb.”

“The narrative that I and all the other women and men that Andy has bullied and mobbed on staff over the years are all disgruntled employees and are looking for our two seconds of fame is not only baseless, it’s projection,” she said. “The one who thrives off fame is not us, and for those who are thinking critically, it will be obvious. Andy centers himself again and again as a macho man who needs to save alleged helpless damsels in distress.”

Regarding the investigation by Vanderbloeman that concluded there was “no systemic or pattern of abuse under Andy’s leadership,” Adams-Brown said, “We spoke with some woman from Vanderbloemen (the recruiting agency who was investigating themselves) named Gail. From that point on, we never heard what happened to our story, if the Saddleback elders ever read it, if Rick Warren ever read it or if anyone in the Saddleback congregation or community ever read our story or the stories of any of the many others who bravely shared with Gail of Vanderbloemen. This lack of transparency appears to be a cover up.”

NDAs

Perhaps the clearest evidence of a cover up would be the amount of nondisclosure agreements involved. After she was fired due to reporting bullying to another staff member, Adams-Brown said, “I was urged to sign an NDA tied to severance and medical insurance in the pandemic, which I did not sign. I lived on food stamps with no unemployment while Andy told Echo staff he was being generous to me and my family.”

An online Petition to Release Former Echo.church Employees from Non-Disclosure Agreements has received 1,766 signatures. “Many former staff have NDAs, and there are so many, after such a high attrition rate under Andy’s leadership, that the true number is unknown,” the petition says.

Howerton and Lakepointe also have been accused of using NDAs, allegations Howerton denies. In direct messages viewed by BNG, Howerton claimed, “I said we never used an NDA, which is true. A CA is categorically different and intended to protect church members from confidential info being released by a disgruntled, hurt, or low character staff member.” CA stands for “confidentiality agreement.”

“If it looks like an NDA, reads like an NDA, it’s probably an NDA.”

Erin Harding posted at the time, “If it looks like an NDA, reads like an NDA, it’s probably an NDA. Using the buzz word ‘confidentiality’ doesn’t make it not an NDA. Let the reader understand.”

After he realized he was losing the argument to the women who were confronting him, Howerton began blocking everyone.

Ignoring critics

Howerton’s hold over the women in his congregation is strong. One woman who has since realized how abusive Howerton is reached out to him during one of the controversies about his support of Driscoll. And Howerton’s response to her was telling. He wrote, “Heads up, there’s a whole backstory to who these people are that are doing the flash mob 🙂 Long story short: you can’t reason with unreasonable people and they attack ppl with large platforms to try to get the attention they comes w the person’s larger platform. The way to get them to move on is to starve them for what they want (attention) so at this point, I’m just trying to get everyone ignoring everything and letting them find a new target :)”

Similarly, Jason Adams-Brown told BNG Wood taught Echo Church staff, “When someone comes at you, you just step aside.” He said when a church member asked a question about the church’s protocols during COVID, “Andy checked how much they gave and it was a question he didn’t want to deal with.” So instead, “He just told them they could go to another church.”

Belittling women who won’t do what they’re told

In these many ways, Howerton and Wood are essentially the same character. And while the SBC removed Saddleback for allowing women to preach, they’re ignoring Lakepointe’s decision to do the same. But the injustice here isn’t women being given a voice, but women being rescued, controlled, ignored and demonized by image and money-driven men.

While Howerton and Wood both allow women to preach, they do so within a hierarchy that essentially tells women where to stand, what to say, what to do. If women function under that hierarchy, Howerton and Wood are branded as heroes. And if women have questions about it, they’re ignored, fired and offered NDAs or CAs.

“Lionesses are known for working in cooperation with each other to stop male lions by overpowering them when they get out of line.”

Lori Adams-Brown said it best in her interview with BNG:

“If women are viewed as equals, as image bearers of God, as ezer kenegdo, warrior women who help in times of trouble as God is also referred to in the Psalms, we don’t need a muscle man to be our hero. We need to be heard, to be the ones who speak on our own behalf on mics at the Southern Baptist Convention instead of Rick Warren and Al Mohler allegedly speaking on our behalf. We have God-given voices. It is time for Andy to listen to understand instead of tone policing, giving NDAs to silence, and covertly belittling women. It’s time to clear the stage.”

She concluded: “In my experience, men who call themselves heroes for women are often hiding abuse of women with a clever persona that no one would suspect. Harvey Weinstein is an example of this, posing as a feminist while abusing countless women in the workplace for years. The men who elevate the voices of women, believe women and work to be anti-sexist don’t need to be heroes. They listen to understand, believe women, sponsor women, and don’t need to introduce them as if they are the umbrellas over women, as Andy does for Stacie.

“They let women be the heroes of their own stories and have their own transformation journeys without men at the center. No lions are needed here. In fact, as my husband, Jason, pointed out, lionesses are known for working in cooperation with each other to stop male lions by overpowering them when they get out of line. It may be time for some lionesses at Saddleback to join together and stop this untamed lion from abusing women once and for all.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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