ServingHim at the Teaching Lifeway Lessons blog is a little taken back by my attitude towards some of the current SBC leadership. I first posted this in the comments section on his blog but it is worthy of a post here at Fide-O. It opens with a response the comment under “Blogging Changed the World”
Serving Him says, Don’t know your background, but can I assume this is a
nice job of honoring your father and mother?
Honoring my father and mother doesn’t necessarily mean lying down and taking a beating. I may have sounded disrespectful in my post, it was not my intention, but I still stand by what I wrote.
I do have great respect for those leaders in the SBC and the past battles that have been fought. They have a lot to do with making me who I am today, which was the bulk of my point. I am not trying to be a rebel intentionally.
However, generalities aside, there is a younger generation that is taking accurate doctrine very seriously. We have discovered that the “Big Five Sins” of drinking, cussing, chewing, dancing, and pool are not actually all that big on second glance. Pride, disobedience to God, gossip, bickering, backbiting, and pastoral undermining are doing way more to hurt the kingdom of God than the man who drinks a glass of wine with dinner. We found it a little disturbing that the Bible says very little about those sins we were told were the bad ones.
We took our Bibles as literal, accurate, and inerrant, just as we were told to do, and began to read them. That is when we discovered a lot of our inherited theology verbally passed down to us is extra-biblical if not unbiblical.
The problem is while we give to the cooperative program, which is what all the SBC should be about, guys like me have been placed on the other side of a new battle against reformed doctrine. The SBC will accept any theological drivel that comes down the pipe from the “Seeker” guys as long as it keeps the numbers up. They will tout the emergent crowd as ground breaking evangelists no matter how much they assault the truth of scripture. Yet we aspire to an extremely high view of scripture and read church history, including Southern Baptist, follow our SBC fore-fathers in reformed theology and it is called a virus, dangerous, and anti-evangelistic. Then to top it off we get to sit in Greensboro as nearly every speaker there took unnecessary shots at one of our great loves, the Doctrine/truth of the Word of God.
We saw how poor ecclesiology was producing more and more lost church members. Yet when there is an effort to reform this, we get another unbiblical excuse about those LOST CHURCH MEMBERS being a great evangelical harvest field. We have seen that the Finnyesque altercall system produces confused, illegitimate church members. When we as young pastors try to reform that system we are accused of not loving lost people. When we began to hold our members accountable to the church they claim membership in we are accused of being mean. When we set up an actual biblical ecclesiastical structure that has SERVING deacons, and a plurality of Pastors instead of a deacon board we are accused of being Presbyterian.
The thing is we are trying to be biblical, and my accusation at the older generation is they are trying to be Southern Baptist whether that is biblical or not.
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36 year old husband, father, pastor, singer, musician, reader, eater, rider, watcher,
Amen, that is one of my greatest fears as I get older and start my adventure in to the ministry of God’s Word, as a pastor, is trying to be biblical when others want to keep things the way they are. One reason I think I might have to leave the SBC and be independent, even though I don’t want to.
I have thought about leaving the SBC myself manytimes, but than I remember that we need men that are committed to getting and seeing the SBC get back to what it should be like. If it wasn’t for guys like Mohler, Dever, and Steve Lawson it would be HARD to remain Southern Baptist. These guys give me great encouragement to remain Southern Baptists. Hang in there naak and other brothers in the SBC!
AAAAMEN! Do not dare call me a Presbyterian for being a Calvinist. James Boyce, John Broadus, and P.H. Mell were Calvinists.
Don’t call me a Presbyterian for believing in a plurality of elders. If that is so, then W.T. Johnson was a Presbyterian.
Which is truly Presbyterian?
A. A Calvinist church that practices believers baptism and church discipline
B. A non-Calvinist Baptist church that considers church members who are delinquent evangelism prospects? What happened to the doctrine of a regenerate church membership?
Will the real Presbyterian please stand up?
To paraphrase our new SBC president, Dr. Page, “I’m Southern Baptist, but I’m not mad about it.”
The deacon body in the SBC church I attend has always been a serving body (20+ years) and exercises several ministries within the church. When I was an active deacon, we never considered ourselves a “Board”.
Neither can I recall an altercall after a sermon. Just like when we joined, we still invite people to a friendship room after church for a discussion. New members attend a new members class which reviews key doctrines before they choose to make their membership official.
I can’t recall anytime when we were encouraged not to take the WHOLE Bible literally, accurate and inerrant. For example, Jesus turned water to wine in an instant. Couldn’t he also create the earth as is in an instant? Sure he can and did. So we worship Him as Creator, too, not just Lord and Savior.
In summary, I guess your SBC experience is different than mine.
“Will the real Presbyterian please stand up?”
In heaven none of us will be Presbyterians or Southern Baptist, etc. … we will all be Calvinists.
ServingHim you are a very blessed man.
Yes, Serving Him, you are in a rare position. I’ve been a member of 2 SBC churches in my day, though I’ve ministered in several. My home church is a large church, twice or three times the size of President Page’s church. The deacons rule. They are a board. What they recommend, the congregation has always, since I can remember, confirmed. The vote of the congregation is a rubber stamp. In my last church, Beck’s Baptists in Winston-Salem, NC, the deacons ruled and served. To their commendation, they did as many visits as the staff, if not more. They had it together on that front. To their discredit, they ruled as well. That’s a no-no.
Dear Scott,
You are on it! These are the very themes I have been learning from the Word, teaching to my congregation and family, and trying to institute in our church polity. You have stated most of this much better than I have, however, and you are in danger of being quoted by me often in the future.
Thank you for your boldness and clarity.
Love in Christ,
Jeff
Don’t be deceived. The SBC is a UN-NGO that is dedicated to the UN agenda. Al Mohler and Mark Dever are not only proponents of the church growth movement, but Mohler is a fellow of the ERLC which is a UN-NGO. R. Land, Mohler and Dever are busy sucking Christians into the one worl church.