SBC 2009: Actually Excited

Early tomorrow, I will be leaving Atlanta for Louisville, home of the famous baseball bat, which bears the city's name. The large Kentucky metropolis is also host to this year's Southern Baptist Convention, an event that promises to have people swinging a few clubs of their own. The SBC annual convention is always a great place to watch old people cat-fight over things the rest of the world cares nothing about.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the dire situation in the SBC with younger leaders looking for a place to participate and many more looking for the exit. I am more excited to attend this year than in many previous years combined (and I sense others are too) because this year might be a turning point for what has become a poorly-branded, pseudo-political organization of late. The Great Commission Resurgence must receive the lion's share of credit for renewed interest in this year's annual meeting.

I was quoted in two well-written articles on the upcoming meeting, and I wanted to link to them both:

- Louisville Courier-Journal: "Convention Growing Grayer"

- Associated Press: "Southern Baptists to Gather in Kentucky"

If you are interested in these sort of things, please leave a comment. I'd love to hear your thoughts. If not, I promise to return to regularly scheduled programming very soon.

Southern Baptists' Choice: Change or Die

FACT: The Southern Baptist Convention is an archaic denominational dinosaur with a bloated bureaucratic infrastructure on the fast track to irrelevance. Whew. I said it. The decline of the SBC has been signaled again and again by the work of individuals like Ed Stetzer who speak with the authority of rigorous research. It can no longer be denied.

To illustrate the progression of SBC internal inflation, Biblical Recorder editor Norm Jameson recently wrote, "Now, Baptists are like all other Americans. We complain about the size of the government but we demand more services from the government all the time. Government wants to be responsive, so they provide the services. We can't demand the services and then complain about their cost." When Jameson was at the Executive Committee in 1983 there were 17 people on staff (including the mail room and a janitor) and an annual budget of $801,200. Today, the Executive Committee has 38 staff members and an annual budget of $9,470,373.00. This growth--all too common among the internal ranks of the SBC--must be rectified or the SBC will die a not-so-slow death.

That may sting a little for those of us who sang out of the Baptist Hymnal as children, made the decision to follow Christ in a Southern Baptist church, and used LifeWay Sunday School materials even before LifeWay was "LifeWay." Yet, denying the truth only kicks the can of reality farther down the road.

FACT: The Southern Baptist Convention does more missions work than any other organization on this planet and has many other vibrant and impactful ministries. Through the International Mission Board, the SBC supports nearly 6,000 international missionaries in countries you've never even heard of. Additionally, the SBC has other vibrant divisions, such as the second largest disaster relief service in the United States. In many ways, we do great work.

You may notice the tension mounting at the interface of these two facts. On the one hand, Southern Baptists cannot and should not stand for the wasteful and overextended bureaucracy. (Rising generations, with their disdain for heavily organized Christianity, certaintly won't.) On the other hand, the SBC is a great vehicle for kingdom work and fulfilling the Great Commission. That begs a question: Is there a way to reform, revise and restructure in order to preserve the good and do away with the bad?

Enter the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR). The GCR is an effort to bring the two facts listed above into harmony that is spearheaded by influential SBC leaders and "regular joe/jane" laypeople. Anyone can sign the petition online, and 3,000 already have. There are daunting odds against the success of such an aggresive initiative, but the value and nobility of the GCR compells me to support it. Southern Baptists are faced with a choice from which they cannot hide. Either they will keep kicking the can of reality while they fade into cultural irrelevance or they will act aggresively to refine our processes while preserving the wonderful work being done by so many. Southern Baptists have a choice: change or die.

Great Commission Resurgence

A new effort to revitalize and unite Southern Baptists is underway called The Great Commission Resurgence. It is being spearheaded by several Southern Baptist leaders, including SBC President Johnny Hunt and Daniel Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This effort has now launched a website with a declaration that is available for electronic signing. I like this effort and support the principles outlined in the declaration including biblical inerrancy, convention reform, and perhaps most intriguing, "A Commitment to Methodological Diversity that is Biblically Informed." If you are a Southern Baptist who wants to see the SBC revitalized as an efficient, Gospel-centered, mission-minded denomination, check this website out.

Southeastern and Baptist Press

Following Southeastern Seminary's 20/20 Conference, which featured Mark Driscoll among others, Baptist Press (BP) released a one-sided article resurrecting old controversies and blindsiding interviewees who didn't know they were going to be quoted in this piece. Southeastern responded to the BP article with a statement on their blog:

"One of the speakers, Mark Driscoll, has received significant criticism from some Southern Baptists in recent days. At first the criticism was limited to ill-informed bloggers, but yesterday Baptist Press entered the fray...We were very disappointed in the BP piece, which we believe was inaccurate in content and harsh in tone."

Ed Stetzer, Director of LifeWay Research, also responded on his blog by saying he was disappointed in BP and noting that one of the interviewees were unaware that they were being interviewed for this story.

Finally, I wrote a response to the article in an op-ed entitled, Unfair, Unbalanced, and Unacceptable, with the Biblical Recorder, the Baptist newpaper for North Carolina. This article outlines how the BP article is simply part of a larger trend toward biased journalism that is discrediting Baptist Press among many.

If you are plugged into the crazy Baptist world, leave your thoughts. For everyone else, we will return to regularly scheduled programming shortly.

True Love Works?

I still remember the drill. The music started, and the lights dimmed. I peered around the solemn room as I floated in a sea of bowed heads. The call went out from the minister who was running the event and like a mad scientist summoning his robot army to life, people around me shot up and headed for the stage. There they found a "True Love Waits" (TLW) card with a dotted line printed below a short pledge:

"Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship."

At the time, the whole thing felt a bit coerced and contrived, and after some reflection, I still don't know if it was the best way to biblically teach sexual purity. Despite the card's wording, the program implicitly seemed to put too high of an emphasis on the V-card, rather than teach a sustained view of purity. Perhaps that is why all of my friends who signed the pledge that day broke their pledge later. Without fail, almost everyone one of them developed this attitude: "Well, I already lost my virginity, and I can't get it back. Might as well enjoy myself now."

Having played their one and only V-card and broken their pledge, they were remorsefully free to continue pursuing pleasure at will. Maybe their stories simply display human nature and our innate propensity for sin. Or perhaps, they illustrate a sweeping failure of the most pervasive Christian abstinence programs available. I don't think I can personally say for sure.

Last month, however, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a large study showing that teenagers who make abstinence promises like TLW are just as likely to have premarital sex and less likely to use protection. Unfortunately, as the Washington Post points out, this data has reignited the sexual education debate that has cooled in recent years. Barack Obama has promised to release millions in funding for sexual education with an abstinence emphasis, and it seems to me that many want to block that funding before the administration releases it.

The question remains whether or not these programs are effective. Many, including a very reputable public health organization, say no. Others, including LifeWay Christian Resources--the organization responsible for distributing TLW cards and selling TLW-emblazoned resources including rubber bracelets, watches, apparel, and a line of expensive silver jewelry--say yes.

My gut tells me that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. There are a whole list of things I don't like about programs like TLW. For example, they assume that teenagers won't see through the contrived program, they come across kitschy with their product lines, and they seem to miss the mark on instilling a holistic approach to sexual purity like the scriptures teach. At the very least, these things have collectively contributed the ineffectiveness of these programs.

Yet, the Church must never give up teaching that God wants sex to be reserved for two people who have been biblically married. This is our responsibility as parents, siblings, friends, citizens and Christ-followers. Rather then recoiling at the criticism, we should use this as an opportunity for reflecting on and retooling these programs. It is imperative that we find a better way to communicate moral truths to teenagers in the 21st century.

What do you think? Are the researchers at Johns Hopkins just out to get us? Do we need to wake up and retool these programs? Do you think TLW-style programs work?

**Update: A different opinion from the WSJ**

Diplomacy at The Expense of Liberty?

It seems like every day another news story reports an effort to mend US-Muslim relations. Who can forget the uproar when Rick Warren and over 300 others signed "Loving God and Neighbor Together,"  a letter penned by Yale University's Center for Faith and Culture, which sought to create dialogue between Muslims and Christians? I remember Baptist Press demanding that one Southern Baptist professor give his rationale for signing that letter. In fact, they published his rationale alongside another article, drawing on the comments of Al Mohler who called the letter "troubling." The problem people had with the Yale letter was that it capitulated on foundational Christian beliefs in an effort to be gracious. 

In this case, I think that Mohler et al. were justified in their criticisms. As much as we desire dialogue with any disenfranchised group, whether they are Muslim or Mormon or gay, we cannot sacrifice who we are as Christ-followers simply to achieve conversation. Conversation for the sake of conversing is neither profitable nor a good use of one's time. We must be true to ourselves as we seek to engage others who are at variance with our religious beliefs. 

Perhaps that is why a more recent attempt to bridge the Muslim gap troubles me. This time the effort came by way of a document, "Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World," which was signed by 33 American leaders meeting at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund conference center. Participants included former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, author Steven Covey, American Petroleum Institute president Red Cavaney and an assortment of professors and former government officials. The one participant representing an evangelical group was Richard Land, President of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. 

The most glaring problem with this effort is that while they rightly emphasize diplomacy as the primary tool for bringing peace and encourage the civic participation in governance, they completely ignore the gross oppression of religious liberty in the Muslim world. It is impossible to comprehensively address Muslim relations without addressing religious oppression. As one commentator stated in the December 13/20 issue of WORLD magazine, "[The report's rhetoric] sounds good, but the report skips questions of religious liberty--and without that fundamental freedom, "democracy" will merely mask tyranny."

Countries like Libya, Algeria, and Iran openly suppress the expression of liberty among Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims. In places like Sudan where 1.5 million Sudanese have been martyred for their faith in the last 15 years, we have seen the results of unchecked suppression of religious liberty. Opposing this sort of atrocity is at the core of what a Christ-follower should be, and we cannot and should not check that at the door in the name of dialogue. 

Christians must never compromise our stance on religious freedom. We are a people on mission, and each year we send missionaries to closed countries where they risk their lives for the gospel. In the case of Southern Baptists, we must be careful that the "Relgious Liberty" in "Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission" remains an integral and fundamental part of our public witness rather than a mere afterthought. I think we can and must do a better job of loving our Muslim neighbors while demanding that they pursue civility and freedom in places where they enjoy governmental control. 

Your thoughts?

Reason #47 that the Southern Baptist Convention Is Shrinking

Earlier this year, I was somewhat dismayed by the decision of LifeWay Christian Resources to pull Gospel Today from the shelves of their stores nationwide because its cover story featured five women pastors. Today, the AJC ran a story entitled "Georgia Baptists take aim at women-led churches" that had a similar theme but a much more ridiculous storyline. 

Apparently, the Georgia Baptist Convention (GBC)--the state convention of the SBC in Georgia--approved a policy this week, which gives them the ability to refuse funds from Georgia Baptist churches who have women for pastors. While the policy is broadly written, it is clearly aimed at the one and only church which falls under its guidelines--First Baptist Decatur, a church that has given the GBC millions of dollars since 1862. 

"I kept waiting for someone from the Georgia Baptist Convention to call us or come visit with me and other leaders of our church to inform us that these matter were being discussed," said FBD's pastor, Julie Pennington-Russell, who was not present when the policy was been discussed. "I assumed that a 146-year relationship was worth, at very least, a personal conversation."

I haven't totally made up my mind on women in ministry, and I know many sound theologians on both sides of the issue. But regardless of whether women should be pastors or not, this is disturbing. When the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845, the founders issued the following statement: "We have constructed for our basis no new creed; acting in this manner upon a Baptist aversion for all creeds, but the Bible." In other words, what historically binds Southern Baptists is not specifically-outlined doctrines, but rather a commitment to the word of God. 

Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Catholics--they are all, to varying degrees, bound by theological doctrine. But Baptists have never been. That is what makes being a Baptist so great, in my opinion. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic echelons in our denomination seem to swell daily and the list of requirements to actively participate seems to get longer and longer. The message we send is, "either step in line or get out!" When Southern Baptists make non-essentials a prerequisite for participation, we promote unnecessary division and actually cease to be Baptist. 

If anyone is taking a count, chalk this one up as reason #47 that the SBC is shrinking: Making non-essentials a prerequisite for denominational participation.

Dare I ask ... Anyone disagree with me on this?

Convergent . . . Whatever that means

I hate labels. Evangelical, emergent, emergING, post-modern, conservative -- each of these has become so nebulous and subjective that they have little meaning left in them. Unfortunately, no matter how much we loathe them, contemporary language is so saturated with labels that they are really inescapable. Therefore, we need to understand what they mean (as best we can).

Some of the most misunderstood words among Christian commentators and laypersons are "emerging" and "emergent." Perhaps, they are familiar least of all to Southern Baptists. Southern Baptists often exhibit some kind of skiddish, toy terrier-like fear about addressing or even acknowledging anything from anyone they consider to be a part of one of these two camps (not that most of them could tell you the difference between the two).

You can imagine how surprising it was when Dr. Danny Akin decided to host a conference (ambiguously named "Convergent") dialoguing about the Emerging Church on the campus of Southeastern. Aside from the name, one must commend both Dr. Akin and the Southeastern staff for having the guts to put on such an important event. At least some Southern Baptists are willing to get in the game! Southern Baptists have begun a significant conversation, and it is imperative that is ongoing.

Guests included Ed Stetzer (Missiologist / Director of LifeWay Research), Mark Driscoll (Progressive Pastor of Mars Hill Church / President of Acts 29), Danny Akin (President of Southeastern), Tyler Jones (Pastor of Vintage 21), JD Greear (Pastor of The Summit Church), and Alvin Reid (Professor of Evangelism, Southeastern).

Perhaps the most surprising moment was the 1+ hr. lecture given by Mark Driscoll that included a polemic against Emergent leaders like Doug Pagitt, Brian McLaren, Rob Bell and others. I encourage you to download it and judge for yourself.

For those of you who did not attend, I am listing some of the more memorable quotes. Please leave me your reactions to any of this.

Mark Driscoll
-"I believe total depravity is for optimists -- that's how much of a Calvinist I am."

-"It is always best to pick dead mentors because they don't disappoint."

-"When God speaks, we are not to converse. We are to obey."

-Responding to Brian McLaren's refusal to comment on homosexuality for fear of "huting someone on either side": "Then I say, 'Now you have hurt God' because God has spoken on this issue with great clarity."

-"Brian McLaren now has an organization called 'Deep Shift.' I think someone inadvertently put an 'f' in there."

-"There is now no clarifying, theological doctrine that defines evangelicalism."

-"If you are thirsty for theology, may I suggest that you not drink from the toilet even though there is water there."

-"It is foolish reductionism to say that culture equals worldliness."

-"The world is not full of good guys and bad guys; It is full of bad guys and Jesus."

Danny Akin
-"The needs of others will outweigh the desires of my own heart."

-"We have a Biblically illiterate church . . . especially within the SBC."

-"Love is the fulcrum that balances freedom and responsibility."

-"We are raising a generation that is theologically ignorant . . . and our churches are suffering."

Ed Stetzer
-"Think about your friends who first embraced comtemporary church culture. Are they still welcome in Southern Baptist Convention life? Mine aren't."

-"People never change until the pain of staying the same grows greater than the pain of changing."

-"The reason there is an Emerging Church is because the Church in North America is failing . . . people are calling for a new expression of the Church."

-"John Maxwell is like Jesse Jackson for white people."

-"The bride is not pretty right now, but you cannot love Jesus and hate his wife."

-"People are losing confidence in the church and then losing confidence in the Gospel."

-"We have got to move away from anything that furthers the try harder mantality in the church. The Gospel is not try harder. It is die to self and live freely."

Mark Leiderbach
-"The Great Commission is more important than beer."

JD Greear
-"Love is probably the most affective apologetic."

-"There will be much joy in our cities when our message is accompanied with tangible acts of its beauty."

Why I Hate Blogs, Blogging and Bloggers.

I have always thought of myself as a slower gazelle. You know the one? He always gets devoured on the Discovery Channel because he can’t run as fast as the older ones or he forgets to watch for predators as he slumps to drink. Yeah, that’s me.

But please don’t pity me. I am not like a water buffalo or pygmy or something; even a slower gazelle is quicker than the average animal grazing the African savannah. I am still a wily thing; I am just shaky on my feet and often forgetful.

Now I am not alone out there. There are a lot of us. We don’t have clubs or cliques, but if we did it would be a near-median between MENSA and the short bus, with only a slight lean towards the MENSA side. We are slower gazelles, and we are the ones with the blogs.

That is one reason why a blog is such a turnoff to me. Because the big, majestic, pack-leading, skyscraper-leaping gazelles don’t have these things, they have websites. They don’t take time to write blogs, they write books… that people buy. So having a blog is a written admission that one is above average- but not by much.

Maybe you haven’t read that many blogs. You don’t understand what the big deal is. Well, let me challenge you to read a dozen or so blogs today, and then you can see first-hand why I hate them so much. See, a blog is really a nebulous thing. Its definition will vary depending on who is writing the blog, what type of blog it is and what the blogger is trying to accomplish by blogging on the blog. Confused yet?

There are blogs on religion, gardening, sports, scrapbooking, parenting, politics. You can have a blog if you are an insurance salesman, laboratory monkey or college student - especially if you’re a college student. (Something about the educational process emboldens us to believe that what we say is worth listening to.) Some are legitimate, intimate and insightful while most are amateur, unfounded, and borderline illiterate. Thanks to the blog phenomenon, you can now peek into the dusty recesses of any boring fool’s mind and peruse their thoughts with the ease of Microsoft Windows (XP not ME).

The most harmless blog is the public journal. It just shares what is going on in that person’s life with insights and maybe a picture or two. This isn’t going to bother anyone. But blogs drop a country mile after this one.

The average blog is a viral infection of autobiographical filler, written by someone who thinks people actually want to read their autobiography. Funny thing is, their posts are almost always meaningless. Their ideas are not usually original, but sad regurgitations of once-read ideas. (Reading a book doesn’t make you smart anymore than skimming a flight manual makes you an airplane pilot.) No wonder their ideas are often as empty, overused, and stupid-sounding as the word “blog” itself.

I just can’t figure out why they do it. The simple answer seems to be that they crave the attention. So by blogging, they massage their ego to the cathartic clicking of their laptop’s keyboard. It is like a child who writes their callow, awkward secrets in a dollar-store diary, but instead of placing it under lock and key beneath a mattress, they post it on the internet for the whole world to see. Almost voyeuristically, they want someone to spy on them and see them for who they really are. These are sick people.

The blogger’s illness is only matched by his or her brazenness. They may be wrong, but are never in doubt; they always have an opinion, even if they do not. Armed with the equivalent of a mail-order Bachelor’s degree from a local college, they meaninglessly muse about controversial subjects, picking the side that will get the most attention and make the most people notice them.

For example, Southern Baptist bloggers abound, each with their own brand of denominational ideology. Most boil down to little more than gutless gossip. I had a telling experience with one of these bloggers. A man we’ll call “Joe” attempted to tear my dad a new corn shoot on a blog recently. When Joe was challenged to confront dad in the Biblical way ( pretty close to “growing up and being a man” except more inclusive), we received a 3-page letter instructing a pastor of roughly 30-years how he should do ministry. After some address checking, I found out that Joe was only a first-year seminary student with no ministry experience. I have concluded that many of these blogging Baptist pastors, if they are actually in ministry, are throwing up a smoke-screen to hide the fact that their church is not growing, their baptisms are down, and they couldn’t preach themselves out of a well with a Charles Spurgeon manuscript and the vocal chords of Adrian Rogers. Instead of spending 13 hours a day hitting “Refresh” and wolfishly devouring gossip, they should be out desperately building relationships with one of the 3 billion people in this world who would go to hell if they died right now.

What is most annoying is that many of them foolishly think that by doing it, they gain street cred. Yet they are not anti-establishment fringe-writers, not the voice of “the people.” The July 9, 2007 Newsweek says that by the end of this year, there will be over 100-million bloggers! That means when you blog, you are no more anti-establishment than Coca-Cola or Walmart. You are the neo-establishment, which is a lot like the old establishment except with worse marketing.

Now, I know what you may be thinking: "This all sounds a bit ridiculous, ironic, perhaps even hypocritical. You are down on bloggers because you want people to read all YOUR thoughts." Maybe. Or maybe I have surrendered to the cold, hard fact that people are going to read blogs anyway, so I can at least bring you a meaningful alternative.

This blog will never be used for silly gossip or filled with all the tedious minutia from my uneventful day. This blog will not be peppered with dozens of mid-sentence links. This blog is not a blogger's attempt to break into the blogosphere and create a blogstorm or blogumentary in hopes of becoming a blogebrity (all considered real words). Instead, I want to do exactly what the tagline suggests: create meaningful conversation with potential to positively change minds. After all, isn’t that what we are supposed to all be about?

A blog can be a place of thought and discussion with the intent to create meaningful conversation. We should be approaching Christlikeness through transforming our minds, so that we are better prepared to share an amazing message with a needy world. Why not do it together in a place like this?

Wow. That all sounds pretty insightful. Perhaps I am faster on my feet than I think. I guess you’ll have to keep reading and let me know.