Guide Posts and Inflection Points
Be yet not aware? What one sows, so will he reap.
The 1950’s were a pivotal time in the culture of the SBC. During this time leaders in the SBC became enamored with pragmatic principles under the auspices of growing the church and reaching the lost with Christ. This spirit of the age was captured in the campaigns slogan “a million more in ‘54” What wasn’t seen at the time was how damaging this pragmatism would prove. Consumerism was introduced to the churches that was corrosive to the consecrated community of believers. What they sowed, we are today reaping.
From what spring of philosophy one waters their fields, so to will the consequent fruit of that ideology grow. The pragmatism introduced in the 1950’s bore damning fruit; cheap grace, costless discipleship, and meaningless membership. The success of growing budgets, buildings, and butts all but silenced the questions and critics. The intoxication with pragmatic success that exchanged strict fidelity to the Scripture for “what works” in the market place of ideas blinded leaders to the cost they were paying. What was that price? The price we are paying in human lives broken, unqualified leaders promoted, and witness destroying policies, is more than any of us alive today should be willing to continue to pay.
Today we have unconverted people in the pew, pastorate, and positions of polity and policy. This isn’t uncharitable judgement, it’s apparent fact. In too many ways our convention looks just like the world, except that instead of stamping out factory widgets, we have been producing cheap grace converts who needed only to feel positively enough about Jesus to raise a hand and have someone declare them saved. These go on to develop a dwarfish Christianity with no soundness in practice because these is no conviction in the heart. Someone might say that’s an ungracious accusation! But is it? Forget eloquent sermons, we are only allowed to say we believe the Word of God if we do the Word of God. Anything else is lip service. We have no right to proclaim we believe something we will not practice, and if we will not practice the Word of God. Those who say but will not do are giving forth evidence of un-captured minds because they have unregenerate hearts. These are unbelievers posing as disciples. After all it is Jesus who say “if you love me you will keep my commandment”.
The corrective to pragmatism is principle. From our present chaos we must strive for clarity, and clarity is achieved by conviction. The wrongs we are witness too are not going to be correct by sorrow and poor feeling alone. There must be concrete action. Repent is a verb not an emotion. When a house is on fire, falling tears from the home owner doesn’t douse the flames. Rather we must point our efforts at dousing the conflagration through principle conviction.
What conviction am I talking about? Not only must we reaffirm and commit to the total sufficiency of scripture (2 Peter 1:3) we must also embrace its unequivocal authority over our lives. We don’t have the right to think as we want (Proverbs 3:5-6), we have the responsibility to believe as we are told (Romans 12:2). This requires a principled conviction that the Word is sufficient and authoritative. And what does the sufficient and authoritative Word tell us to do at times like the ones we are facing?
“God will judge the outsider, [you] purge the wicked person from among you.”
1 Corinthians 5:13
Who is the wicked person to be expelled from the privilege of participation in a local church? 1 Corinthians 5:11 is explicit, “[do] not… associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one.
The carnage of broken lives and violated bodies is directly related to the sufficiency and authority of Scripture. It’s directly related to the commands to deny oneself, resist sin, reject temptation, even pluck offending eyeballs, or arms in the fight against sin. The cheap grace, easy belief “brother” who is not convicted of the sufficiency of the Word, will not submit to its authority. Gospel indicatives imply Gospel imperatives.
We must also dust off one of the attributes that our soft padded, offend no one at any price, culture has dismissed. Righteous anger is the correct response to the results of pragmatism, but it must also go further. Righteous anger directs us to upend and turn over those things which we’ve inherited, that are not Biblical. Its the scalpel we must wield to excise the cancer of a low view of Scripture from among us. The process may be painful, cost friendship, and even suspend cooperation but it must be done.
An abused woman will find little solace in the sympathy of others. Any woman who has been violated will only be comforted when those who abused them are held accountable, disciplined accordingly, and when the culture that produced abusers and promoted it through coverups is dismantled decisively. As church leaders we have a moral and ethical obligation to pursue justice. If we really care about the abused, then we need to take the action that will protect them and prevent future abuse from happening. Creating a new bureaucratic department in the convention isn’t enough, only the law of God is enough to begin to remedy the crisis we are in. But even that is cliche. Rather we must say ‘only the sufficient and authoritative Word of God, and my submission and obedience to it, is the only path forward through this moral morass.” We ought to expect that from ourselves and from anyone who calls themselves a disciple of Jesus.
That means that as we pick through the rubble represented by the Guidepost report, we are given a rare opportunity to rebuild. In addressing the incipient pragmatism in our convention there is an opportunity for us to reject the ‘new’ way by returning to the ‘old’ way of our founding-fathers. There is nothing left in the Southern Baptist Convention for the faithful local church pastor, if the convention will not, by force or choice, repent and return to the Bible both in praxis and practice.
If anyone is ashamed of what this represents then why call yourself a Baptists? What passes today as Baptist would in many respects be unrecognizable by the founders of the Baptist movement. These men were men of principle, practice and unalterable conviction in the sufficiency and authority of God’s Word. We their children have strayed, and we their children are being given a sobering opportunity to return, now that we are witness to what pragmatism has wrought in our beloved convention.
Will you join me is searching your own heart, praying for repentance deep enough to spark revival, and will you confront in your own life any untoward way, and confront in your brothers any erroring path. Together we can provoke one another to love and good deeds. If we understand love as “seeking God’s best for the one loved” we have great days ahead as we strive together for a renewed convention.