SBC ANNUAL MEETING

THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION holds its annual meeting this week in Dallas. By an unexpected turn of events, I’m playing a small part on the planning committee helping direct registration. So hope to see you there! 

When Southern Baptists are at their best, they are a diverse coalition of independent churches united around Jesus’s Great Commission. They are urban & rural, traditional & contemporary, Calvinists & Arminian, high church & low church, politically involved & uninvolved – all cooperating to send missionaries & start new churches. As a Baptist missionary myself, I love it. Cooperation to proclaim the gospel is beautiful! 

Because of that diversity, there will likely be a few controversial measures up for vote including policies regarding churches with female pastors, abortion abolition, a budget containing legal costs for ongoing sexual abuse investigations, and their ethics organization, the ERLC. There will also be wonderfully encouraging reports from the International Mission Board and the SBC seminaries. 

This morning I relistened to Joel Gregory’s prophetic SBC sermon from 1988, “Don’t tear down the castle to build a wall.” In our zeal to protect what we believe in (the wall), we must not destroy the very thing we are trying to protect (the castle). "You can have a perfect wall and a demolished castle. What good would it be to protect the doctrine if we destroy the church in the process?" Gregory urged SBC messengers to have lively debates about doctrine and boundaries while heeding Ephesians 4: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs… Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

This is the same message as Carl F. Henry’s famous book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.” Henry feared the influence of liberalism but also saw the danger of giving control of a denomination to the most strictly, narrow, and combative leaders within those denominations.

Southern Baptists have an opportunity to stake their ground as theologically conservative and great-commission cooperative. Or to become increasingly more engaged in the secular culture wars and narrow. This week, I’m praying we’ll do the former.