Pete's Blog

Recently the Southern Baptist Convention's "Executive Committee voted to end cooperative relationship with Broadway [Baptist Church] over church's failure to clarify or correct stand." Dr. Mohler tweeted that he was in the meeting at 2:20 this afternoon, tweeted the announcement at 3:20.

Searching the Baptist Press (the Southern Baptists' newspaper), the earliest mention I could find of the issue was from December 4^th, 2007. Apparently their pastor (who'd started in April 2001) wanted to allow homosexual members to have a single picture of their couples to appear in the members' directory.

Reading a little later, another article came out March 6^th, 2008, stating that there was a vote on the issue (it is a Baptist church), and the vote passed (with less than a third of the membership voting—boo-urns). (Update: I misunderstood the vote. They took out any idea of having couples together. My current understanding is that they put pictures of the members doing ministry together, which might have the couple together, but not necessarily.) But this vote led to a petition for the pastor to be removed from the church. The vote was on March 9^th and the congregation voted to keep their pastor (although, you can hardly say that the congregation voted to keep their pastor if only half the membership voted).

The pastor ultimately resigned anyway to take a teaching post at a theological school in Georgia.

The Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee a year ago started considering what to do with Broadway since the denomination is confessionally opposed to homosexuality: "In the spirit of Christ, Christians should oppose . . . homosexuality." Finally they've decided. I think they made the right call.

You might find this boring since it doesn't really impact any of us. Still, I wanted to post it because the SBC's (Southern Baptist Convention) always had a special place in my heart. They started off strong, swung liberal, and then in the late 70s and 80s regained the orthodoxy the denomination was founded on. Also, they're real Baptists, honouring both credobaptism and congregationalism, plus they're complementarian. A few other things in the mix are the presence of Drs. Albert Mohler and Mark Dever, both are Southern Baptists, and the International Mission Board which works really hard to send anyone who has a desire and is qualified to go into the mission field. They really want to tell the world about Jesus. So I get pretty excited when I hear about them. Especially when it's news of them doing the right thing.

In a talk last year Dr. Mohler said that he was uncertain what direction the denomination was going to take when it came to congregations that were walking in a direction opposed to their confession. I wonder whether he had this issue in mind when he mentioned it. I'm glad to know that they had the courage to separate from people who were in clear opposition, not only to the confession, but to the Scriptures. It gives me hopes that this cooperative organization (when I called the SBC a denomination I say it in the very loosest sense of the word, since the SBC is committed to congregationalism and local church autonomy) might stand for some good years ahead.

Update: Read the Baptist Press'
article.

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Another thing that interested me in the course of this process, was the number of members who participated in the votes, compared with the total membership. Membership inflation has been a problem in the SBC. For example, officially, there are 16.5 million members on their rolls. But Dr. Tom Ascol, pastor of an SBC church in Cape Coral Florida, said that of the 16.5 million members, only 6.1 million of them regularly attend a Sunday worship service. And we Baptists complain about the paedobaptists having unsaved members.