Tom Ascol Speaks Honestly About SBC

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Well, the Southern Baptist Convention matters in the evangelical world in America. It matters around the world.

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We have the largest missionary sending agency in the world, and so we export our

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Christianity. And just like a rising tide raises all ships or can lower all ships, that's pretty much true for the

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SBC. So I've been in the SBC all my life. I love the way that we can cooperate on wonderful things, 47 ,000 independent autonomous churches that voluntarily cooperate.

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We educate one -third of all evangelical seminary students in North America. So it's pretty significant.

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And what happens in the SBC is important. Obviously, God doesn't need the SBC, and the

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Church of Jesus Christ is going to go on with or without any denomination, any kind of association of churches.

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But I'm in it, our church has been in it, and we want to be in it to make a difference. And the last few years, what's been going on in the

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SBC has in many ways not been healthy. We still have a lot of good things that the

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SBC cooperates to do, but we have watched these ideological philosophies that are godless, that are acidic, that come from neo -Marxism and post -modernism begin to infiltrate into some of our institutions and agencies just like they have in every area of our culture.

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And it's time for the pastors of the SBC to stand up and say, we can't let this go any further.

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All these institutions, these agencies that our churches have paid for, we built, they belong to the churches, they need to be held accountable to the churches.

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And that hasn't been the case very often. I mean, it has in some ways, but there's been too many times when those institutions and agencies have acted like they're just independent, that they're not accountable to the churches.

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And so as a pastor, I want to rally fellow Southern Baptist pastors and say, brothers, we are men who are going to give an account to God one day, and we need to come to terms with an honest assessment of what's going on.

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And we need to acknowledge what's going on in our churches. And for so many years now, we have gone along saying, oh, we're people of the book, we're people of the book, when in reality, there are huge parts of the book that we have just kind of skated over and assumed.

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And we cannot afford to be mere theoretical inerrantists anymore.

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We have got to submit ourselves to the authority of Jesus Christ revealed in scripture.

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And that means that we must order our churches the way the word of God says churches are to be ordered.

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We've got to be sensitive to the people who become members of our churches. We claim to be those who believe in a regenerate church membership.

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And so whenever people join our church, they join saying, we're going to follow Christ with you. And if they don't follow

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Christ with us, we cannot let them remain inside. Jesus in the inerrant word said in Matthew chapter 18, 15 through 20, that if one refuses to be corrected from sin and continues on sin, he is to be put outside the church.

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First Corinthians five, it happened in a church started by the apostles. So if we're going to be people of the book, we're going to have to take these things seriously.

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We have structural problems in the SBC, but man, we have spiritual problems.

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And the number one spiritual problem in my estimation is we have lost the fear of God. I mean, we see men standing up who want to lead various movements in the

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SBC and they lie. They lie in boldface fashion. They lie without embarrassment.

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We've seen reports now of abuse of women and children that have happened in various contexts that involve

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Southern Baptist life. And these things should not be. And then sometimes when those things have happened, they've been covered up by spiritual leaders.

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You don't do that if you fear God. If you fear God, then you're going to take God seriously and you're going to deal with those kinds of issues that sadly are, they're tragic always.

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And they're going to happen in a fallen world. I wish we could say we're going to find a way that we'll never have to deal with these kind of sins or crimes again, but that's not going to happen until the

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Lord Jesus returns and makes everything new. But from now till then, he's given us a book and that book tells us how to deal with these issues.

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And it's time. I don't think we've got any more time to play around with this. It's time for judgment to begin in the household of faith.

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And I wanted to rally pastors primarily to say, men, let's step up.

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We have got to take seriously the call of God that we say has laid claim of our lives.

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Well, we have seen elements of critical theory begin to infiltrate. And that, of course, as you know, it's not separated from critical race theory or queer theory or radical feminism.

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They all come from the same root. And so we've had some churches and church leaders kind of laugh about women preaching on the

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Lord's Day and on Mother's Day. And they say, oh, well, it's just one day out of the year. So why should we be upset?

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We've had a church in California, Saddleback Church, very loudly ordaining two women pastors for the first time in history and celebrating this new move of God in their church.

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Well, again, we believe the scriptures and we have a confession of faith in the

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Baptist Faith and Message. And in that confession of faith, it acknowledges only qualified men are to serve as pastors in churches.

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So are we going to stand firm? Are we going to preserve the boundaries that we say we have because of biblical conviction?

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Are we just going to look the other way? And queer theory has come in not as radically and as strongly as it has in some other

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Christian spaces, but it's knocking on our door and it's seeping through the cracks in the windows.

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We see it in things like one of the professors at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Karen Swallow Pryor, who endorsed the

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Revoice Conference, which is a conference that is designed to affirm gay Christianity and help gay

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Christians to live healthy sexual lives according to the biblical ethic, which is just an impossibility.

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The only way you live healthy according to a biblical sexual ethic is to renounce everything except chastity, purity, abstinence outside of a biblical covenanted marriage between one man, one woman for all of life.

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Everything else is outside of what God says is righteous. We've seen up until recently, we had a provost at our oldest seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, who said,

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I am a racist and I will be a racist until the day I die. Well, there are pastors like me who've contributed money from our churches and our churches are saying, why do we have a racist as a provost?

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And when pressed, he would say, you know, it's an Augustinian concept or those around him and over him would say he was virtue signaling.

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Either way, we've got a problem. If the man's not telling the truth about himself, then why did he say it?

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Well, he said it in an arena where everybody applauded him for being so sensitive and so wise and so humble and in touch with all of the systemic racism that he has participated in and benefited from.

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But when pressed to own his words, there's a lot of obfuscation and a lack of direct repudiation of the statement.

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And it goes to this point that it seems like we've lost confidence in the gospel.

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It's like we can't admit when we've done something wrong, because if we do, then it's, oh, no, then people will think less of us.

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When did we start living on the basis of our performance? I mean, we have a savior and it's his righteousness that declares us acceptable to God.

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It's his death for our sins that is completely atoned for all of our shortcomings of what

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God's called us to be and do. So I don't have to cover up and pretend that I'm something I'm not. When I examine myself or somebody comes to me and said, brother, you sinned here.

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I don't have to argue my way out of that to save face. Save face? Really? No. I have a savior.

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If I discover something that's sinful in me, God's already known it. Jesus has already died for it.

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There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ. I can confess it and acknowledge my failure there, look to him for the hope and salvation that I have when he died on the cross, get up and in faith, go forward.

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We don't have to pretend and play games about this. So at bottom, it's a denial of the gospel.

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And I really fear that we have not thought as fulsomely as we should about the gospel.

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In 2 Timothy 2 .8, Paul's last letter we have in the New Testament, he's in prison, he's going to die. He has a pretty keen sense that he's going to die.

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He feels himself to be poured out as a drink offering already. He's run the race. He's finished his course. He uses that language to Timothy.

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And in verse 8 of chapter 2, he says, remember Jesus Christ. Remember Jesus Christ, the seed of David, who was raised from the dead, according to my gospel.

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And I've thought about that for years. Why is this apostle, knowing he's near the end of his life, telling to his young colleague, remember

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Jesus Christ. Is Timothy in danger of forgetting Jesus? Well, not the facts of Jesus, the reality of Jesus.

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What Paul's saying there, risen from the dead, Jesus Christ, he's saying, Timothy, think about the implications of this.

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Think about what you have in a crucified, risen Savior. You have everything that you need.

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And because of Christ, you can face any challenge, any obstacle in the world, and you can know that whatever you find coming down the pike toward you in Christ, you have enough to either withstand the evil attempts to move you off the pathway or to address the confounding things that come to you.

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It's the same realities of 2 Corinthians chapter 4 and verses 16 through 18.

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And Paul, after listing all of these things that have happened to him, you know, the difficulties, the trials, the persecutions, being pressed down, he says, so we do not lose heart, you know, though outwardly we're wasting away, inwardly we're being renewed day by day.

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And you think, well, how does that happen? He tells us, as we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen, because the things that are seen are temporal, the things that are unseen are eternal.

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These are working for us in eternal weight of glory. I fear we lose sight of the eternal realities that have been secured for us by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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And we need that counsel of 2 Timothy 2 .8 today as badly as at any time in the history of the church.

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We must remember Jesus Christ. If we will, then we're not going to be so easily seduced by these ideologies that come into the world.

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We'll not be so quick to try to cover up and pretend that something is less than the reality dictates and the data shows us to be true.

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We'll face it. We'll own it. Where there's sin, we trust the Savior. Where there needs to be correction, we'll look to the book and we'll say, here's how we ought to walk.