NAMB's Problems Go Beyond Women Pastors

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We are gonna do a short episode hopefully today, but it is one for you

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Southern Baptists out there. We're gonna talk about the North American Mission Board and some controversial things that happened in the last week.

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I think the issue is actually corruption, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, dishonesty, backdoor deals.

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These are the kinds of things that are wrecking SBC institutions. It's not so much the issues themselves that are being fought over as it is how they're, the assumptions that are being brought to that fight, that people who actually pay into this aren't able to hold these institutions accountable.

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That's a real problem. And that you don't, lack of transparency. You don't need to know really what we're doing.

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We, trust us, you know, and if you question that you're the enemy. These are the kinds of things that are wrecking the

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SBC. And we're gonna talk about a controversy that took place mostly last week on women pastors in the

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SBC in contradiction to the Baptist Faith and Message who were being funded by the North American Mission Board.

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That means if you're going to a Southern Baptist Church, you're paying money into this North American Mission Board, you're giving money to the

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Cooperative Program, some of it's going to this kind of thing. And it's against the statement of faith that you hold. And that's a real, real problem.

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And I've seen, I saw, it reminds me on a smaller scale of an organization that I was in, in my teens, that it was like a youth organization that the parents kept making these rules for the leaders in the organization and what they had all these policies of what the leaders are supposed to do on outings and how to deal with,

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I think, homesickness and all sorts of other issues that, you know, are common to young teenagers. And I remember in that organization, the leaders basically just refused to follow them.

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And in a sense, at least, at certain points they did. And it made parents angry. And it was one of these tug of wars where the leaders were just kind of like, well, just trust us.

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And there was a lack of transparency and it created this big problem. And that organization does not exist anymore. And I'm seeing that on a much larger scale play out in NAM, where it's not so much the issues, like I said, that they're being fought over, it's the assumptions brought to, it's an elitist assumption that's being brought to the table here.

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And that doesn't, the issues are important though. So this is important if you're gonna be, you know, voting for an

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SBC president this summer, if you're in the SBC, you're gonna want someone who's gonna deal with this stuff. And if they're not saying anything about it, you gotta ask yourself why, and you're gonna want them to say something about it because these are issues, these are real issues.

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So here we go. Oh, one more thing. Before I show you what

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I wanna show you, I wanna speak a little bit about my own perception of NAM.

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And this is after going to a Southern Baptist seminary, going through NAM training, and they have, you know, weekend training things.

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I went to one of them. Going, well, knowing people in NAM, there are some church planners who have used the money well, there's no doubt about that.

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But I have not been, to say I have not been impressed is an understatement.

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I have been shocked at the incompetence and to some extent the waste and the lack of biblical anything that I've seen in my experience with NAM.

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And this was really, this was kind of almost before the social justice stuff got going. So it's,

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I'm already not, my experience hasn't been the best. And then the horror stories that I've received in the

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SBC, a lot of them come from NAM, more so than the ERLC.

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I know a lot of people think, well, just Russell Moore needs to get out of this convention. You guys, this is not Russell Moore. Russell Moore is one problem.

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Russell Moore is one person that's creating a problem, I should say. It's more than Russell Moore. There's someone ready to take

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Russell Moore's place if he goes, and there'll probably just be another Russell Moore. With NAM, you have a, the church money is, that's collected in the co -operative program is going to fund woke churches, guys.

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And I, it's been frustrating for me, I'll be honest with you. It's been very frustrating for me because I get, I've gotten a lot of information, especially yet last year and the year before from people telling me that the corruption in NAM, of where, you know, specifically where woke churches were being planted and they, and taking money away from churches that weren't going woke.

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And, you know, very little of this, what was public though, and the people that would come out to me didn't ever want to be named, it seemed like.

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And so it was like, I can't cite. I can't just say someone I know in NAM says this.

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Like, what am I supposed to do with that? Like, I can't, I can't really use that information. And so I haven't used that information.

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And I'm not using it now to say, you know, you should just believe what I said 100 % right now without me citing anything.

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I'm just telling you what I've heard and how it's consistent with what you're about to see.

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But I will tell you one thing off the top of my head that is publicly kind of available. I think it was at Charlie Dates.

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It was a, I think it was Charlie Dates. It was someone who was leaving the SBC and they had admitted they had gotten like 200 ,000 bucks from NAM and then they were just leaving.

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Like, but it was to plant, it was like, why did NAM give so much money to this one church?

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Meanwhile, if you look at the money that's going for church planting, it's costing more to plant a church.

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The money's risen significantly for that, but they're planting, you know, less churches and the money is being depleted anyway.

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They're getting less money. So there's like, what's going on? Why is it working out this way?

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And I, you know, I have that suspicion. I remember, I will say this, this is someone

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I met. I remember I tried to get them to go on the record and couldn't, but you know, they were, they left their

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NAM church plant because they were baptizing unrepentant lesbians. And this is against, you know, the

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Baptist faith and message and they, it was one of those things. They just couldn't, they couldn't reason with the church planting team.

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That's what they were gonna do. And these are the kinds of stories that I was getting.

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And I'm like, well, if you're not willing to come forward, I can't do anything about this, this story. Now some things though are starting to make their way to the surface.

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And so I want to shine a light on some of this. I want you guys to see just the small glimpse, in my opinion, of NAM and kind of the way they operate.

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This is, this was actually sent to me. This was sent to me by someone who could not, again, didn't want to go on the record, but just sending me, hey, here's people in NAM, people probably close to this person that, you know, they're marching with Black Lives Matter last summer.

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You know, you're supporting Black Lives Matter. These are the kind of people there. And there's a bunch of other screenshots as well, but being funded by NAM to go plant churches.

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And I've heard Detroit is one of the worst places, by the way, for this. Planting woke churches and with like a, you know, it's like Orthodox to be woke.

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You have to be woke to plant a church in Detroit, from what I've heard. Again, you don't have to believe me on any of this, but, you know, these are screenshots.

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You can check to see if these people are actual NAM church planters, which they are, or they were at the time that this was sent.

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Here's what's going on now, though. Here's what's going on now in the SBC. And this stuff, we do have sources for.

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Tom Askle, on the last week of January, I guess it was, pointed to or showcased, hey, here's a

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NAM church plant. Has a woman pastor. This is a, you know, what's going on here? Kevin Ezell, person who is the head of NAM.

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And Kevin Ezell, I'm not gonna go through the whole thing now, but essentially, he said that basically, he said,

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SBC pastors, NAM holds our partnership with pastors in the SBC churches in the highest regard. NAM assists churches who plant churches that wholeheartedly affirm the

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Baptist faith message 2000, which includes its statement that the office of the pastor is limited to biblically qualified men.

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Okay, sounds good, right? As an SBC family with a shared theology, let me encourage you to voice concerns you have to NAM or to me personally, as a pastor, let's not attempt to publicly shame planters.

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So that's what Tom Askle was doing. That's what he's saying. He said, Tom Askle is shaming planters, pastors and believers. Let's work through concerns we may have with each other in love.

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Now, this is stupid, in my opinion. You have publicly available information.

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Someone has publicly gone out and said, yeah, we're a NAM church and this is our woman pastor at this church.

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And then to post that is apparently public shaming. No, that's publicly available information that's being put out there.

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And it's a legitimate concern if that person is not in keeping with the Baptist faith and message. So what's

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Kevin Eazell is doing here though, is I will point out the hypocrisy. He is publicly shaming Tom Askle when he says that.

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It's to embarrass Tom Askle, you know, you shouldn't public shame. Well, that's what Kevin Eazell is doing though. So Jeff Wright wrote this on the

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Conservative Resurgence Voices blog. February 8th, 2021, he said, what appeared to be an invitation to engage directly with Dr.

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Eazell via email resulted from those of us who reached out in a form letter response from someone other than Dr.

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Eazell that amounted to a shutdown in further communication. The last I personally received directed me back to Dr. Eazell's tweets, for instance.

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This is the testimony that I hear over and over and over again, guys.

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And this is what happens almost every time someone in an SBC entity tries to bring up, hey, there's a problem here.

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They try to go through the proper channels, they're shut down. They're given the ring around the Rosie. They're quietly fired.

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They're repositioned somewhere else. They're not given straight answers about things. This is how this organization operates.

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This is like, there's so many examples and like almost every example. And it was someone calls me and is like,

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John, I'm in this SBC entity and here's what's happening and I wanna fight it. And I was like, well, if you go through those channels,

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I'll tell you what's gonna happen. Like, really? And that's exactly what happens. Good cop, bad cop, let's wine and dine approach, try to neutralize.

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I mean, that's what they're concerned about, neutralizing opposition so they have their institutions and they can control them.

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It's about control, they're institutionalists. You gotta understand that. Now, NAM is no exception.

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NAM might be the worst example of it from the stories that I've heard. And this is publicly available right here, which

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F Wright says, and this is exactly, I'm just telling you, this is exactly the private stories I get as well. I try to go through the channels,

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I'm shut down. And then if you go public with it, then people say, well, why didn't you go through the proper channels?

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Why didn't you, you're being intolerant and divisive and unloving and unchristian.

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You should have just gone to the, well, it's like, yeah, we did. We did try that, we were shut down.

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And that's the story that gets repeated over and over and over and over. So this is sort of the setup.

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Now, here's what dropped last week from the same blog, Conservative Resurgent Voices.

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These are all pictures or I guess they blotted out what specific churches.

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But these are all screen grabs from churches funded, at least at the time these were grabbed by NAM, or at least they were funded by NAM at some point.

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All of these different churches, different parts of the country, Washington, DC, California.

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And they have executive pastors that are women and or associate pastors that are women or creative pastors that are women or campus pastors that are women.

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And they have women pastors. And the proof is there, it's all there. And you can go to the

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NAM website and you verify. I think one of these churches has left NAM since then, the blog updated.

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But a bunch of them are still in NAM with women pastors. This was posted

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February 9th by Capstone Reports. A NAM strategist says church with women pastor is on the cutting edge of culture.

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And here's the screen grabs. So there's a problem, guys. This is a real, real, real problem.

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These are people that are being funded by the cooperative program, little old ladies going to church, putting their money in the offering plate to spread the gospel and some of it's going to this stuff.

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And it's not in keeping with the statement of faith that the Southern Baptists have. That's the real problem here, guys.

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For those, even those who believe that, you know, biblically women pastors are okay, you can't believe that it's right for an organization to violate its own statement of faith, its own agreement with the rest of the churches and entities and people in the organization.

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And just say, well, whatever, we're just going to take the money that you're giving us and we're not going to carry on what you've tasked us with promoting.

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We're not going to do that. We're going to actually do some of the opposite. You can't believe that's right. And that's what I want to really focus on and say, that's the problem with this more than anything else.

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Now, is there a solution for this? Is there a solution for what's going on in NAMM? And that's a very small taste you're getting, really small, guys, compared to everything that I've seen and heard and stuff that unfortunately can't all go public.

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This is the one person running for president that I've seen a solution from.

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And I'm not saying no one else will come out with one, but this is the only one I'm aware of.

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Randy Adams, who's running for SBC president, said, the post today by Conservative Resurgence Voices about several

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NAMM churches. And by the way, this is on February 8th. He was really quick with this. It seems to be in clear violation of the

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Baptist Faith and Message 2000. It should raise concern and further illustrates why we need transparency, bingo, and partnership across local, state, and national.

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Here is why. Just take, just last week, trustees said they know everything that NAMM is doing. Do they know about this?

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If not, could it be they do not know everything going on at NAMM? Transparency, accountability, partnership,

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SBC 21. Now, I'm not telling you, I'm not campaigning for Randy Adams or anything.

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I haven't even talked to Randy Adams. I'm just showing you, here's one person, the only person in the SBC that has, is trying to get into a position where they can do something about it, that I know of, who has called attention to this and says he's got a solution of some kind.

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And if you go to his website, he does have, he talks about transparency and his specific plans with us. I'd encourage you guys, if there's someone else running that you're, that you want, you think is a good candidate, encourage them to come out and talk about this stuff.

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Because this is the stuff that's getting out there and it needs to be confronted. There's no other option because this is the kind of rot that gets into everything else when, and of course, there's no, there isn't a reaction, of course, it's being ignored, even though the evidence is there.

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And it's a problem. I just don't know what else to say about it.

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Yeah, so bottom line with that is, any organization that you're part of that has stated beliefs, and those beliefs are violated in any way, that, the more that that continues, the more that it sets a precedent that that's allowable, that kind of thing's okay.

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And the more those rules don't actually matter anymore, and it weakens them, it weakens their authority. We're living through this with the

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Constitution in our country right now. And we're seeing something similar happening in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, I believe. This isn't being treated seriously by Kevin Eazell, by the people that lead the, you're not hearing people even talk about this.

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It's either ignored or when it's talked about, it's some kind of a reinforcement that we believe, we hold up the document, we believe the

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Baptist Faith Message 2000, and then it's going after the sin of, I guess, exposing someone or something.

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It's just mean. You shouldn't expose that when they're in violation of the agreement that you're, that you are a party to, and they're violating it even though you're funding them.

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This wouldn't work in like any other situation in life. Like if you, on a business contract level, they violated the contract, you're paying them to do a job, but it's mean to point that out.

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Like it wouldn't work. But somehow in this organization, that's the way things often get run.

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So I think I just wanted to say that. Nothing personal against anyone.

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In NAMM, my experience has been very limited there, but I do have some experience there, and I have not been impressed in the least with the way that they go about things.

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And maybe one day I'll talk more about that. I'll talk about what that looked like when I went through some of that.

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Here's some other stuff. I wanted to just point this out. I almost forgot, and now

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I'm glad I remembered. This is a Reddit, which is a chat group page for the

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Southern Baptist, and a church planner says, was an aspiring church planner in residence in Washington, struggling whether or not to go with the assessment process with NAMM.

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And he says, there's been turmoil in the SBC. I didn't grow up in SBC, not tied to the nomination, just feeling pressure to join and get funding.

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Now, by the way, I felt that pressure too. And here's some of the advice he's given. I probably tell you to take the money and run with a plan if you plan to plant consistent with Baptist polity.

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NAMM's pragmatism and drunken sailor spending are bad for the SBC, but that's a criticism of their offer. For the recipient, the process gives you some good information, and it's pretty good money.

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Fewer strings in other places. The convention fights might mean the punch bowl gets taken away in a couple of years, and some new networks will form, but if you're planting right now, it probably remains a good deal.

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So this guy's admitting, yeah, you won't have accountability, but you'll get money. And to reinforce this, this aspiring church planter said that, this is amazing,

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I'm actively being told not to worry about specific theological issues I may have as they really aren't a big deal.

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One that came up right away was the restriction on alcohol. The assessor practically said that I shouldn't even worry about it as it's more of a

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Southern cultural issue and will probably be going away in the next couple of years. Makes it hard to know what exactly I'd be committing to.

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So he's saying himself, the NAM assessor, the guy being paid by cooperative fund money, by churches, to assess a church planter is saying don't worry about our rules.

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Don't worry about them. Guys, not good. Not good.

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There's some folks that I think are following some of this corruption stuff, because this parallels the

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CRT social justice stuff. Will McCraney talks a lot about corruption in NAM.

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He's one guy. I'll put his Facebook page, which is where he posts most of his stuff, on the info section if you wanna know more about this.

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I think if you're in the SBC, you need to get informed on this stuff. Jacob Johnson is another guy who was formerly with NAM in Kentucky, and he posts stuff a lot about complicated things that sometimes

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I just don't know all the people involved, so I don't usually talk about that stuff. It's a little outside of my wheelhouse.

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But if you're in the SBC, you should probably start following that stuff. Those are two people, though.

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And then, of course, the Capstone Report and Conservative Resurgence Voices are posting a lot of stuff. I've showed you some of that stuff. I'll post links to all these people in the info section for you to check out.

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But you're gonna want someone to address this. You can't have an organization that doesn't have rules that they are willing to abide by.

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Change the rules if you don't wanna abide by them. So that is, that's how the cookie crumbles for me.

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The other stuff I wanted to show you, not that, yeah, just real quick, just a few things

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I noticed. Some of you were following the living out kind of controversy that I guess now it's maybe two years ago with Sam Albury.

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Tom Buck had done some articles at James White's website, Alpha and Omega Ministries, and at the time,

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I had remembered, I thought, Sam Albury saying, oh, I'm not a gay Christian. It's not really, it's about being gay and living out.

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It's about same -sex attraction. And anyways, it looks like there was a rebrand recently, and I just wanted to point this out to people who are following this.

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Living out now, this supposed ministry, is now, when you post it, it says Christians and gay, living out,

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Christians and gay. That's their tagline. So I guess that they're putting their flag down.

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That's where they are. I just wanted to point that out to some folks. Also, Lagos. I use Lagos.

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I'm not against people using Lagos. I bought it years ago, or my parents, I think, were the ones that bought it for me when

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I was in seminary. They're going woke, though, for Black History Month.

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God's word, black voices, experience faith and scripture through the eyes of African -American writers. This is standpoint epistemology.

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First book on the list, Reading While Black by Esau McCulley. Here's a quote from it.

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But if we all read the biblical text, assuming that God is able to speak a coherent word to us through it, then we can discuss the meanings of our varied cultures have gleaned from the scriptures.

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What I have in mind, then, is a unified mission in which our varied cultures turn to the text in dialogue with one another to discern the mind of Christ.

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Yeah, that's how you get at the mind of Christ. You just gotta go through all the cultures. What about the ones that died off? We'll never know the mind of Christ because of the cultures that died off that did not give us their unique perspective.

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I mean, this is ridiculous, guys. This is standpoint epistemology, Reading While Black. Oh, last thing, but not least.

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So this was fun. Some of you saw this on social media. I posted it on a few sites. I said, I posted these different, these are movies.

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The Searchers, Shane, El Dorado, The Big Country, Magnificent Seven, all Western movies from kind of the golden age of cinema.

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And their intros are all very similar in some ways, just very, you know, big landscapes and these kind of more rousing themes.

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If I played them for you, I'd be shut down from the copyright people, so I'm not going to.

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I wouldn't be able to monetize this video, so I'm not going to. But here are the movies.

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You can go look them up yourself and the themes and the intros, and so there's this combination of kind of these vast landscapes with kind of more of a regal sounding, inspiring, you know, theme of some kind.

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And so I had asked people, what is it that, what makes this unique, essentially, is what

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I was trying to get at. Think beyond cowboys and landscape, and what is it that these songs, these mixed with images, these media form was trying to communicate?

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And why is it gone? Is the more important question. And so some people were basically just, a lot of people were just describing it, saying, well, it's, you know, they're, what

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I just said, it's, you know, regal and inspiring and open landscapes and all that kind of stuff. And that's absolutely true, that is what it is.

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But I was thinking a little more deeper than that, philosophically, what are we missing in our culture that we used to have?

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Because you watch this stuff and you feel like there is something very positive about it. There's something very, like, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna conquer something, or we're gonna,

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I don't know, there's just some, you know, big landscape, it's, you know, ready to be tamed and we're gonna go tame it, kind of thing.

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Makes, it's actually, there's a human scale thing going on here. Men, generally, in those Western movies, and it wasn't just Western, there's a lot of epics like this on those big, like, cinemascope screens.

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You have, like, the people are very small, generally. They don't, like, take up the whole frame.

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They're in this environment. And there is a sense, and this is what

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I was kind of more getting at than anything else, that you are playing a part in something much bigger.

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There's something, and that's what the music exudes. There's something, there's a purpose, there's a telos, there's a direction, and you're playing some kind of a role in it.

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You have an important part in it, but you're not it. You're, you are playing a part in a plan that is much more, much bigger.

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And there's hope with that. There's expectation with that. There's meaning in that. Today, even if you wanna look at, like,

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Westerns today, dark, mostly, focusing on the violence.

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You don't see, necessarily, the big, the landscape stuff as much, generally. It doesn't focus on the landscape, and with, if there is landscape in music, it's usually ominous kind of music.

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Something dark is about to happen, and there is no plan. There's just, it's just matter in motion.

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That's what the landscape represents. And in those older movies, it was, here's a desert, here's matter, but there's purpose behind it, and the music kind of reinforced that.

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And man's presence in that barren wasteland was related to the purpose.

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So that's, that was my thought when I was thinking through that a little bit. I'm sure I could say more, and someone else could probably say it better, and maybe say even more than me.

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But it just, it catalogs kind of where we are going as Americans, I think.

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That used to be, especially Western movies, that used to be, you know, those were the heroes. Those were the people you'd look to. They were considered the best of America, and this is what

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Americans do. And some people call that now rugged individualism as almost a smear, which it shouldn't really be a smear, or individualism that's just, you know, it's selfish in some way.

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That's what America is. But actually, it was a, there was a day and a time when people believed that one man, or two men, or a group of men, like the

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Magnificent Seven, could make a difference. That men could make a difference. And I think we've lost that in some ways.

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We don't think we can make a difference. The collective group has to decide something, and standing against injustice, you know, it feels like a helpless thing.

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Even to those who mislabel injustice, the social justice warriors, you know, they're always depressed. They even, they win the presidency, they're still depressed and angry.

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So, it just shows kind of how untethered we are from a transcendent

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God. I think that's ultimately what's behind a lot of that. So, I just wanted to make that little observation.

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Hopefully, that was interesting to you. We got James White this week. Hopefully, you're gonna enjoy his take on Romans 13.

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We got an expert on critical theory, who's gonna be on, who used to be a critical theorist, became a true

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Christian, rejected that, but still teaches at a law school. And he's in the SBC, and he's gonna talk about it.