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Hey everyone, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And I want to talk to you about the Southern Baptist Convention. I actually recorded a whole podcast earlier today, and I wasn't able to upload it.
And now some of that information is kind of old, but I made my prediction, which you didn't get to hear. And unfortunately, my prediction came true about the results of the election between Barbara and Tom Askel.
So it's not a surprise to me, but I know for some of you, it is a surprise. And I know some people need to just kind of come to their own conclusions on this. They need to see for themselves the corruption that exists in the convention by attending a meeting and seeing with their own eyes.
For me, I think I had a bit of an advantage of being at Southeastern years ago and seeing kind of how the same politics that you saw displayed more clearly in the convention are deployed on a more of a local level in an institution.
So for me, I've been talking about this issue. Of corruption, but also mostly of social justice for a while and the two kind of do go together. And after the convention last year, I made a video, eight reasons to leave the SBC.
And I have certainly not changed my mind. I'm probably more convinced of the position I held last year now than I was then. But I haven't wanted to rain on the parade of people that are well-meaning and orthodox and wanting to attend these conventions and make a difference.
Because I know many of them have to come to the conclusion themselves. Like I said, that the SBC is perhaps beyond saving or an organization one should not be a part of. And the other thing is just, hey, if there is a chance, if there is a way, if there is really bold leadership that's willing to call out false teachers and willing to really rally the base and come up with a actual ground game, I don't want to just discourage people from that.
So that's kind of one of the reasons I haven't shared at least immediately in the last few weeks, my prediction. I did put a poll out on Twitter, or no, sorry, I don't have Twitter, YouTube. And with people's predictions and people were overwhelmingly predicting Tom Askew was going to win.
And this is many of you listening to this particular podcast, people in my audience. And I knew there was a lot of optimism there. And so I realized as I'm talking about this, that there's probably right now a little bit of sadness over it, maybe some depression if you're a Southern Baptist who really cares about your denomination.
And there's really no sugarcoating it. But the one thing I can say is that the Lord reigns. The Lord is on his throne. We know this, but the church is the institution that will last. The Lord's kingdom will not fail.
It will continue. The gates of hell will not prevail against it. And the Southern Baptist Convention, all it is and all it was ever intended to be was an organization to cooperate between churches for mutual cooperation for the purpose of missions and education and really mainly missions, but also church planning and some disaster relief.
So it's not an organization that, some of these things can be done outside of the SBC. It's not the church. It's supposed to be a parachurch that helps the church. And when that purpose is no longer useful for the church, if it's not actually helping the church, then it's time to get out.
And a lot of people are getting out and it'll probably go this way every year. More people will go out as they see the corruption and the social justice and all the rest. So that being said, I do wanna say though, I'm traveling through Wisconsin.
You can see I'm in a hotel room right now. And I've been encouraged. I actually just had a wonderful time in DeForest Evangelical Free Church and just wonderful people there. Wonderful pastor, Pastor Michael Lawler.
He's just a very humble man. And I stayed with a family in the church. He's just very impressive, raising their kids right, well-behaved, well-mannered children and just servants, real servants, giving up without complaining and with just positive, great people to be around.
It gives me hope when I see this because I've seen it all over the country that there are solid churches out there. Not to say that all churches have their issues, but there are solid families, solid churches, stable individuals.
And we need to be reminded of that sometime. And one of the things that I'm reminded of when I travel is that the Lord has his people in all places. And then tonight I was able to speak at, it was more of a very small political kind of, I guess, event for lack of a better term.
But I think it was probably one of the smallest, you know, it was the smallest group I've ever spoken at, but we had a great time. And it was more of a discussion than anything else. There was, I didn't count, I guess there's probably like maybe 10 of us.
I mean, it was just kind of a circle. And, but, you know, there was one girl in particular there, one young lady who is very excited about going to Hillsdale College and she's just on fire. And it's kind of the thing, the infectious personality, the positive personality, that, you know, the Lord is gonna do something.
I mean, it's true. And I don't know always what that looks like, but it's the thing I needed to hear on a day like this because I'm with a lot of you all out there. You know, I knew this was gonna happen in a way, but at the same time, it's hard when you see it happen.
And so I just want to start off by saying that. And then let's get into the details. I'll analyze it some for you and I'll just give you some of the observations I've had. I've tried to follow this as best I can while someone's traveling, it's hard.
But Bart Barber defeated Tom Askle in the presidential election for the SBC, 60, rounding up, 61 to Tom Askle's 39%. So it's not really close at all. Bart Barber really did win. And I can see even the silver lining in this.
And that is that if it was closer, I think a lot of Southern Baptists would see the hope in staying in. I think that happened last year to some extent. I think seeing a defeat, this rousing of a defeat, I think changes that to some extent.
I think a lot of pastors are gonna be leaving because how do you overcome this kind of a thing? And I know there's probably Southern Baptists who are really bemoaning that, but the thing that I was honestly the most, obviously I wanted Tom Askle to win, but if he didn't win, I really didn't want it to be close because I knew that would just kind of put that carrot in front of the horse and like, we'll just do it next year, which a lot of them probably are saying anyway.
But this isn't close guys, this isn't close. And it shows you where the convention's at. And this was a year that many conservatives in the CBN vein were really optimistic. And so to see this is quite a blow for the Southern Baptists.
I wanted to just point out, this isn't really being reported much, but there's a lot of subtle changes going on. Here's an SBC pastor saying one of the hymns, the word mistakes, the word sin was taken out and the word mistakes was substituted.
I mean, that's kind of significant, but these are, they're small things because they're not, but there's a lot of them. And this is not an exhaustive list. You have the ERLC announcing their conference, their Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptists.
And their conference is going to be uniting to make abortions unnecessary. United to make abortions unnecessary. And I mean, this is the kind of thing you'd expect from a mainline denomination. How about making abortions illegal?
How about ending them? How about banning them? If you want to have a conference about the family and strengthening the family and underlying issues that lead to people wanting to divorce, like out of wedlock births and so forth, then do that.
But uniting to make abortions unnecessary, it's odd phrasing. And it's the kind of phrasing you'd hear at like a PC USA church or something. You have the fact that there was a survivor care room at the convention hall provided by the task force, private, secure, comfy, quiet.
Here's the thing. Do you really expect with the security at the convention center, people are in danger of being sexually abused? I mean, that's insane, really? They need a safe space? You couldn't have told someone 10 years ago that this would be in effect, and yet it is.
You have new coalitions forming. Interestingly, the Armenian Calvinist debate just seems to be kind of almost like ended. You have Jack Graham endorsing Tom Askell, despite the fact that Tom Askell is Calvinist, Jack Graham is Armenian, and I think they use the term traditionalist, because there's issues that are more fundamental going on.
And that's happening. There's real changes going on in the convention. And as far as I can tell, there's three options here. You're going to have one faction take over, and of course, the conservatives did not, and just boot everyone else out.
I mean, really make it hard for conservatives, or if the conservatives had one, make it hard for the progressives. And so that's one option. And so that you can have true unity. So the progressives can be with progressives and agree on definitions.
And so the conservatives can be with conservatives. The other option is you have fake unity, and you just pretend like these issues are not primary issues, that the cancer really isn't stage four. It's like stage maybe one or two, or it's not really cancer.
We don't really need chemo, but we just have some disagreements that are secondary. You could do that. Some of that was definitely going on at the convention, especially with Dwight McKissick and some conservative leaders that seem to really want to, for some odd reason, take a false teacher like Dwight McKissick and treat him like a brother and almost minimize some of the disagreements, or it seems that way.
I mean, people that wouldn't want to be seen with me or take a picture with me or anything, more than happy to do one with Dwight McKissick. It's strange, and they're conservative to me. It's a strange dynamic.
But really what happens is there's a fake piece there because Dwight McKissick will go and take a picture with John MacArthur, but he's tweeting out about how terrible John MacArthur is. And these guys will go to war after they take their pictures and stuff.
So, I mean, that's not real unity. And so that's kind of the other way forward for the Southern Baptist Convention. You just have a fake unity. Or I guess the third option is you're just going to be in battle mode all the time, and you're grinding gears with other people in your convention.
You don't agree on very fundamental things, but yet for the sake of habit or something, you stay in the convention and you keep being involved. And so those are the three options. And I think that probably that third one is going to be the one that's going to be the most prevalent.
Although there's a lot of people, like I said, are probably leaving for the conservatives. Here's Dwight McKissick earlier today or yesterday accusing, basically he says that the African-American Pastors Fellowship had an address from Bart Barber, who won the vote.
And he says, he'll never insult our dignity. So that's insinuating that the other people running did insult the dignity of African-Americans. So you have Robin Hadaway and Tom Askell responding and saying, yeah, but we weren't invited to this meeting.
So we would have come, but we weren't invited. So that's the kind of, I mean, that's a dirty tactic, but this is the same guy who's taking pictures with John MacArthur. And you have certain CBN people that are high up taking pictures or treating him like a brother and stuff like that, according to reports at least.
And so it's odd to me because this guy, I'm going to just say it, he's a false teacher. And I put a bunch of screenshots up here just showing that, that he thinks social justice is, if you don't have it, that you have an incomplete gospel.
And he's gone after John MacArthur for that very reason, questioning John MacArthur's gospel because John MacArthur's against social justice. And someone can screenshot this, or you can download the PowerPoint from Patreon because I make these PowerPoints available for patrons.
And just a small sampling of Dwight McKissick making this point. And yeah, and of course he's egalitarian. You think women can be pastors and he's got other issues, but I mean, this is fundamental stuff.
You can't have a convention. You can't share a convention when you have two different gospels. How do you do it? And then buddy buddy up and treat, we're brothers still? No, you're not. How? What commonalities do you have?
So mistrust though is building in the convention. And this is where I think, despite the fake unity that's existing in some quarters, there's been a lot of questioning. I mean, Nathan Finn, more on the progressive side here, questioning the SBC pastors conference, the way that the conservative Baptists were gonna steal it apparently.
They were gonna eat, that's his word. They're attempting to steal the election. Of course, Bodie Bauckham lost that. But it's just paranoia almost. And I think a lot of that probably is projection. I mean, the progressives tend to accuse others of what they themselves are doing.
Danny Akin retweeting Griffin Gutledge, who he's the one that wrote that gospel coalition article about the sexual abuse task force issue that I went over a few episodes ago. But anyway, Griffin Gutledge says, there's a plan to change the agenda and move the presidential election to the very beginning of the time.
And so Tom Askel can win and Danny Akin, I pray this is not true. I mean, the people from CBN that were reaching out to me, at least the people in that meeting were saying, I don't know what he's talking about.
Of course, that didn't even happen. But you have conservatives that are suspicious too. Here's Alan Nelson, a pastor saying like, I thought Bodie Bauckham had the majority, but the platform said, no, we gotta go to a secret ballot.
So there was a secret ballot in the election for SBC president of the pastors convention, which Bodie Bauckham did not succeed in, unfortunately. But there's just a mistrust going on. I had people from the conservative Baptist network suspicious of whether or not the counting process was accurate in that particular election.
And then you have the SBC pastors conference itself. I watched part of this and it was ridiculous. I watched Marcus Hayes and a guy, I think his name was PJ Tobion, if I'm not mistaken. But it was weird.
PJ Tobion is talking about we need unity and there's things that can get our eyes off Jesus, like valuing the Bible too much and being too pro-life. Like really, you're at Disneyland? I mean, you're right next to Disneyland during pride month.
And those are the examples you're gonna use. Okay, those are the threats. And Marcus Hayes talking in vague terms about, don't let these philosophies and outside ideas distract us and break us apart. We have unity.
The thing is, you don't have unity. If you have two different gospels, you don't have unity. And you have two religions, in my opinion, in the Southern Baptist convention living side by side, social justice and Christianity.
And they cannot live side by side. It won't work. Yet the Southern Baptist convention pastors conference retweeted someone who basically said, there's no drift and the pastors conference shows there's no drift.
Well, I listened to the part of the pastors conference and I immediately thought, yeah, this is a drift. I mean, even their illustrations are all, I mean, it's little stuff too sometimes, but like your illustrations are all, they're movies.
It was just poor preaching, vague. It was strange. And then you have the credentials committee basically saying they don't know what a pastor is. So they're responding to a motion from last year that would have the credentials committee basically kick Saddleback church out of the convention for having female pastors.
And the credentials committee's response is, well, they may be serving in the, they may have a title of pastor, but we don't know if they really are serving in the function of a pastor. And then they think that's what the office of pastor means when the Baptist faith and message talks about in an article six.
Oh, this is so convoluted. So we're gonna just let people redefine what a pastor is and say that, well, that's compatible with the Baptist faith and message. This became a convention for fight. Unfortunately, it's a convention for fight that was lost by the conservatives in this case.
And that went for pretty much all the fights that erupted, that I saw at least and that people told me about. The sexual abuse task force, they were able to do their thing. And it's just an unfortunate thing because the Southern Baptist Convention, I don't know how this doesn't fundamentally change it when you can have situations in local churches that end up liability is the convention itself becomes liable for.
Now, tomorrow or not tomorrow, probably later today, I'm gonna drop an episode about the sexual abuse task force and the Tom Buck, Jennifer Buck situation. I've debated whether I should do it, but then the Daily Wire, Megan Bashing came up with an excellent article from the Daily Wire and we'll read through it and I'll talk about it.
But this is what's happening in the Southern Baptist Convention. I mean, it's just, things are going downhill and they're going downhill fast. Bart Barber is, he's not perhaps as overt as some of the more woke Southern Baptists, but man, I mean, he defended Ed Litton on the plagiarism thing and wanted to kind of justify plagiarism.
He thinks, I mean, he's pub in public about his views on same-sex attraction and he kind of adopts that SSA stuff, that position. He's definitely gone down some of the woke stuff when it comes to the critical race theory.
He's just, but he's kind of all over the place and he's not an academic, so he's not precise in his language. So I don't think he's gonna rock the boat too much, but he's someone who was gonna keep the Southern Baptist going the direction it's already been going, which isn't a good direction.
And so my advice has been the advice I've had now for really the last year and it's what I've thought for at least the last two years, and that is you need to get out of the convention. Now, if you decide to stay, then fight, but have your exit strategy.
Is it gonna be next year? When is it gonna be? People, I think, wanna know why this state of affairs has come to be. And the best, this is what I thought for a long time preceding this particular convention, but there really isn't much of a ground game.
I brought this up for a number of years. Is there a fund that exists for conservative pastors to be able to attend the convention when they don't have the money that NAM puts forward to bring their crowd in?
And this year, there were some private people who were doing some of that, but there needs to be a lot more of that and just a more concerted ground game. It's just, it's not very organized, it seems.
The other thing, and this is more important, in my opinion, is, and this is I'm sure about, I've talked about it so many times, the conservative leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention, though I have some respect for many of them, one of the things that they, and I'll just have to say it, I think they've utterly failed in, is being able to identify false teaching and then call out the names of false teachers.
And if you do that, then, and you have a rallying point for the gospel, we have a different gospel here, I think that motivates the base to show up. I think it shows them where the problem is and they know why they're there.
When you have, though, just really overly cautious to the point of people who have been saying false teaching, teaching false teaching for years, are still welcomed as brothers or treated that way, and they're not denounced, and they're just, the way even things are phrased is so soft and quote-unquote charitable, it's just not gonna make your base show up.
Why would, I mean, I'm one of those people, actually. Why would I wanna be part of the SBC and show up for these things, which, I mean, that's a commitment of time and money and frustration, if we have leaders that aren't going to really press these issues hard and represent, well, represent not only myself and how I view it, but just speak prophetically the way that the word of God actually talks about some of these issues, like a false gospel.
That's been a frustration for, in my opinion, and I think the other thing is there's a lot of conservatives who probably don't think it's actually as bad as it is because they're not hearing that. They're not hearing their leaders actually go after this stuff in those terms.
So that's my analysis of it, and more coming tomorrow or later today, and we'll go over some of this, but I hope that's helpful for some of you. I hope that it at least satisfies some of you who wanted me to give some analysis to this.
It's more of the same, unfortunately, and I wish there was something more that could be done. I don't know, short of a miracle, but the God's kingdom still moves on, and we still move on, and so the end of the Southern Baptist Convention is not the end of Christianity, and it's certainly not the end of American Christianity, and so keep trudging, keep walking with the Lord.
It's not even a trudge. Keep a pep in your step and keep doing the things that the Lord wants you to do. Take that step of faith like so many characters in the Bible who were in dismal times and yet obeyed the Lord, and the Lord blessed them, and the Lord was with them.
Just remember that. Read the Bible, read stories of hardship being overcome, and that will inspire. Anyway, God bless. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone this weekend. Go to worldviewconversation .com, or I should say this week, if you want to see where I'm going to be.
And I would love to see you. I'm going to be not far from St. Paul, Minnesota, I believe. So check it out, worldviewconversation .com, and look forward to seeing you. Bye now.