Episode 78: The Law Amendment and SBC 2024

Christ as King and the Local Church

To the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

I built a shelf. You built a shelf? Two shelves. Are you a carpenter?

I'm kind of a shelf promoter. You are. You're amazing. Is it a little too shelf-righteous? A little bit. Anyway, yeah, so how you been?

Man, I've been running behind. This morning, I was rolling into Marshall, and I'll tell you, Marshall, for people that don't know, you kind of cross a mountain when you drop down into the valley where Marshall's at, and I always kind of kick my car into neutral and just kind of let it coast down the hill, and I coasted right past the police officer, going a little too fast.

Were they hating? You were rolling. Were they hating? Well, he wasn't hating, but he did pull me over, which I was coming to our morning. On Wednesday mornings, we have a little group of us guys that get together, and one of the guys in our group is the police chief in Marshall, so it was his deputy that stopped me, and so he gets my license and stuff, and there in just a minute, he comes back, and he's like, you're the pastor over at First Baptist, right?

Yeah, I am. Okay, see you later.

Oh, that's all another episode. Pastors on the other side of the law. It was crazy. Hey, that's a great segue. Speaking of law. That's right. That's like we planned that. Special report from the Rural Church Podcast.

The SBC, the Law Amendment, and Ecclesiology

Eddie and my take on the law amendment. Neither one of us is going to the annual meeting this year. I went last year. Eddie, when's the last time you went?

I went to Nashville. I haven't been since Nashville. We pretty much, to just state clearly where our church is, we pretty much, after Nashville, decided that the Southern Baptist Convention is out of step with where we are as a local church, and we didn't think that we had the influence anymore to continue to partner with the Southern Baptist Convention, so we pulled that.

A few months after that, we pulled all of our funding for everything, SBC. We do still give to the Arkansas Baptist Children's Homes. We do that, but other than that, and we do our local association. We're still in fellowship with our local association, but as far as the state convention and the national convention, we are pretty well disaffiliated, except for it's almost impossible.

It's bloody in, blood out with SBC, but as far as participation, we don't really participate.

Well, I have been told that the SBC operates like a mafia, except I don't think there's any killing, but I do know, sadly, that when you pull back the curtain and you look behind the scenes, there's a lot of rot that the average SBC goer has no idea about.

If I give you one example, I mean, well, no, I won't. I'm not gonna give you an example. It's too personal. Okay, so let me say some things as well. I thought Nashville was an absolute catastrophe. I thought what happened to Mike Stone was a travesty.

I thought that was wicked. I thought the stuff that had happened before, like the leaks and stuff with Philip Bethencourt and Russell Moore, I thought all that was just shameful. And so we've had some situations here.

That's kind of some of the stuff I was gonna share, but that'll be for another episode. But basically after the 2022 meeting in Anaheim and Tom Askell didn't get elected and it was just bad, we really kind of pulled back and we stopped giving to the cooperative program.

We still give to our local association. So it comes, now I agree with Tom Askell. I think he said the line before of like, what happens at SBC is not that important, but it matters. So it's kind of a tale of a pulse, if you will, of evangelicalism in America.

Does that, is that fair, you think? And that's fair. I think that's fair. And I don't know if you saw, but I did look, cause I'm always curious about this. The ACP reports just came out and the percentage, now this is bad to say, but it's like the percentage is actually better this year than it was last year.

But there are some 12 .8 million. I just looked at this. So the number's kind of fresh in my mind. There's some like 12 .8 million people in the SBC. And on any given Sunday, about 3 million of them, just over 3 million of them go to church.

So what is that like four to one? Or maybe it's more like three to one, but anyway, it's gone up. It's better. What I'm saying is it's better in 2023 than it was in 2022. Cause you know Oh really? Yeah, yeah.

And I'm sure part of that has to do with COVID and stuff, but it's like the most, like I'll give you an example for our church now, praise God, we're actually to this point. We have more people on Sunday morning than on our church roll.

That's awesome. So it's like, that's taken years. And you know, and it's small, the numbers are small, but it takes some work. But used to, I think Jim Eliphaz pointed this out, used to, that's how Baptist life was.

If you had 500 people in your service, you probably had 200 or 300 on your roll. Now it's the opposite, but worse. If you have 200 people in your service, you probably got like 800 on your roll. Right.

And so it's just a, it's really a failure of ecclesiology. And that brings us to the law amendment. Let me just give our listeners, I'm sure some listening already know, some may not. I don't know who listens to this.

Hi mom. But let me say, this is what's going on with the law amendment. So essentially the Baptist faith and message says, I don't have all this in front of me. So I'm paraphrasing, so forgive me. But essentially the Baptist faith and message says, how many offices Eddie?

There are two offices, pastor and deacon.

That's right. And it doesn't say anything about deacon, which we could talk about that later. It might be a good episode, but it does say that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture.

So it's not just all men, all men don't get to be pastors. Right. Qualified men are pastor. Okay. That's pretty cut and dry. Let me just say this. I'm not trying to be weird about this, but when I say to you, only qualified men are called to be pastors and that's in the Baptist faith and message.

What does that mean, Eddie?

I'm not being silly. I'm just saying, what does that mean? I think that that means we would go to the biblical texts and we would say, what are the qualifications given? And there are two types of qualifications given for men in the scripture.

There are character qualifications and there are competency qualifications. The character qualifications are dealing with the man, his relationship with the Lord, his care of his family, his character as a Christian man, as a godly, mature Christian man.

And the competency qualifications deal with his ability to lead, his ability to teach, his ability to counsel. I think all of those are things that we could look at what Paul says, both in to his letter to Timothy and to Titus, and we can pull out those qualifications and what he can do as a leader and a teacher, a shepherd in the church, and also his character as we can see through his life and his home and his family.

So let's play a game here. You're gonna be the apostle, Paul, and I'm just gonna be a random Southern Baptist pastor. I'll say, Paul, I get that, but help me out here. What level of pastor does that apply to?

Pastors. Yeah, I hear you. I got you. But what level? Okay, because we've got missions pastors, senior pastors, youth pastors, children's pastors, administrative pastors. I just need to know which group of those do we have to apply those qualifications to?

Yeah, if I were speaking as Paul, I think I would say, what are you talking about? I've never heard of these distinctions that you're making.

Well, we've just grown so much since the New Testament. Yeah.

The point is that there aren't different levels of pastors, right? There aren't different adjectives given to pastor. In the New Testament, there were just pastors. And I think that's important because, look, if a man isn't qualified to be a pastor in the church, then he's not qualified to be the youth pastor either.

If he's not qualified to be a pastor in the church that you would have stand in the pulpit, then he's not qualified to be the executive pastor either. If a man, and definitely not a woman, of course, is not qualified to be the pastor, one of the pastors in the church, stand in the pulpit, then she's not qualified, he's not qualified to be the children's pastor either.

Now, they may be qualified to do ministry with the children, but why do we have to attach pastor to everything that gets done in the church? It could be that she's just teaching the younger children, and that's not a pastoral role.

But what about tax purposes? No, all right, let's set all this aside for just a second. We're laying all this out. So now in comes the Mike Law Amendment. So it was years, and you know that I have benefited greatly from Dr. Mohler, I believe you have too.

My children still, at times, I catch them listening to the briefing as they fall asleep. It's funny, and one of the things, so funny, my son, I think he was like six or seven, we were driving one time, he's like, can we listen to Alec Mohler?

You know, and Colin, Al Mohler, Alec Mohler, anyway. But it was a number of years ago, not that long ago. I wanna say like three or four years ago. I wanna say like three years ago. I wanna say around the Nashville time, that people like Al Mohler, prominent people who I respect, were saying women pastors in the SBC is not a thing.

It's not a thing, it's not a problem. And then around the same time, it was a Mother's Day, and you remember Beth Moore, when she was still in the SBC. She was, goodness, which I don't remember when she left the SBC.

Anyway, point is, Mother's Day, she's preaching. Okay, at an SBC church. Why doesn't anybody in the upper echelon of the SBC call this out? No one really does, you know? It's all kind of supportive. And the whole idea, I guess, behind the scenes is like, look, there's not a problem.

It's kind of like, and I think men are the worst at this. I know I'm the worst at this. If you've got an issue, maybe a health issue, you just kind of ignore it. That'll go away, you know? And so you have people ignoring it, maybe covering it up, all that.

It leads up to a study last year, an extensive study, I think American Reformer puts this out from last year, that there are some nearly 2 ,000 women pastors in the SBC.

Well, so I'm looking at a post by Jared Moore, who is one of the candidates for president of the SBC. You should vote for him. If I were gonna be there, I would. But he says this, currently there are 1 ,844 female pastors in the SBC.

1 ,844.

Yeah, so the Mike Law Amendment, so get all this information out of there. So the Mike Law Amendment says, essentially, if you are a church with a woman serving in the capacity of pastor in any form, then you're not in friendly cooperation.

So we're not just talking about which, okay, so our church, we have a plurality of elders, but we don't call it like, and I carry, and I believe it's biblical. I do believe this is biblical. We may disagree on it, but I do believe biblical, 1 Timothy 5, 17, you know, the ones who labor in preaching and teaching.

So I think that it's biblical for an elder to carry more of the shoulder, more of the load of the preaching and teaching. But we're very clear, at least Jacob and I are very clear and clear to the people like, this isn't senior pastor, associate pastor.

If you wanna put labels in front of pastor, I'm not really gonna quibble about that. I know some solid churches that do. But the reality is if you have the name pastor, doesn't matter what adjective is in front of pastor.

If you have the name pastor, you are required from the Bible to be qualified as a pastor. Otherwise you're just making up your own ecclesiology. Anyway, the law amendment says you're not in friendly cooperation, which by the way, that's cut and dry, right?

Bad to fake the message. It says only men are allowed to be pastors. All the law amendment is saying is like, yeah, we really believe that. And if you, we're our convention that takes seriously our statement of faith.

And so that's what the law amendment's saying. And so it passed in New Orleans. It has to pass two years in a row by two thirds majority. It passes last year in New Orleans. And so now this year is the big showdown.

And what's interesting to me, Eddie, is the elite in the SBC are very quiet. They don't like to stir up stuff unless something they feel threatened, if you will. And they have really started to talk in the last couple of weeks about the law amendment.

So I'm gonna pitch it back over to you. So like, why do you think that is? What do you think about the law amendment? Let's talk about this and then let's get to the deeper roots of the problem in just a minute.

The World Is Watching, but the Church Must Be Faithful

Well, yeah, what I have to say is simply it doesn't even make sense why anyone who was willing to affirm the Baptist faith and message would have a problem with the law amendment. Yeah, because it's not saying anything that's not already the case.

It's like you said, it's just taking it seriously. And so I don't know why, you know, I can't look into the hearts of, you know, people in leadership in the SBC and why they, other than I think that there is, and we've always heard about this.

Everybody knows about the 11th commandment in the SBC. But a lot of it is we have become so afraid in evangelicalism, in different denominations of offending the world. And, you know, it was one of the things that, you know, I go back to Nashville and that was what, four years ago?

Well, it's 2021. Yeah, three years ago. I go back to when we went to Nashville and I'm just reminded of, you know, the thing that I heard over and over and over and over again. The world is watching. The world is watching.

The world is watching. And that's right. That's why we need to get this right. Because if we say the world is watching and we don't want to offend them, so we need to be as egalitarian as they are. We need to be as non-definitive on gender as the world is, because the world's watching.

Well, what kind of witnesses that to the world? How is that a proclamation to the world of the truth of the gospel or the sovereignty of God? If we say the world's watching, we better not do anything they don't like.

There's no witness in that. There's no proclamation in that. And there's no hope for the world in that.

I had to pull this up because I wanted to see, but I'm going to give you the answer right here. I'm going to give you about 10 billion reasons. Is that right? Goodness. The 2023 annual church profile, undesignated receipts, undesignated receipts, 10 billion, 27 million, $338 ,119.

Wow. $10 billion, the SBC churches, $10 billion. Now this is the argument. Our cooperation is more important than our distinctives. So it's more important for the sake of the gospel and the sake of the mission and the sake of the kingdom.

Okay, Eddie has, honestly, Eddie, and this is not true. I'm just making this up. Disclaimer, not true. Eddie has a lady at his church that is a children's pastor. She's not doing anything. She's not preaching.

She's not, you know, she's not doing anything like that. Eddie's complimentarian. She's just got the name children pastor. Are you really going to say that it's worth losing? Let's say Eddie's church, again, I'm making this up, gives $10 ,000 a year to the mission of the SBC.

Is it really worth losing $10 ,000 a year from this little church that has a children's pastor? And of course you multiply that across the landscape, the SBC, and that's what the opposition is saying.

Come on, guys, you're responding a little heavy handed to something that's not that big a deal. Now I have some things I want to say to that,.

But what do you say to that? Well, I would say one, it is a big deal. And, you know, I think what a lot of this comes down to is really understanding where the actual local churches are. You know, I've heard just here lately on the political, you know, not talking about in the church, but talking about just national politics.

I've started to hear people beginning to talk about that maybe there isn't this silent majority of conservatives. What we thought are this majority of conservatives, maybe they're not so conservative, you know, because, you know, after Roe v. Wade got overturned, we actually have seen that in many states that we would have thought would have protected life, they've not protected life.

They've not sought to use their state laws to ban abortion, but actually they've enshrined it in places like Ohio. We've talked about that. And it's on the ballot in Arkansas. Right. And so just pointing that out to say, maybe things aren't as conservative as we thought they were.

Well, inside the SBC, you and I both heard this, but both, you know, from people standing on platforms and in, you know, individual conversations we've had with people, that, well, the individual, you know, Southern Baptist people sitting in the pew, they're on our side.

And I'm not sure that that's true. I think that there are a lot of Southern Baptists sitting in the pews who they would agree, is it that big a deal that this woman's called pastor because they've been taught so poorly on the subject.

And so I really do think it's a part of this is that it's not just the elites who don't agree. I think there are a lot of people in Southern Baptist churches who they've not been taught well. Yeah.

I don't want to share too much here. Again, we'll do an episode layout, but I can tell you from experience that I had a couple of people very close to me that stood up and adamantly said that what we are to give our money and it's not our responsibility what's done with it.

If the entities misuse our money, that's on them, not on us. Okay. I agree with that to an extent until you know what's going on. Right. If I give someone money and they're using on drugs, yes, that is on them.

Until I figure out that the money I'm giving them, they're using on drugs. Right. If I continue to give it to them, I have become complicit. That's right. They're responsible, but I'm complicit because I'm feeding the machine.

And that's what's happening to SBC churches that are just giving to the cooperative program, unchecked, trust the system. Recently, we had a situation, our school, public school here, they were trying to bring in some woke literature.

Thankfully, we had a brother on the school board stood up. They took out some of the books, grateful for that. But what the mantra on Facebook from the teachers was, hey, we've been to school, trust the system, trust us, trust us, trust us.

No, right? That's over. Parents have a responsibility to understand what their children are learning. And in the SBC, it is not trust the system. God has ordained the local church as the and no other, the, I'm using the definite article, the mission hub and the mission enterprise of the New Testament is the local church.

And so the problem is we believe, so just going back to the law amendment, the idea is if we do this in Indianapolis, and by the way, this will tell, hey, and I'm all supportive. I am 100 supportive of the brothers who have these convictions and they're going up there and they're fighting it out.

I'm saying, I'm not, I'm not, you're not gonna see me rail on them. Praise God for them. I've talked to them behind the scenes. I'm praying for them. I support them publicly. Anything I can say or do to support them, I will.

I'm not going, praise God that they're going, go and fight this out. Thank you for doing that. But Indianapolis will really tell. I mean, the last few years, I think have already given us the answer. Anaheim, you might say is an anomaly, but Nashville, and maybe you say Nashville is an anomaly because it's like maybe people didn't really understand how deep the rot was.

But last year, you know, it was tough. And of course Saddleback got removed, the law amendment passed, so we'll see what happens. But this really will be telling if that silent majority is really real or not.

And if they're real and they don't show up, then it doesn't really matter anyway. So the last thing I was gonna say there about that is that the law amendment is just trying to stick to our convictions.

And what we have to come down to, Eddie, is do we believe, we say this all the time, God doesn't need our money. Like, but do we really believe that? So the idea is, if I could partner, I use an extreme example.

If I could partner in the SBC with the cartels, right? And we could increase that billions of dollars, we could double it. Now it's 20 billion. Would we do that for the sake of the mission? I think you actually have some people that would say yes.

I'm afraid you would. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. They'd be like, what, 20 billion? Yeah, well, yeah, let's do it, you know?

Right, because we're gonna use it for something good. We're gonna use it for the kingdom.

Yeah. And it's a lack of trust in the sufficiency of scripture. It's a lack of trust in the sovereignty of God. It's a lack of trust in the primacy and beauty of the local church. To say, we've got a compromise for the sake of the dollar.

Go ahead, I'm sorry, I'm taking over. Well, no, no, I just wanted to add, you know, so often that has been the argument. Look at what, you know, altogether we can pool our money and it's such a large amount of money.

But that was one of the things that we came to as a local church after Nashville. We said, we've got this, we're a small church, we got this small amount of money, but we believe that the Lord can utilize this the way that he sees fit if we just disperse it to missionaries and entities that we do know that we can agree with, that are like-minded with us.

And so we changed the way we were giving and we're trusting the Lord. And I think so often really it is a lack of faith that causes us to say, no, we have to have it in this thing that we can see so that we can quantify all the things that God is doing.

We can quantify, which honestly we can't, that's part of the problem is that there's not really transparency. But the idea is we can say there's been this many baptisms, there've been this many church plants, there've been this many missionaries sent out from these X billions of dollars, this many people graduated from SBC seminaries and all these things.

But the reality is if all of us as local churches would simply look for the best place that we have to partner with like-minded educational facility or organizations, like-minded missionary organizations, like-minded missionaries for the advancement of the gospel and just trust the Lord to do the kingdom work.

He's doing it. All we can do is do the little part we have and trust the Lord with the big part. And I think so much of this is us trying to concern ourself with things that are above our pay grade.

Why the SBC Is Not Necessary for the Great Commission

Yeah, let me say a few things. One, the SBC was founded in 1845, so it's been here less than 200 years. And I don't want to despise our heritage. God has, and even today is doing good things through people in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And for that, we are grateful. But 2 ,000 years and the SBC has not even existed 10 of that. God doesn't need the SBC. Furthermore, the SBC as we know it, brother, in terms of cooperative program, that did not begin till 1925.

So we don't even have 100 years. I mean, next year is the 100th year, the 100th birthday of the cooperative program. I'm just saying, it's not, if you think the SBC is necessary to fulfill the Great Commission, you're outside your mind.

Right. On paper, I've said this for years, I don't have a problem with the idea of the cooperative program on paper. The problem is, and a lot of us do this kind of stuff on a lot smaller scale, you know?

Like with our associations and stuff like that. On paper, there's not a problem with the cooperative program. The issue is, the further removed you get from the local church, the worse things get. And you might be able to pull it off for half a decade, a decade, couple decades, but eventually human depravity is gonna catch up and you're gonna have people doing things.

Look at the history of Israel in the Old Testament. Look at the reality of just what mankind will do time and time again, sometimes even in the name of religion, but it's wrong. And so then this is the idea, like people get further and further removed from the local church.

What are they doing with the money? And here's a big red flag, right? What are you doing with the money? We're not gonna tell you. Like, how much do you make? We're not gonna tell you. What? That's a big problem.

That's a big problem. Practically, you're removing yourself. I know you have the trustee system and all that, but for all intents and purposes, the trustees now work for the entities, not for the churches.

And so for all intents and purposes, you don't have a system that is overseen and under the authority and leadership of local church. I'm gonna give you an example. Some people aren't gonna like this if they make it this far and listen.

But I was listening the other day to some podcast and basically it was talking about congressional leadership and the government, like, do you know anybody that's happy with what's going on in the government?

I mean, almost nobody. I mean, almost either side, you know, it's like they don't like anything going on in government and yet the same people stay in power. Like, how is that? How can everybody be upset with it, but the same people stay in power?

That's because the people in power know how to work the system. That's right. Now tell me, explain to me, Eddie, the difference between Congress and the SBC when it comes to that. It looks identical to me.

Right, it's identical, yeah.

Well, I mean, and honestly, man, I can just tell you back a couple of years ago when a lot of that stuff was going on, one of the big things that really left a bad taste in my mouth was just how political all of it was with the SBC president races and stuff.

I was just like, this, I just don't want any part of this, you know? And I'm not saying anything bad about any of the guys that were involved that they weren't, you know, doing it for the right reason or whatever.

I'm just saying it did seem so worldly, so not the church.

But you put us, all you gotta do is put a spiritual twist on it. So for example, Southwestern paid for a lunch with Ed Litton, paid for that in Arkansas, paid for that. Our money that we give to the cooperative program was used for a campaign of a man who turned out to be a serial plagiarizer.

And that was used from that institution. So I reached out to the institution and said, okay, hey, how about let's do a lunch with Mike Stone? They laughed at me. No, we're not doing that. But it was all in the name of, oh, this was just a regular pastor's lunch.

And by the way, they did it the next year with, and guess who was the speaker? Bart Barber, you know? So it's like this kind of stuff, this is shenanigans. And here's the deal. If you're gonna, and I will say this, remain in the SBC, not remain in the SBC, you gotta deal with that yourself in your conscience.

But if you are going to remain in the SBC and you're not doing anything, you're not going to the meeting, anything like that, I'm just gonna tell you, you're wrong. If you're going to remain in the SBC giving to this inflated machine, and you're just gonna let the professionals handle it, you gotta do something about it.

You either gotta stop giving, or you need to go and be part of what these brothers like William Wolfe, and Tom Askell, and Jared Moore, and all these brothers are, Mike Stone, the Conservative Baptist Network, all these people and institutions that are trying to right the ship, if you will, you gotta be involved in that.

So for me and you, I think we kind of made that decision, like, look, that was taking too much of our energy. It was taking too much of our focus. I'm much happier now where I'm serving and connecting with churches in Mexico and things like that.

But for others, you wanna stay, you wanna fight, that's noble, don't lose the institution, don't give it to the liberals as they say, but you gotta be involved. And if you can't be involved, you need to bounce.

Right. What do you think?

I would completely agree. And that's basically where we were at three years ago. We said, we don't feel like we have the influence to make a difference, but we do feel like we can be responsible to the Lord with the things he's given us by directly partnering with missionaries and different organizations for the furtherance of the gospel that we agree with.

And so that's what we've done. Because in the end, we'll stand or fall before the Lord. And so we just as a local church wanna be, we wanna be accountable to the Lord. We want to seek to advance the kingdom and promote the gospel.

And we didn't feel like the best way we could do that was cooperating with the SPC.

That's a good point to make, is that the Lord will hold his churches accountable with, it's like the parable of the talents. How are you going to steward the resources God has given you? And you, many churches have bought into this lie that if I don't pump this machine, I really can't be effective.

Because you have the state guys that'll come out and show you all these pictures and look at all these things you're doing. And I know your church is only given $80, but look how we're maximizing these $80.

But I don't believe that anymore. So what I wanna say is like, I'm not saying every person employed by a cooperative program money is degenerate. I'm not saying that. So hear me clearly. But what I am saying is, a lot of the stats that we're pumping out, I'm leery of.

X many baptism. Okay, how many of these numbers? So we got baptized this year. How many of those were baptized five years ago? And then how many are gonna be baptized five years from now? How many of them are truly converted?

You're telling me, you don't care about the office of the pastor, which by the way, this is what this episode about, and then it comes back to that. You don't care about ecclesiology, because the Lord says to you in his word, there are two offices.

There's the office of elder, which we often call pastor, and there's the office of deacon. That's it. I'm not saying that your church can't pay anybody else for anything. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying when it comes to the offices of the church, there's elders and there's deacons.

If you try to make a person a pastor, the Bible says can't be a pastor, whether that's some unqualified man or a woman, a godly woman, but she's unqualified because she's a woman. God has not called her to the role and office of pastor.

So what you're saying is, you don't believe what God has to say about ecclesiology. And so you're gonna continue to pump money into a system that doesn't care about what God has to say about ecclesiology in an effort to think that you're gonna expand the kingdom when you forget that the kingdom is about the church.

It's about Christ, but the church is the kingdom as the kingdom is spreading over the globe and that manifests itself in local churches. So it's very counterintuitive for you to say, I'm gonna keep pumping money into this system that doesn't care about the church for the sake of the church.

Staying or Leaving the SBC, and Where the Church’s Energy Belongs

Yeah, right, right. Yep, you're exactly right. And I just, you know, I'm thankful for godly brothers who feel like they still need to be in the fray in the SPC. But the thing that you and I both also heard is, well, there's just so much invested already.

We can't lose the institutions. We can't lose the seminaries. But at some point you've gotta say, how much time, effort, and money are we gonna pour into retaining those instead of actually being about the mission?

And I think for you and I, we've gotten to the point where we've said, it's not worth it. I don't agree. What we can do is what we can do in our local churches not fighting for the SPC. But I'm not saying, like you said earlier, I'm not deriding the brothers who are still in the fray.

And if the Lord would send a revival to the SPC, I hope the Mike Law Amendment passes. But the reality is that we've gotta be about seeking the growth of the kingdom and the advancement of the church in the world.

Yeah, I think these are good brothers, good friends. I'm at a different position now than even I was even last year. Last year was this kind of final, like, okay, let me just go. But it's kind of like, I'm not a financial advisor.