Episode 78: The Law Amendment and SBC 2024

Rural Church Podcast 2.0

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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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?

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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.

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The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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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

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. I built a shelf. You built a shelf?

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Two shelves. Are you a carpenter? I'm kind of a shelf promoter. You are.

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You're amazing. Is it a little too shelf -righteous? A little bit. Anyway, yeah.

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So, how you been? Man, I've been running behind. This morning, I was rolling into Marshall.

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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.

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And I always kind of kick my car into neutral and just kind of let it coast down the hill.

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And I coasted right past the police officer.

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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

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I was coming to our morning. On Wednesday mornings, we have a little group of us guys that get together.

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And one of the guys in our group is the police chief in Marshall. So, it was his deputy, you know, that stopped me.

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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?

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Yeah, I am. Okay, see you later. Oh, that's all another episode.

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Pastors on the other side of the law. It was crazy. Hey, that's a great segue.

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Speaking of law. That's right. That's like we planned that. Special report from the

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Rural Church Podcast. Eddie and my take on the law amendment. Neither one of us is going to the annual meeting this year.

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I went last year. Eddie, when's the last time you went? I went to Nashville. I haven't been since Nashville.

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We pretty much, to just state clearly where our church is, we pretty much, after Nashville, decided that, you know, we were, the

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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

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Southern Baptist Convention. So, we pulled that. A few months after that, we pulled all of our funding for everything

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SBC. We do still give to the Arkansas Baptist Children's Homes.

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We do that. But other than that, and we do our local association.

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We're still in fellowship with our local association. But as far as the state convention and the national convention, we're pretty well disaffiliated, except for, you know, it's almost impossible.

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You know, it's bloody in, blood out with SBC. But as far as participation, you know, we don't really participate.

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Well, you know, I have been told that the SBC operates like a mafia, except I don't think there's any killing.

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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

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SBC goer has no idea about. If I give you one example,

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I mean, well, no I won't. I'm not going to give you an example. It's too personal. Okay, so let me say some things as well.

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I thought Nashville was an absolute catastrophe. I thought what happened to Mike Stone was a travesty.

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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.

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And so we've had some situations here. That's kind of some of the stuff I was going to share, but that'll be for another episode.

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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.

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We still give to our local association. So it comes, now

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I agree with Tom Askell. I think he said the line before of like what happens, SBC is not that important, but it matters.

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So it's kind of a tale of a pulse, if you will, of evangelicalism in America.

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Is that fair, you think? That's fair. I think that's fair. And I don't know if you saw, but I did look because I'm always curious about this.

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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.

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But there are some 12 .8 million. I just looked at this. So the number is kind of fresh in my mind.

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There's some like 12 .8 million people in the SBC. And on any given

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Sunday, about 3 million of them, just over 3 million of them go to church.

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Wow. So what is that, like 4 to 1? Or maybe it's more like 3 to 1.

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But anyway, it's gone up. It's better. What I'm saying is it's better in 2023 than it was in 2022.

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Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure part of that has to do with COVID and stuff.

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But it's like, I'll give you an example. For our church now, praise God, we're actually to this point.

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We have more people on Sunday morning than on our church roll. That's awesome.

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So it's like that's taken years. And it's small. The numbers are small. But it takes some work.

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But used to, I think Jim Eliphas pointed this out, used to, that's how Baptist life was.

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If you had 500 people in your service, you probably had 200 or 300 on your roll.

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

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Right. And so it's really a failure of ecclesiology. And that brings us to the law amendment.

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Let me just give our listeners, I'm sure some listening already know, some may not. I don't know who listens to this.

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Hi, mom. But let me say, this is what's going on with the law amendment. So essentially, the

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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

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Baptist faith and message says, how many offices, Eddie? There are two offices, pastor and deacon.

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That's right. And it doesn't say anything about deacon, which we could talk about that later. Might be a good episode.

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But it does say that the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture.

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So it's not just all men. All men don't get to be pastors. Right. Qualified men are pastors.

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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

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Baptist faith and message. What does that mean, Eddie? I'm not being silly. I'm just saying, what does that mean?

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I think that that means we would go to the biblical text, and we would say, what are the qualifications given?

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And there are two types of qualifications given for men in the scripture.

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There are character qualifications, and there are competency qualifications. The character qualifications are dealing with the man, his relationship with the

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Lord, his care of his family, his character as a

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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.

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I think all of those are things that we could look at what Paul says, both to his letter to Timothy and to Titus, and we can pull out those qualifications.

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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.

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So let's play a game here. You're going to be the apostle Paul, and I'm just going to be a random

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Southern Baptist pastor. I'll say, Paul, I get that, but help me out here. What level of pastor does that apply to?

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Pastors. Yeah, I hear you. I got you. But what level? Because we've got missions pastors, senior pastors, youth pastors, children's pastors, administrative pastors.

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I just need to know which group of those do we have to apply those qualifications to?

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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.

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Well, we've just grown so much since the New Testament. Yeah. The point is that there aren't different levels of pastors, right?

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There aren't different adjectives given to pastor. In the New Testament, there were just pastors.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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It could be that she's just teaching the younger children, and that's not a pastoral role.

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But what about tax purposes? No. All right. Let's set all this aside for just a second. We're laying all this out.

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So now in comes the Mike Law Amendment. So it was years, and you know that I have benefited greatly from Dr.

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Moeller. I believe you have too. My children still, at times, I catch them listening to the briefing as they fall asleep.

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It's funny. One of the things that's 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 Moeller?

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And Colin, Al Moeller, Alec Moeller. Anyway, but it was a number of years ago, not that long ago.

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I want to say like three or four years ago. I'm going to say like three years ago. I'm going to say around the Nashville time, that people like Al Moeller, prominent people who

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I respect, were saying women pastors in the SBC is not a thing.

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It's not a thing. It's not a problem. And then around the same time, it was a

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Mother's Day, and you remember Beth Moore when she was still in the SBC? She was, goodness, which

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I don't remember when she left the SBC. Anyway, point is, Mother's Day, she's preaching. Okay.

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At an SBC church. Why doesn't anybody in the upper echelon of the

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SBC call this out? No one really does. It's all kind of supportive.

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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.

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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.

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And so you have people ignoring it, maybe covering it up, all that.

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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

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SBC. Well, so I'm looking at a post by Jared Moore, who is one of the candidates for president of the

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SBC. You should vote for him. If I were going to be there, I would. But he says this, currently there are 1 ,844 female pastors in the

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SBC. Yeah. 1 ,844. Yeah. So the

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Mike Law Amendment, so get all this information out 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.

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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.

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I do believe this is biblical. We may disagree on it, but I do believe biblical 1 Timothy 5, 17, the ones who labor in preaching and teaching.

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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.

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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.

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Right. Yeah. If you want to put labels in front of pastor, I'm not really going to quibble about that.

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I know some solid churches that do, but the reality is if you have the name pastor, it doesn't matter what adjective is in front of pastor.

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If you have the name pastor, you are required from the Bible to be qualified as a pastor.

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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.

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Right. Bad to fake the message says only men are allowed to be pastors. All the law amendment is saying is like, yeah, we really believe that.

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And we're our convention that takes seriously our statement of faith.

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

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It passes last year in New Orleans. And so now this year is the big showdown.

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And what's interesting to me, Eddie, is the elite in the

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SBC are very quiet. They don't like to stir up stuff unless something they feel threatened, if you will.

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And they have really started to talk in the last couple of weeks about the law amendment.

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So I'm going to pitch it back over to you. So like, why do you think that is? What do you think about the law amendment?

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Let's talk about this and then let's get to the deeper roots of the problem in just a minute. Well, yeah, what

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I have what I have to say is simply it doesn't even make sense. Why anyone who was willing to affirm the

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Baptist faith and message would have a problem with the law amendment? Yeah, because it's not it's not saying anything that's not already the case.

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It's like you said, it's just taking it seriously. And so and so I don't

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I don't know why. You know, I can't I can't look into the hearts of, you know, people in leadership in the

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SBC and why they other than I think that there is. And we've all we've always heard about this.

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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.

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And, you know, it was one of the things that I go back to Nashville. And that was what, four years ago?

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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.

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The world is what the world is watching. The world is watching. And that's right.

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That's why we need to get this right. Because if 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.

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We need to be as non -definitive on gender as the world is because the world's watching.

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Well, what kind of witness is that to the world? How is that a proclamation to the world of the truth of the gospel or the sovereignty of God?

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If we say the world's watching, we better not do anything they don't like. There's no witness in that.

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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.

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I'm going to give you about 10 billion reasons. Is that right? Goodness.

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The 2023 annual church profile, undesignated receipts, undesignated receipts, 10 billion, 27 million, three hundred thirty eight thousand one hundred nineteen dollars.

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Wow. Ten billion dollars. The SBC churches.

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Ten billion dollars. Now, this is the argument.

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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.

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OK, 80 has honestly 80. And this is not true. I'm just making this up.

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Disclaimer, not true. Eddie has a lady at his church that is a children's pastor.

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She's not doing anything. She's not. She's not preaching. She's not.

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You know, she's not doing anything like that. Eddie's complimentarian. She's just got the name children pastor.

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Are you really going to say that it's worth losing? Let's say

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Eddie's church again, I'm making this up, gives ten thousand dollars a year to the mission of the

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SBC. Is it really worth losing ten thousand dollars a year from this little church that has a children's pastor?

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And of course, you multiply that across the landscape, the SBC. And that's what the opposition is saying.

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Come on, guys. You're responding a little heavy handed to something that's not that big a deal.

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And 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.

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And, you know, I think what a lot of this comes down to is really understanding where the actual local churches are.

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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.

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I've started to hear people beginning to talk about that, that maybe there there isn't this silent majority of conservatives.

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What we thought are are this majority of conservatives, maybe they're not so conservative, you know, because they're because, you know, after Roe v.

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Wade got overturned, we actually have seen that in many states that we would have thought would have protected life.

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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.

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It's on the back and it's on the ballot in Arkansas. Right. And so and so just pointing that out to say maybe things aren't as conservative as we thought they were.

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Well, inside the SBC, you and I both heard this, but both, you know, from people standing on platforms and in and in, you know, individual conversations we've had with people that.

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Well, the the the individual, you know, Southern Baptist people sitting in the pew, they're on our side.

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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.

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Is it that big a deal that that that this woman's called pastor because they've been taught so poorly on the subject?

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And so I really do think it's a part of this is that it's not just the elites who don't agree.

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I think there are a lot of people in Southern Baptist churches who they've not been taught well.

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Yeah. I'm not 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 we are to give our money and it's not our responsibility what's done with it.

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If if if the entities misuse our money, that's on them, not on us.

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Okay. I agree with that to an extent until you know what's going on.

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Right. If I give someone money and they use it on drugs. Yes, that is on them until I figure out that the money

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I'm giving them, they're using on drugs. Right. If I continue to give it to them, I have become complicit.

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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.

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Trust the system. Recently, we had a situation, our school public school here.

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They were trying to bring in some some woke literature. Thankfully, we had a brother on the school board stood up.

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They took out some of the books. Grateful for that. But what the the the mantra on Facebook from the teachers was, hey, we've been to school.

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Trust the system. Trust us. Trust us. Trust us. No. Right. That's over.

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Parents have a responsibility to understand what their children are learning.

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And in the SBC, it is not trust the system. God has ordained the local church as the and no other.

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The I'm using the definite article, the mission of and the the mission enterprise of the

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New Testament is the local church. And so the problem is, we believe.

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So let's go back to the law amendment. The idea is, if we do this in Indianapolis.

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And by the way, this will tell. Hey, and I'm all supportive. I am 100 percent supportive of the brothers who have these convictions and they're going up there and they're fighting it out.

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I'm saying I'm not I'm not. You're not going to see me rail on them. Praise God for them. I've talked to them behind the scenes.

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I'm praying for them. I support them publicly. Anything I can say or do to support them.

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I will. I'm not going. Praise God that they're going. Go and fight this out. Thank you for for doing that.

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But Indianapolis will will really tell. I mean, the last few years, I think, have already given us the answer.

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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.

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But last year, you know, was tough. And of course, Saddleback got removed.

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The law amendment passed. So we'll see what happens. But this really will be telling if if that silent majority is really real or not.

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And if they're real and they don't show up, then it doesn't really matter anyway. Right. So so the last thing

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I'm going to say there about that is that the law amendment is just trying to stick to our convictions.

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And what we have to come down to, Eddie, is do we believe we say this all the time?

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God doesn't need our money. Like, but do we really believe that? So the idea is if I could partner,

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I use extreme example. If I could partner in the SBC with the cartels. Right.

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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?

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I think you actually have some people I would say, yes. Mm hmm. I'm afraid you would.

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Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. Right. What? 20 billion. Yeah. Well, yeah.

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Let's do it. You know. Right. Because we're going to use it for something good. We're going to use it for the kingdom.

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Yeah. And it's a lack of trust in the sufficiency of scripture. It's a lack of trust in the sovereignty of God.

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It's a lack of trust in the primacy and beauty of the local church to say, you know, we've got to compromise for the dollar.

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Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm taking. Well, no, no. I just wanted to add, you know, so often that has been the argument.

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Look, look at what, you know, all together we can pull our money and it's such a large amount of money.

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But that was one of the things that we came to as a local church after Nashville. We said, we've got this.

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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.

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If we just disperse it to missionaries and entities that we do know that we can agree with, that are like minded with us.

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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.

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We can quantify, which honestly we can't. That's part of the problem is that there's not really transparency.

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But the idea is we can say there's been this many baptisms. There have been this many church plants.

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There have been this many missionaries sent out from these X billions of dollars.

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There's this many people graduated from SBCC 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

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Lord to do the kingdom work. He's doing it. All we can do is do the little part we have and trust the

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Lord with the big part. And I think so much of this is us trying to concern ourselves with things that are above our pay grade.

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Yeah. Let me say a few things. One, the SBCC was founded in 1845. So it's been here less than 200 years.

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And I don't want to I don't want to despise our heritage.

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God has and even today is doing good things through people in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. And for that, we are grateful. But 2000 years and the

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SBCC has not even existed. Ten percent of that. God doesn't need the SBCC.

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Furthermore, the SBCC, as we know it, brother, in terms of cooperative program that did not begin till 1925.

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So we don't even have 100 years. I mean, next year is the 100th year, the 100th birthday of the cooperative program.

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I'm just saying it's not if you think the SBCC is necessary to to fulfill the

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Great Commission, you're outside your mind. Right. On paper, I don't on paper.

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I've said this for years. I don't have a problem with the idea of the cooperative program on paper.

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The problem is and all a lot of us do this kind of stuff on a lot smaller scale, you know, like with our associations and stuff like that.

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Well, on paper, there's not a problem with the program. The issue is the further removed you get from the local church, the worse things get.

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And you might be able to pull it off for half a decade, a decade, a couple of decades.

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But eventually, human depravity is going to catch up and you're going to have people doing that.

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Look at the history of Israel in the Old Testament. Look at look at the reality of of just what mankind will do time and time again, sometimes even in the name of religion.

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But it's wrong. Right. And so then this is the idea, like people get further and further removed from the local church.

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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 going to tell you.

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Like, how much do you make? We're not going to tell you what that that's a big problem.

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And 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.

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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.

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I'm going to give you an example that some people aren't going to 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.

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Like, do you know anybody that's happy with what's going on in the government? I mean, almost nobody.

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I mean, almost either side, you know, it's like they don't like anything going on in government. And yet this the same people stay in power.

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Mm hmm. Like, how is that? How can everybody be upset with it? But the same people stay in power.

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That's because the people in power know how to work the system. That's right. Mm hmm.

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Now tell me, explain to me, Eddie, the difference between Congress and the

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SBC when it comes to that. It looks identical. It looks identical to me. Right. It's identical. Yeah.

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Well, I mean, and and honestly, man, I can just tell you back, you know, 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

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SBC president races and stuff. I was just like this. I just don't want any part of this, you know.

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And I'm not saying that 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.

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

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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 Linton.

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Right. Paid for that in Arkansas. Right. 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.

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And that was used from that institution. So I reached out to the institution, said, OK, hey, how about let's do a lunch with with Mike Stone?

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They laughed at me. No, we're not doing that. Yeah. But it was all in the name of, oh, this was just a regular pastor's lunch.

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Right. And by the way, they did it the next year with, and guess who was the speaker? Bart Barber.

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Yeah. So it's like this kind of stuff, this is shenanigans. And here's the deal.

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If you're going to, and I will say this, remain in the SBC, not remain in the SBC, you got to deal with that yourself in your conscience.

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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,

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I'm just going to tell you, you're wrong. If you're going to remain in the SBC, giving to this inflated machine and you're just going to let the professionals handle it, you got to do something about it.

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You either got to stop giving or you need to go and be part of what these brothers like William Wolfe and Tom Askle and Jared Moore and all these brothers are,

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Mike Stone, the conservative Baptist network, all these people and institutions that are trying to ride the ship, if you will, you got to be involved in that.

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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.

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I'm much happier now where I'm serving and connecting with churches in Mexico and things like that.

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But for others, you want to stay, you want to fight, that's noble. Don't lose the institution.

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Don't give it to the liberals, as they say, but you got to be involved. And if you can't be involved, you need to bounce.

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Right. What do you think? I would completely agree. And that's basically where we were at three years ago.

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We said, you know, we don't feel like we have the influence to make a difference, but we do feel like we can be responsible to the

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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.

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And so that's what we've done. Because in the end, we'll stand or fall before the

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Lord. And so we just as a local church want to be, we want to be accountable to the

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Lord. We want to seek to advance the kingdom and promote the gospel.

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And we didn't feel like the best way we could do that was cooperating with the SBC. That's a good point to make is that the

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Lord will hold his churches accountable with. It's like the parable of the talents.

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You know, 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,

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I really can't be effective because you have the state guys that will come out and show you all these pictures and look at all these things you're doing.

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And I know your church is only given $80, but look, look how we're, we're maximizing these $80.

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But I don't believe that anymore. So what I want to say is like,

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I'm not saying, I'm not saying every person employed by cooperative program money is degenerate.

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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.

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I'm leery of X mini baptism. Okay. How many of these numbers?

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So we got baptized this year. How many of those were baptized five years ago? And then how many are going to be baptized five years from now?

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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.

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And then it all comes back to that. You don't care about ecclesiology because the Lord says to you in his word, there are two offices.

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There's the office of elder, which we often call pastor. And there's the office of deacon.

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That's it. I'm not saying that your church can't pay anybody else for anything. I'm not saying that.

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I'm just saying when it comes to the office of the church offices of the church, there's elders and there's deacons.

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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.

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God has not called her to the role and office of pastor. So what you're saying is you don't believe what

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God has to say about ecclesiology. And so you're going to continue to pump money into a system that doesn't care about what

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God has to say about ecclesiology in an effort to think that you're going to expand the kingdom when you forget that the kingdom is about the church.

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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.

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So it's very counterintuitive for you to say, I'm going to keep pumping money into this system that doesn't care about the church for the sake of the church.

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Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Yep. You're exactly right. And I just, you know,

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I'm thankful for godly brothers who feel like they still need to be in the fray in the

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SPC. But the thing that you and I both also heard is, well, there's just so much invested already.

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

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And I think for you and I, we've gotten to the point where we've said it's not worth it.

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I don't know. What we can do is what we can do in our local churches not fighting for the

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SPC. But I'm not saying, like you said earlier, I'm not deriding the brothers who are still in the fray.

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And, you know, if the Lord would send a revival to the SPC, I hope the Mike Law amendment passes.

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But the reality is that we've got to be about seeking the growth of the kingdom and the advancement of the church in the world.

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Yeah. I think these are good brothers, good friends. I'm at a different position now than even

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I was even, you know, last year. Last year was this kind of final, like, OK, let me just go.

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But the it's kind of like I'm not a financial advisor. So disclaimer, it's kind of like if you had,

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I don't know, let's say MySpace stock. You remember MySpace? Did you have a MySpace? I never had a

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MySpace account. Yeah. OK, so let's say you had. I'm not that old. You had MySpace.

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Whatever, dude. You had MySpace account or stock or whatever. And you're like, boy, this is tanking.

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But I've invested a few thousand dollars in it. I just can't let it go right now.

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I'll keep pumping. You know, it keeps going down. I'll keep pumping. I got I just can't let it go.

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I just I can't let it go. You know, and it's like, bro, at some point you got to be like, hey,

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I'm cut. All right. We did lose, but we're out. And I do understand the argument.

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We don't want to hand it over to liberals. I get that. I'm appreciative of that. And I don't want to make light of that.

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I think that is an important point. But a counterpoint that I would offer is the church is going to keep going.

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Right. And that's where I'm focused. The only institution that Christ promised to build and maybe

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I'm maybe I'm tipping my my cards here about, you know, eschatology and all that. I'm all male.

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Like, I'm not holding out hope for universities, you know, to stay conservative or nations to stay conservative, like or even denominations or even denominations.

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Look at the UMC. I mean, that's right. And that's that's the whole point, too. I want to say this because, like, I don't remember the guy's name, but the executive director of the

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Tennessee Baptist Convention, I don't know if you saw that. And then Kevin Easdale said he like, you know, but basically he was saying, like, if we start getting rid of churches, you know, for having bad ecclesiology, then we're just we're we're sacrificing the mission or whatever.

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I'm paraphrasing that. But but again, the reality is you are on SBC, a trajectory of the

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UMC. Yeah. You are on that trajectory. Now, some people put that back. Look at how bad

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UMC is. See, SBC is not that bad. And you're like, what? You're comparison like you're taking the worst comparison that you possibly can to show, you know, as we say, it's like, well, and they should that should be a warning for us because they're only further down the road.

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I mean, if we because this is the road. Yeah. You're on the same.

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You're in the same stream. They're just further. You know, you're floating in the same direction. That's right.

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And this should be a clarion call. Wake up here about ecclesiology.

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Forsake the love of money. It seems like there's somewhere in the Bible that talks about the love of money, not money.

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We're not saying money's evil, but the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil and forsake that forsake the infatuation you have with the world's approval.

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Open your Bible, get in the book and say, I want to do what this book says for our churches.

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And that takes it's kind of like with Congress, like the only way things are going to change in our government is you're going to have to have people that work themselves out of a salary up there.

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Right. They're going to have to say no to money. Right. You're going to have to have the same thing in the

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SBC. But supposedly these are men of God. So let's do it.

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Right. Let's do it. Let's see it. But, you know, it's it's it's a big meeting and we'll see what happens in Indianapolis.

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It would be a look, brother. It'd be a very good sign if the

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Mike law amendment passes. I'm worried. I'm wary that it that it will.

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But and I don't know that it won't be some sort of procedural, some sort of procedural shenanigans.

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You know, that kind of stuff happens. Oh, we're going to we're going to vote on this at.

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Oh, yeah, it's going to be at 2 a .m. You know, whatever, you know, we have, you know, that's the kind of stuff the platform does.

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And for me, I just got I was tired of getting beat up and made fun of. Okay, I'm going to I'm going to take my

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Bible and go home and I'm going to go to the local church and I'm going to trust what

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God has for it. So I don't know. Maybe we're kind of rambling. You got anything else?

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You know, yeah, I did. I think I think all of this comes back to is our confidence in the

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Lord to be in control of the of of what he is doing with his kingdom so that we can put our attention simply to doing what he's given us to do.

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Or do we feel like we've got to try to control this big mammoth thing? And I think the more that we'll just trust the

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Lord and put our hand to the plow and and be about serving our local churches and value our local church, the more that we can expect to see real revival and real transformation and real advancement of the gospel all around the world.

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Yeah. Amen. Well, I'm not sure when this episode will come out. We will put it out probably later in May.

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But I do want to say to the brothers and sisters who are going who are fighting the good fight, who are taking a stand to who are serious about these things.

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The Lord be with you. We love you. We're supportive of you. We're praying for you.

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And we sincerely hope that your efforts are not in vain. And we sincerely hope that God does good things in in Indianapolis.

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For those of you who are, you know, making fun of these things, you don't care.

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Like shame on you. Christ is worthy of a healthy church. Christ is worthy of healthy ecclesiology.

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So if you're in a, you know, some sort of executive position or, you know, DOM or state leadership or SBC leadership, and you're just tired, you're just so tired of the people pointing out the faults like you need to repent and you need to have like repent, maybe that even means stepping away from your office.

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But I promise you at the day of judgment, it'll be worth it. Repentance can be hard and it can be humbling.

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But at the end of the day, it's worth it. And there is grace for those who will own their sins and repent.

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So I implore you repent and everyone else care about the local church.

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Christ is worth anything else, brother. That's it, man. All right. Sign us off.

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We'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

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God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poimos, the masterpiece of God.