The Southern Baptist Convention Losing Members As The Question Of How To Handle Things Like Affirming Churches And Female Pastors Roil Their Ranks
The Southern Baptist Convention is an organization that has, sadly, but firmly joined up with the end times Laodicean Church. The decline of the Southern Baptist Convention is an excellent case-in-point for why Christian churches should not be involved with politics, because that’s not what a Church is called to do. A biblical New Testament […]
The post The Southern Baptist Convention Losing Members As The Question Of How To Handle Things Like Affirming Churches And Female Pastors Roil Their Ranks appeared first on Now The End Begins.
The Southern Baptist Convention is an organization that has, sadly, but firmly joined up with the end times Laodicean Church.
The decline of the Southern Baptist Convention is an excellent case-in-point for why Christian churches should not be involved with politics, because that’s not what a Church is called to do. A biblical New Testament church is called to preach the gospel of the grace of God, and to use God’s preserved holy word to do it. In 2023, you won’t find the King James Bible in very many SBC pulpits, and you won’t find Paul’s gospel preached too much, either. At least not the way Paul preached it.
“Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” 2 Timothy 4:2-4 (KJB)
For the benefit of our Southern Baptist Convention readers, and we have lots of them, let’s ‘uncomplicate’ things to see if we can help them out. What’s the proper response to unrepentant LGBTQ+ as members of the church? It’s no, as per Romans 1:18-32 (KJB). What’s the proper response to female pastors? It’s no, as per 1 Timothy 3:2 (KJB). What’s the mission of the church? Being a witness of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ as per 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 (KJB). How involved in politics should Christians be? Every bit as involved as the apostles were in Acts 5:40-42 (KJB), which is to say not at all. No where in anything Paul ever wrote is any Christian called to fight the ‘culture wars’ even one time. Whenever Paul was given a chance to ‘speak before kings’, he always used it to preach the gospel, and cared nothing for ‘effecting cultural change’. Acts 26:1-28 (KJB) will tell you all about that. It’s not complicated. You can’t win the ‘culture wars’ but you can preach the gospel and let the Lord work.
You can be a Christian or a politician, you just can’t be both. Can the SBC turn things around? Perhaps, but Revelation 3:14-22 (KJB) says they likely will not.
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The ‘Shrinking Southern Baptist Convention’ Is Doubling Down on the Culture Wars
FROM POLITICO: Over the clanking of silverware and the smell of breakfast sausages on the sidelines of a major gathering of Southern Baptists here, several hundred pastors and other churchgoers welcomed a roster of speakers ruminating on a “teetering” nation, “sexual insanity,” “all this trans stuff” and the specter that the country’s largest Protestant denomination was on a “road to insignificance.”
At the evening get-together in the same hotel ballroom — where attendees sipped on bottles of water in this humid city better known for imbibing more intoxicating beverages — they used even more apocalyptic language.
“We are living in dark and perilous times in America,” read the billing for a night with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “as our culture descends into a spiritual abyss …”
Not long ago, during Donald Trump’s presidency, white evangelical Christians had taken comfort in the idea that their interests carried weight at the highest levels in Washington, in conservative Supreme Court appointments and otherwise. Even if it had taken some rationalization for them to get behind a thrice-married former casino owner who botched basic religious conventions and was eventually indicted for his alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star, the Trump years were good years for these Baptists.
“One of the things about President Trump’s administration, there were so many Christians involved,” an influential Texas pastor named Jack Graham told the crowd. “In the West Wing, you couldn’t walk very far without bumping into bona fide, born-again believers and followers of Jesus.”
Since then, it seemed that everything else, quite literally, had gone to Hell. As nearly 13,000 delegates, known as messengers, arrived here recently for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and side events like that evening’s gathering — hosted by Liberty University in partnership with the Conservative Baptist Network, a more conservative group — it was an open question if they could do anything about it.
The midterm elections had not produced the sweeping conservative victories Republicans promised. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the signature accomplishment of the religious right, had become a major liability for the GOP, contributing to losses in a series of elections. In December, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, signed legislation codifying same-sex marriage into law — with the support of 39 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate.
There was the transgender rights movement, which pastor after pastor complained they saw seeping into their pews. A panel conversation one afternoon entitled “Re-Forming Gen Z: Sexuality, Technology and Human Formation” drew such a large crowd that organizers turned away late-comers and a moderator was forced to combine what he called “a lot of questions related to gender and sexuality” into a few. They included how best to respond to a teenager who insists on a preferred pronoun and how to “navigate conversations with a teen who believes in God but also thinks that same-sex attraction is OK.”
And then there was the temerity of some Southern Baptist churches to allow women to serve as pastors, which had been the focus of feuding within the denomination.
“Things have changed in America,” Tim Wilder, the pastor at a church in Osceola County, Fla., near Disney World, told me as we rode alone in a dark shuttle bus back from a day of meetings at the city’s convention center to a nearby hotel one night. “I believe we’re in an anti-Christian nation.”
The next day, at the meeting site, Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas, told me, “It’s almost like Christianity’s being attacked.”
Mathews, whose husband is a former pastor, said, “I think we’re getting closer to the end times.” And she was hardly alone in that assessment. On the sidewalk outside, a man named Beau Hill, from Lexington, Okla., passed out literature calling for abortion to be classified as homicide. Hill, who told me his daughter had “killed my first-born grandchild,” lamented what he called a “progressive slide” in the country.
“All we’re doing,” he said, “is trying to hold the line.”
It was lost on no one at the meeting here that the Southern Baptist Convention, still the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, lost nearly half a million members last year.
“The Southern Baptist Convention is officially a denomination in decline,” Chuck Kelley, a former president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, told me when we met in the lobby of the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. READ MORE
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End times deceiver Rick Warren battling the Southern Baptist Convention in 2022.
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