by Dave Roberts » Thu Dec 24, 2015 9:38 am
I'm fascinated by how we all defend our turf. I started this based on a Sunday drive to speak in a church. In listening, however, I am reminded of how much we share a lack of clarity. A couple of weeks back, I met with the pastor search committee of a church that bills themselves as SBC, but will allow designated gifts to CBF. What is interesting is that over half their deacons (including the chairperson) are women. During their interim. they have had women fill the pulpit on several occasions. Also, women serve the Lord's Supper, take the offering, and lead prayers in worship. Are they really an SBC church? Their numbers seem to be legion.
A second observation is that after five months of serving as the CBFVA Interim Field Coordinator, what I am seeing in no way matches the picture Sandy is painting. In VA, almost all of our CBFVA leadership is held by younger people, many of whom were not even born when the SBC wars were in full tilt or who were born during them. They don't look back on the history. They love the way CBF operates, the missiology, and the openness to women in leadership. When I am not preaching, I am attending a church served by a woman pastor and past moderator of CBFVA. The preaching is biblical, the concern is for missions, baptisms take place regularly, and the congregation is divided among old and young.
A third observation is that there is a great deal of agitation in many churches across the spectrum caused by the loyalty to the Tea Party ideology, the Trump factor, the distrust of all authority including clergy. and the desire to take the church back to the glory days they remember. At the same time, they are glorifying Mike Huckabee's phony history of America that Christianizes everything and makes the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution almost "God Breathed." The desire for a renewed Christianity is one without repentance or atonement that looks more like Joel Osteen than Jesus. The coded words of racism embedded in this ideology make us more Southern than Baptist.
Fourth, there is a great sense of loss for many of us as we have watched Baptists fight for almost 40 years, all of which has crippled evangelism, has reduced mission support, and has blackened the good name of Baptists. I grieve to see the SBC reducing missions staff at the IMB. CBF is maintaining its core missions emphasis, but we are stuck at 126 units of service among global missions personnel because gifts do not come to us any better than to the SBC. We are no longer challenging ourselves with the world before us. Instead, we have become far more locally focused than globally so. Identity is part of this decline of mission support in all groups. The lack of clarity makes it harder to inspire giving. Also, identity must be more than just, "I'm not like them."