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Ed: Keith, where any of the individuals that you name above publicly professing "Open Theism" while self identified as Southern Baptist ?

If this is Pennsylvania, I can well believe it.

Sandy,

I believe that the Roman Catholic church may count membership similarly to the United Methodist Church. We have two categories of membership, Baptized members and Professing Members. Professing members are those who have been confirmed in the church or joined the church as adults after the usual age of confirmation.

The Roman Catholic Church also has confirmation as the time when, ideally, persons in the church make a personal commitment to Christ. I think their terminology is slightly different than my own Church but the idea is largely the same.

I know some evangelical Christians are suspicious of the idea of an organized program such as confirmation for making a commitment to Christ. The idea seems to be that God has to tap you on the shoulder and tell you it is time to make a profession. My interpretion of scripture is that NOW is the time for salvation and any time a person wants to profess faith in Christ they can and should do so.

On the subject of how churches count membership, I don't think any of us of any denomination have very acurate membership rolls. The Baptist churches I served were very reluctant to ever remove inactive membership from their roll. So while they didnt count participating children in their roll they did count many many inactive folks that we'd not seen in many years and may be either at another church or no church.

United Methodists do purge their rolls on occassion but also not as often as it would really keep the rolls accurate though we have very accurate lists of "baptized" and "professing" members.

So I really don't think that the RCC is due for extra criticism for how they count membership since we don't do much better anywhere else as Protestants.

http://www.baptiststandard.com/news/bap ... n-64-years

William notes that Calvinist churches in the SBC have baptism numbers that are similar to those of Non-Calvinists, so the decline isn't the result of creeping Calvinism, though I don't think a lot of people are convinced of that. The numbers are unsettling to Southern Baptists, as they should be. And the gap between membership and attendance is pretty high.

I'd say that it is time for everyone in the SBC to get out of their theological discussion, and back into one about what is happening to evangelism.

Saw it pretty much in full as an AP story yesterday, Sunday Gadsden Times, Judge Roy Moore's backyard

http://www.tennessean.com/viewart/20130 ... -Baptists-

The report to me would get a no vote because it doesn't really say anything. There is a lot of dancing around the real issue facing SBC churches concerning Calvinism. It has a "can't we just all get along" feel to it.

It will get passed however and the conflicts will continue. SBTS will still not use the BF&M 2000, which just ticks some people off. Congregations will continue to have to choose between male only elected pastoral dictatorship as "taught" by Patterson and his like or the you're not mature enough or male enough model being "taught" by Mohler and his like.

They have managed to use a lot of words and but actually say anything useful.