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Fundamentalism remains the functional modus operandi despite all the special committee fogs

Well written piece that gets at the guts of the current hocus pocus SBC. Should help Sandy and William refine their thinking!!

http://abpnews.com/opinion/commentaries ... c4I92wo6M8

I read the piece and found it pretty accurate and a good summary of the SBC's recent experiences with Calvinists. I had not heard of Jerry Faught but think he did a fine job.

If you wanted some discussion, Stephen, you could have copied and pasted a salient paragraph or two here.

There is a tentative truce among us at the moment but there is still a sliver of SBC Traditionalists who believe that we should have a quota system for new entity leaders that avoids too many Calvinists and also some who designate their giving around SBC seminaries (Southern and Southeastern) which they perceive to be excessively Calvinistic.

Ed: Sandy how do you arrive at the conclusion that "Mega churches are a bigger threat to the growth of the SBC than Calvinism."

After years of hearing the "slippery slope" argument about "even one liberal in our seminaries," I am amazed at the tolerance for an idea that was largely abandoned or at least powerfully modified by the missionary enterprise of the 19th and 20th centuries. Mohler, and his Calvinist friends keep citing 18th and 19th century Baptists who were indeed Calvinists before the late 19th century explosion of the missionary enterprise. It fascinates me that those who would argue a "slippery slope" for having even one non-inerrantists on a seminary faculty haven't connected the same standards to an inerrantists Calvinist.

Both church growth and church decline are much more complex than the single issue items that were bandied about. The SBC believed that address often quoted by Bill Leonard that they were "God's last and only hope." Somehow I think God is bigger than all denominational politics.

I don't see anyone among William's list of SBC leaders who are Calvinist, or associated with Calvinism in the SBC, that would be a threat or deterrent to the evangelistic and missionary emphasis among Southern Baptists. It does not appear that the Calvinists in the SBC are of the same variety, or operate with the same intensity, as those who so drastically affected primitive Baptists.

The decline in baptisms is demographic. If you look at the state conventions, the baptism numbers are down in the deep South, and so is the membership and attendance. They've pretty much saturated that area among the homogeneous population that they reached in the 50's and 60's, and the churches are basically just swapping members as younger people move from traditional congregations to the megas. But outside of that area, most of the state conventions are seeing record baptism numbers, and growth in attendance, membership and total number of churches. The Philadelphia-New York corridor has seen a lot of new church plants in the past decade, and that work is showing up in the numbers in two state conventions. The upper Midwest, especially the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor, is seeing similar growth, as is the Northwest convention, and California. The numbers are smaller there, but that's where the action is. And I don't see Calvinism interfering with those efforts, in fact, a lot of those church planters are coming out of Southern.