by Jim » Sun Nov 19, 2017 5:08 pm
I attended the first clambake of the KBF in 1991 in Winchester, Ky., after falling out with the SBC because of its position on ordaining women. My church is sort of tied to both KBF and SBC, probably as much a generational thing as anything else. A seminary on the campus of Georgetown College (about 15 minutes away) is oriented to the CBF like the one at Richmond, Virginia. The latest concerted effort by the KBF is an almost frantic campaign to get churches to hire more women pastors, thus sort of demeaning them, both women and churches (using the slogan “breaking the stain-glass ceiling”). For this, the KBF partnered with the Baptist Alliance and held special sessions and church services led by women with the predictable hyphenated last names to make sure they are recognized for their individuality. The BA is biblical anathema. The KBF a few years ago joined the Kentucky Council of Churches (micro WCCC) and thus made that organization its spokesman on all matters, putting it in the position of the mainliners regarding marriage, homosexuality and all the rest. In other words, it has started down the slippery slope of the worship of the god Diversity. My prediction is that the CBF and its affiliates will go the way of the mainliners, denominations which are not stagnating but actually entering their death throes, making Christianity as heathen as the world of entertainment. The CBF/KBF should have established its own denomination in the 1990s but its churches were too invested in the SBC going back to the 1800s, again because of the people who actually carried the freight – old codgers now. Pastors are far too invested in their jobs to attempt what would be a virtual bloodletting if they tried that now anyway. Jimmy Carter probably envisioned his NBC in 2008 as a new denomination headed by him, of course. That didn't work out. He was already on the record as favoring legal same-sex unions then so he had an uphill battle on his hands, with his main colleague, Bill Clinton, no help. I'm a relatively poor pensioner with not much to give, but it goes to missions of both Lottie Moon and the CBF as well as to Samaritan's Purse, which in the long run is certainly of more worth than the CBF in pursuing the Great Commission. The inflexibility of the SBC vis-a-vis the unmistakable high principles outlined in scripture makes it more important than any other denomination in the country, though I do not subscribe to its Calvinism. The mainline denominations in the USA are imploding spiritually much as did ancient Greece and Rome and, more recently, Europe governmentally. This is happening as the church strives to become more of the world than in it. The nation is wallowing in decadence now and dragging the church with it...or is it the other way around?