Mohammad Kahn, whose mocking videos have done a great deal to expose the hypocrisy of Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, has a few questions. Well-known Southern Baptist pastor Wade Burleson of Enid, Oklahoma, offered a forum in which to answer them. We perked our coffee here today using heat radiated by the resulting exchanges.
You may wish to watch one of the videos before visiting the steaming stream of comments:
Pastor Wade Burleson turned a slimy anonymous email into a touching open letter on balancing faithful forgiveness and resolve.
Enid, Ok., pastor Wade Burleson is conducting more than a personal homiletic exercise when he flogs the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) through Matthew 23. His whip of the "Woes of the Pharisees" does burn, and rankles some SBCers.
Burleson cuts immediately to the bone with his (2) "pastors and self-proclaimed leaders of the SBC have seated themselves in positions of authority" who even demand (6) "that they be called "Dr." by those who know them."
No, prez Johnny Hunt isn't the only SBCer with with a fake Phd. on his resume. Nor does Burleson gloss his excoriation with footnotes. Whether he has Hunt in mind is from the text unknowable.
Likewise, readers may find any number of SBC controversies among Burleson's other broad hints.
Or choose to read his short-form allegorical satire - not quite Dante's Divine Comedy - as straightforward experimental sermon.
It's surely a stretch (unless perhaps you're from Missouri, Georgia, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon and northern Idaho, and others on a growing list) to read (23) & (24) as somehow in part commentaries on the Great Commission Resurgence Task force recommendations. He writes:
(23) Woe to you, SBC pastors and self-proclaimed SBC leaders, hypocrites! For you emphasize giving, giving, and giving, but you neglect the weightier things: justice and mercy and faithfulness. Don't neglect these things while you seek the dollar! (24) In your blind greed you are straining gnats and swallowing camels.
Whereas it is hard not to read (29) through (33) as criticisms of what David Flick in a different context usefully calls the "conservative insurgence." Burleson writes:
(29) Woe to you, SBC pastors and self-proclaimed SBC leaders, hypocrites! For you exalt other pastors and you build monuments to their legacy, (30) saying, ‘If we had lived in the liberal days of our forefathers, we would have helped them them in turning around our convention.’ (31) Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered your brothers. (32) Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. (33) You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to judgment yourselves?
Tim Dahl found it useful to ignore SBC political implications and read himself into the text. As did this writer.
If Burleson's whip stings, is it because your back needs it?
On behalf of gifted Southern Baptist women:
www.bWebaptist.com asks Southern Baptists to:
- Pray for women pastors and for women who are being called into ministry.
- Pray for a softening of the heart of the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention toward women in the United States.
- Start an email cell group which would commit to pray and to enlist others.
Unusual (in our experience the email cells are) and sound strategy.
The book Hardball Religion by Wade Burleson gets an almost play-by-play punches-unpulled review from John Pierce, executive editor of Baptists Today.
Key snippet:
Burleson’s courage to stand toe-to-toe with abusive power-brokers, to expose the misuse of denominational authority and resources, and to defend those harmed by heavy-handed tactics is commendable.
Yet, for so many of us, his recent “discovery” of fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist Convention is not breaking news. It shows just how late Burleson is getting to the game.
He writes: “I began to realize in 2005, to my horror, that the issue causing such pain in the Southern Baptist Convention was not a battle for a belief in the inspired, inerrant word of God.”
Burleson is right. It is about something else — something very destructive.
Read the entire review here.
Erupting in answer to Wade Burleson's tulips blogs [1,2] was a Southern Baptist flame war, predictably rich in the words "liar" and "liberal."
The Big Daddy Weave covers that fundamentalist-driven soap opera -- flames, comments-closing, IP-address blocking and all.
At length he suggests:
Fundamentalists fighting is nothing new. But the fighting has reached a new level in the Southern Baptist blogosphere. All I know is that the old white guy-dominated Southern Baptist blogosphere can stir up more drama than a handful of teenage drama queens.
There is of course some rejoinder from those taken down. Read it all here.
Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson gracefully stood his ground today regarding the planned purge of Calvinist professors from the ranks at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The former Southern Baptist International Mission Board member also provided more detail and made it clear that he isn't just fighting for Calvinists -- he's fighting for fair treatment in Baptist life and healthy diversity in Baptist faith culture.
He reported a victory this week for fair treatment and diversity:
There will be faculty reductions at SWBTS as there will be at Southern and other educational institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention. But, due to the uproar over the exposure of removing only the Calvinists at SWBTS, the chosen method of reduction, at least as of today, will be different.
One march is not the war. He admonishes:
Southern Baptists better realize the path being taken by some leaders, and by God's grace, we better do all within our power to stop the forced removal of those people from SBC service and employment who don't agree with particular ecclesiological, soteriological and eschatological idealogues leading our Convention. This week was a solid step in the right direction. And, as the picture above shows, saving the tulips at SWBTS is on behalf of the next generation of Southern Baptists.
Whether or not you're a Southern Baptist, we recommend the entire piece to you here.
Part one of the debate, with its stream of sometimes harshly accusatory comments attached, is here.
Shirley Taylor, who with her husband publishes bWe: Baptist Women for Equality email newsletter and Web site, told us via email:
I am just an ordinary woman who got fed up with the Southern Baptist Convention which holds sway over the local church, the local Baptist association, the state convention, and refuses to realize that the greater sin is not that women be allowed to serve, but that the greater sin is to keep women in their so-called place.
She explains, writing with the quiet tone of an after-church conversation, that the current disregard for women by the SBC can be cured, because it is a result of ignorance. The pastors "just don't know" how many of the women in their congregations believe women should be free to serve as deacons, and "even pastors."
She is helping inform them, and brings the summary force of a hammer blow to her convictions.
I wonder if that is in part because she has three granddaughters and would like a better future for them. In any case, she wrote:
Many of these church members have daughters and granddaughters who are feeling the call to go into ministry, and there is no option for them except to go on to the mission field. We are more than willing to ship our daughters off to a foreign land, but we allow our sons to stay home and preach. Doesn't anybody see the hypocrisy in this? Our bellies are full of camels that we have swallowed while straining out the gnat when it comes to women in authority. We stab those scriptures with our bony fingers and declare that women shall not have authority over men, and then we put them on every committee and give them every responsibility in a church, except as the office of a deacon. What makes the office of a deacon so sacred that we argue endlessly and heatedly about who should or should not be "scripturally allowed" to be one?
Women have been tainted with the sin of Eve long enough. If we truly believe that Jesus can wash away our sins, then why are we saying that Jesus cannot forgive women for something that Eve did, which was not even our sin. It is time we accepted the fact that Jesus makes both men and women whole through his saving grace.
She is a former employee of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, and knows most of her denomination's top leadership is moving away from rather than toward accepting women into its pulpits. But she is not alone. Enid, Okla., pastor Wade Burleson recently reprinted on his blog a persuasive account by Mimi Haddad explaining the role of women in the growth of South Korean churches.
Burleson, clearly aware of addressing himself to a church which is foundering on growth problems, then invites the theological debate which could lead to the changes bWe seeks. He includes with that invitation the example of a very effective Southern Baptist voice who, it is implied, would be far more effective if not barred from the pulpit:
I have two questions: What fault, if any, do you find in Mimi’s biblical reasoning? Has Beth Moore been released within the Southern Baptist Convention?
Some agree but are pessimistic. Some Baptist women raise other questions about Southern Baptist Church attitudes toward women. And there are some who see a failed an erroneous strategy.
Meanwhile, the volume of Southern Baptists asking their fundamentalist leaders to reconsider the theologies which led them to push women out of and away from a place in the pulpit, is rising.
Wade Burleson is able defender of the faith as he reviews Newsweek's profile of Ted Haggard
It is when he turns to leadership
We Christians should take an honest look at what it is we think qualifies a person to lead. I sometimes wonder if one of the problems of modern Christianity is that we have created such a false sense of super-spirituality that we succumb to a certain mode of pretending that we never struggle. Christians, especially we who lead, sometimes try to act as if we are perfect. We have pastors who bully those who question them, denominational leaders who call those who oppose their decisions "liberals" and other actions that lead me to believe we have a God-complex among some of our leaders. This false sense of moral invincibility has led to a climate where transparency, honesty, and personal integrity are no longer a part of our corporate faith. ... .
Southern Baptist International Mission Board inflated, sometimes fabricated statistics of missionary accomplishment certainly raise those issues. Former IMB Trustee Burleson is expert on those problems. But his point is more general.
Burleson concludes:
The SBC church, institution or agency that believes the "leader" is beyond simple accountablity will find that leader has the capability to ruin the organization. When and if that happens, the fault will reside not only with the leader, but those laymen who were unable to see that a lack of transparency is the first indication that something is wrong.
Will his call to Southern Baptist reform be answered?
Tony Cartledge
Former IMB trustee Wade Burleson began the new year by suggesting that the IMB make a resolution to put some integrity into its numbers. On its website, the IMB cites statistical reports claiming that in 2007, IMB mission efforts resulted in 609,968 baptisms and 25,497 new church starts.
Burleson points out that such numbers would require that each of the IMB's 5,500 or so missionaries would have to be responsible for five new church starts and about 120 baptisms, and George Frink picked up on that discussion, pointing to an Ethics Daily post from 2005 that cited several international Baptists who dispute the way the IMB takes credit for baptisms and church starts that are unrelated to its work.
Please read it all here.
Frink calls attention to a retired insurance broker's assessment of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board's embezzlement coverup:
So .. I was really shocked when I heard about the Gray Harvey case. Not only have I been active in churches for 45 years or so, in the SBC for 27+ years, but I spent 50 years in the Property & Casualty Insurance business, which is the line of business that covers stuff like employees stealing. So I know a bit about that.
For one thing, I doubt that the SBC insured employee theft. If they had, they would have been reimbursed for Mr. Harvey's theft, and I figure the insurance company would either have collected from the malefactor, or prosecuted. I DON'T figure they'd have let it die a natural, peaceful death.
He makes his view of the IMB trustees who allowed the case to go unprosecuted and took the reported oath of silence quite clear when he says:
If I was somebody like Sam Walton, and this sort of shenanigans had gone on in MY company, I'd fire the lot of them.
We concur, although former IMB trustee Wade Burleson's attempt to hold them to account earned him a drumbeat of anonymous criticism which implied that Burleson was egolistically damaging missionary efforts, until Burleson responded:
If you are the person who used to work for the board and worked with Gray Harvey, you may also be the person that two people told me was involved in the embezzlement.
Please email at wwburleson@hotmail.com and I will tell you if you are the one identified by two people, in writing, as an accomplice.
In His Grace
Wade
Fri Dec 05, 10:04:00 PM 2008
Accomplices?
How tangled is the disastrously miswoven web?
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