Retro-innovative Georgia Baptist Convention time travelers

Seeking to disfellowship Atlanta's Druid Hills Baptist Church, the Georgia Baptist Convention (GBC) is fleeing present reality. The GBC executive committee recommended that change at its March 16 meeting and Shelia M. Poole of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote today:

“It seems sad that they decided to go backwards in time,” said the 52-year-old Mimi Walker, a former missionary in the Philippines. “I’m not sure what the value is of trying to go back in time when women were held in subservience.”

The overarching result, not value, is a steadily smaller, more strictly Batholic and of course less diverse Southern Baptist Convention.

Southern Baptist autonomy (not for women in the pulpit: for predators)

Put a woman in the pulpit and the ax of Southern Baptist discipline falls. The Georgia Baptist Convention is preparing to disfellowship Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta because the Reverend Mimi Walker is a co-pastor there. While critics write the South Carolina Baptist Courier to abjure Eau Claire Baptist Church for calling Kelly Dickerson Strum to be co-pastor, one suggesting that church discipline is in order.

Yet amid the recurrent revelations of Southern Baptist pastoral sexual abuse, again documented by Christa Brown, no equivalent scripture-laced outpourings about applying the force of denominational discipline to the protection of the young from sexual wolves in Baptist clerical cloth. Or disfellowship of churches which ship predators of the cloth along to other congregations without a word of warning.

Oh no. Policy is clear: Women in the pulpit are a danger to the entire denomination. As are homosexuals welcomed into the pews. For the proliferation of predators, however, Southern Baptist Churches are autonomous. No denominational consequence for negligence.

A solvable problem, lacking only will

Christa Brown, the insightful proprietor of Stop Baptist Predators, explains how the American Baptist Churches can teach the Southern Baptist Convention how to take effective control of its profoundly destructive problem with sexually predatory clergy.

Or to be more precise, she relates how a group of Baptist pastors illuminated the issue in their online discussion.

As you would expect, it's a straightforward matter of setting standards, keeping records that make it difficult for credibly accused clergy to move with impunity from church to church, leaving a trail of victims as they grow. Yet the denomination discussed which does that is the American Baptist Churches, which somewhat like the SBC prizes local church autonomy. As they say on their Web page:

As early Baptists overcame oppression by establishing a congregational church system emphasizing local church autonomy and separation from state influence, so contemporary American Baptists continue to emphasize both the importance and the responsibility of every church and the individual believer before God.

Read it all here at Stop Baptist Predators.

Two churchmen sentenced, one inadequately

An Argentine judge sentenced former Archbishop of Sante Fe Edgardo Storni to eight years incarceration for abuse of his power to sexually exploit a male seminary student. That sentence punctuated a long running scandal in which a book was published documenting the abuse, the Vatican launched and abandoned an investigation and a succession of victims saw their cases dismissed by various judges.

Not similarly concerned with the abuse of power in such relationships, a California judge sentenced "the youth group leader at Miracle Land Korean Baptist Church in Cypress was sentenced to 90 days for having sex with a 15-year-old girl."

Both abuses occurred in close association with church events, making obvious the link between clerical authority and the sexual incidents.

Both assailants enjoyed the public support and protection of their church communities, as though their were something acceptable about their crimes. That misguided view of clerical sex crime contributes to the isolation of and harm to victims.

Most ethicists agree that betraying the trust of and abusing the authority of the ministry to secure sexual favors does not and cannot result in mutual consent.

The result is instead a form of rape.

Punishment at every level should fit the crime, should it not?

[H/T: Christa Brown]

Church planting: Waste or salvation?

Church planting has become a main branch of the Southern Baptist Convention evangelism strategy, but a North Carolina pastor who ran for SBC president last year has raised serious questions about whether it should be.

Les Puryear, pastor of Lewisville Baptist Church, using statistics compiled by the SBC's North American Mission Board, says that the convention spends about $100,000 over the first four years of a "planted" church's life, yet 32 percent of new churches don't survive for four years.

As a result:

If $1 million is invested to plant 10 new churches, $320,000 of that investment will not result in a viable, healthy church.

Without citing a source Using statistics from from the SBC Annual 2008 Book of Reports (p. 123), Puryear cities an NAMB church planting budget for 2008-2009 of about $22.85 million (a graphic on this page of the NAMB web site shows the 2008 budgeted expenses for church planting to be $24.4 million). Puryear calculated that about $7.31 million is being spent on churches that won't exist after four years.

The new churches that survive for four years average 85 in attendance and have baptized 48 people.

Puryear compares that to his first four years at Lewisville, when 51 people were baptized.

"Thus, my 127-year-old 'traditional' Southern Baptist church has a higher average baptisms per year than does the average new church plant. I provide these stats not to glorify my church but to demonstrate that established, traditional Southern Baptist churches can be viable places of reaching the lost."

SBC records show that in 2008, the convention's 44,848 churches (newly 'planted,' dying, thriving, etc ...) baptized 342,198 people, an average of 7.63 per church.

Ed Stetzer, who is now president of LifeWay Research, cited similar figures in a 2003 article called "The Most Effective Evangelistic Strategy Under Heaven." The article, which was adapted from Stetzer's book, "Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age," quotes noted church growth author C. Peter Wagner as calling church planting "the single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven."

Stetzer goes on to cite research that new churches average about 14.4 baptisms per year for every 100 people in regular attendance in worship while churches that are 16 years old or more baptize about 7.3 persons per year for every 100 people in attendance. He calls new churches "a gift of evangelism."

"Without church planting, our denomination will decline; but more importantly, the number of Christians in North America will continue to decline. If we love God's Kingdom, we must love church planting."

Church planting has been emphasized in the SBC since well before Stetzer's article. Although the strategy has on occasion been problematic.

The Overseas Leadership Team for the SBC's International Mission Board adopted a vision statement in 1998 to guide the IMB's missionary force.

"We will facilitate the lost coming to saving faith in Jesus Christ by beginning and nurturing Church Planting Movements among all peoples."

The IMB defines a church planting movement as "a rapid and multiplicative increase of indigenous churches planting churches within a given people group or population segment."

By 2000, the IMB was discouraging volunteers from constructing church buildings overseas and instead moving them toward church planting efforts.

The IMB claims that its missionaries were responsible for more than 25,000 church starts in 2007, but the board's numbers are thought to be inflated and in some cases fabricated.

The SBC's North American Mission Board see its role as helping Southern Baptists fulfill the Great Commission "through a North American strategy for sharing Christ, starting churches and sending missionaries."

NAMB even has a web site it calls a "one-stop shop for church planting."

The SBC's seminaries emphasize church planting. The Nehemiah Project, which put a professor of church planting on each Southern Baptist seminary campus, started in 1998, according to this time line.

Members of the convention's Great Commission Task Force, which is studying ways the SBC can better accomplish the Great Commission, have talked about the importance of church planting. Danny Akin, the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a driving force behind the task force, has called for a church planting strategy "that assaults the major population centers of North America."

"Why we plant more churches in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee than we do in New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington and California is absolutely incomprehensible to me."

The Great Commission Resurgence Declaration calls for "new churches in unevangelized areas of North America, especially the great urban centers," and for the revitalization of existing congregations.

"We long to see a Convention where every church is a church planting church in its unique Jerusalem, its Judea and Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth."

Ronnie Floyd, chairman of the task force, said at a recent question and answer session that the group's report "will ring the bell for church planting."

I believe charging out of the gate of our report will be a real commitment to Gospel churches planting Gospel churches planting Gospel churches.

In his blog post, Puryear says he is "not anti-church planting."

"And so, is church planting the best way to reach the lost? I'm not certain that church planting is the 'best' way, but it is one effective, though expensive way."

In addition to church planting, Puryear said he'd like to see NAMB emphasize helping existing churches.

"Pursuant to such a goal, I would like to see NAMB establish seminars, conferences, study courses, etc., to help the local church learn how to develop strategies for reaching the lost. I hear many missionaries talking about outreach strategy, but I never see anyone teaching pastors and leaders of the local churches how to develop outreach strategies. If NAMB or someone else would develop such training, I would be the first in line to attend. Also, I would happily pay for such training. We train missionaries how to develop strategy. Why cannot we train our pastors?"

FBC Jax Watchdog warning about involvement with a Charlotte, N.C., Christian television network

Watchdog is unhappy that First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla., broadcasts on the Inspiration Network.

Watch the WCNC investigative video to decide whether you agree with Watchdog that affiliation with this group is lamentable. Chances are good that you will be troubled by at least part of what you learn.

Watchdog notes that FBC pastor Mac Brunson asked for a special offering last Easter to raise $180,000 to purchase Inspiration Network air time.

Then, illustrating why his blog has received such a Byzantine reaction from the leadership of FBC Jax, says:

I, for one, could not donate money to any organization that gives money or is associated with these "Televangelist Gunslingers", as this report calls them. I can't believe any bible-believing church would need to affiliate with the likes of these folks to spread the gospel.

Why, indeed? Not the kind of question the powerful always field well.

Martin E. Marty on 'Creation Care'

American Lutheran religious scholar Martin E. Marty writes about Evangelicals and the Environment:

This week I stumbled upon a little book which prompts a Sighting of one way some evangelicals are dealing with the environmental crisis and the future. It's Lindy Scott, ed., Christians, the Care of Creation, and Global Climate Change (Pickwick), based on a conference at Illinois' Wheaton College, often called the flagship evangelical liberal arts college-one of several flagships. The only "known" contributors are Wheaton President A. Duane Litfin and super-scientist and up-front evangelical, ex-Oxonian Sir John Houghton, who spoke and wrote on "Big Science, Big God." The rest of the essays, reports, and proposals are from students and graduates of Wheaton and its kin and kind.

One of the essayists therein is student Ben Lowe, who copes with the issue of evangelicals shying away from environmental concerns. Marty relates some evangelical environmental hangups and hints at the answers:

1. The environment isn't really in crisis." Lowe lists seven patent "degradations" of the climate, and agrees with Calvin De Witt that "the common agent...is human action."
2. "Everything's going to burn up anyway." This is the word of the "Eschatology determines ethics" apocalypticists, whom he counters effectively.
3. "Fear of paganism, nature worship and panentheism." This case is a bit blurry, and demands more careful examination than he gives it, but his report is accurate.
4. "Higher priorities: save souls, not whales." This is the oldest standard evangelical put-down; Lowe and others in the book really take that one on, and down.

Creation Care has a growing following amone Southern Baptists too.

Dogs, elephants and Southern Baptist intolerance

Oklahoma Baptist bloggers aren't all about metaphoric animal-friends stories. Or once upon a time when the denomination was still larger, they weren't. Though by then he had left the ranks of Southern Baptists, pastor David Flick met it all head-on with a sweeping historic summation in a Nov. 7, 2007 which included:

This week, Southern Baptist intolerance has raised its ugly head yet again. The International Mission Board could not tolerate trustee, Wade Burleson's, principled dissent on several issues of little consequence. In the scheme of things, Burleson's dissent amounts to little more than a hill of beans. Yet the IMB, led by chairman John Floyd and former chairman, Jerry Corbaley, censured him. In a wildly slanderous and lengthy report, Cobaley accused Burleson of slander and sin. Burleson's censure says a lot about the credibility of the IMB. on a scale of 1-10, the IMB's credibility is minus-6. It says a lot about Burleson's credibility as well. On the same scale, Burleson's credibility is a strong-9.

More than intolerance is involved, Flick argues in a document here which deserves to be revisited while others attempt to arrest the well-foreseen inquisitorial process which has been grinding down the SBC.

Now Burleson is late to the game, John Pierce of Baptists Today observed in reviewing Burleson's new book, Hardball Religion.

Hardball indeed and played for decades now -- not zoo animal stories.