Revival Part 5

Shame on the Jesus freaks

SHAME ON the Jesus People, or on lots of them anyway.

I should have known that the boomer generation Jesus people had gone over to the dark side all the way back when Barack Obama got elected and I suggested to my pastor by email that the worship team should offer "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and he replied that he would pass along my note to the music pastor but that he doubted the song was in our range.

I should have known then that the Jesus people had essentially sold out to the Southern Baptist tradition.

Let me back up 178 years, to the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Below you will find a more complete account, but for the purpose of this message, I will just note that in 1845, in the United States, southern Baptists took on an identity of their own because northern Baptists quit sending money to support missionaries who were slaveholders or were sent out by slaveholders.

After abolition, the southern convention maintained a socially conservative stance on race relations; for example, it opposed the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. Sure, the convention adopted a resolution in 1995 denouncing racism and repudiating its past defense of slavery and opposition to the civil rights movement, but that may well have been for practical rather than Biblical motives.  

Here is some Southern Baptist history.

And here's some recent news: From The New York Times

Southern Baptists finalized the expulsion of two churches with female pastors on Wednesday, after a dramatic clash at their annual convention over moves by an ultraconservative wing on multiple fronts to reverse what it sees as a liberal drift.

The ousted congregations are the Saddleback Church in Southern California, one of the denomination’s largest, and the Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. They were expelled in February but were given the opportunity to appeal the decision at the church’s annual meeting in New Orleans, which ends Wednesday.

Impassioned appeals by the two churches’ leaders were resoundingly rejected by the more than 10,000 delegates. The results were not close. More than 90 percent of the delegates voted in favor of Fern Creek’s expulsion, and almost as many voted to confirm the removal of Saddleback, which was founded by prominent preacher and author Rick Warren.

On Tuesday, the leaders of two expelled churches each had three minutes to make their appeals from the convention floor to be allowed to stay in the denomination.

At the microphone, Linda Barnes Popham, the pastor at Fern Creek, related how she had dedicated her life to Jesus when she was 8. She spoke of being taught “to follow to the ends of the earth” whatever Jesus called her to do, and of how her church shares the gospel.

When Warren’s turn came, he noted that Billy Graham had once said his daughter, Anne, was “the best preacher” in the Graham family.

“No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology,” Warren said. “I am not asking you to agree with our church. I am asking you to act like Southern Baptists who have historically ‘agreed to disagree’ on dozens of doctrines in order to share a common mission.”

Warren noted that the denomination’s theological statement is 4,032 words long. “Saddleback disagrees with one word,” he said. “That’s 99.99999999 percent in agreement! Isn’t that close enough?”

The crowd shouted back at him, “No!”

The ousted churches will continue to function as churches but lose their association with the denomination and the ability to participate in its programs, including its robust missionary and disaster relief programs.

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HAVING TAUGHT at a Southern Baptist affiliated college that was then named Christian Heritage, I came to recognize that the school was far more about Heritage than about Christian.

In my latest novel (complete but still in need of some editing, so it likely won't be out until next year), working title All Sorts of Outlaws, the good guys take arms against a political movement whose methods for gaining ever greater power include overthrowing public education in favor of private schools and colleges whose curriculum is all about promoting their agenda. Like Christian Heritage college who dedicated their science classes to disproving evolution. I can only wonder what books they are banning these days.

Okay, aside from teaching, I also write books and publish and market them.

Some years ago, when first invited to teach at a Christian writers' conference, I soon learned that the publishers and agents represented were all members or affiliates of the Christian Booksellers Association.

 Founded in 1950 by members of the Southern Baptist Convention, CBA has guidelines for books sold by its member stores to prohibit offensive content including profanity, alcohol consumption, and references to luck. When customers at CBA's member stores take offense to a book, CBA pressures all member stores to stop selling books by that book's publisher. An editor lamented to some of us that his house got a complaint from a bookstore that someone objected to a book's character drinking wine and the publisher took appropriate (meaning financially beneficial) action

This means that folks who lean toward Christian faith are strongly encouraged and at least somewhat manipulated to consider not reading about anyone who doesn't follow their own cultural preferences. If the CBA (meaning to me the Southern Baptist Convention) controlled television, the same rules would apply. Now, I prefer stories that don't rely on stuff I find offensive, but I will assert my right to read about or watch portrayals of offensive people and I respect the rights of artists to create according to what they believe is true about the world. I believe Jesus would do likewise. My desire is that people would read Crime and Punishment and watch The Greatest Story Ever Told and choose to follow Christ rather than the tide of modern humanism that led Dostoyevski's Raskolnikov to crime.