"exclusion" is in the eyes of the beholder

A great letter in LEO from a few weeks back...

I wonder if Phelps felt that the conservatives were "excluded" into the 1970s...

Attn: Joe Phelps: I’m glad you’re not in the Southern Baptist Convention. The fact that churches like yours — that started seminaries, schools and hospitals — are now “excluded” from the SBC is not because the convention became more conservative, but because they returned to their historic convictions. Highland Baptist has a history worth celebrating, but a history made tragic by the slow erosion of conviction by time, cultural pressure and darker forces.

The result is bizarre and arbitrary interpretations of scripture. The same Jesus you quoted in your recent column is the one who spoke more of hell than heaven, who promises to return riding a white horse and carrying a sword. The Jesus who said, “Let the children come to me,” also warned of how he’d say to men, “Alas, I never knew you,” before casting them out into the darkness.

The evangelicals in the SBC respected God’s word enough to realize that they had no right to pick and choose. It’s either God-breathed or it’s not. The elements that were cast out in the ’80s were the ones who went with the flow of Western culture, accepting as eternal truth the decrees of academia over the Bible’s many-thousand-year claims. They couldn’t leave Jesus altogether. So they devised a thousand schemes to determine what was actually the Bible and what wasn’t. These choices created an emasculated book that can neither condemn nor save.

Where I resonate with my SBC brethren is their commitment to the Gospel. God is unfathomably holy, we are desperately sinful, and Jesus Christ makes a way on the cross to save us from our sins. Where decline continues, it is because of distraction from that essential message — liberalism, conservatism, moralism and a whole host of secondary agendas distract from the essentials.

I’m the first to cringe at some of the SBC’s cultural backwardness. Their marriage to the GOP is a tragic distraction from the Gospel. But ultimately, it’s their commitment to the Scriptures that gives me hope. While I pray that those changes happen, I pray that their commitment to God’s word and to the weight of the Gospel never lets up.

Mike Cosper, Germantown