They Got It All--Now What?

I think it likely that at this point, my anonymous comments on an unnamed church will not cause any trouble. Only a handful of souls read this blog anymore, anyway.

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I'll try to keep it brief.  No one likes long blogposts.

I belong to a church that is in decline.  It was declining when I joined, probably about six years ago now.  The ministry team then consisted of one semi-retired pastor with a background in sales and self-publishing who was serving on an  interim basis, the music minister, who'd apparently been there since the dawn of time, and the youth/education minister.

Within a month or two of me visiting, they'd called a youngish former missionary to the pastorate.  He did, in my opinion, well, but like any other man, he wasn't perfect, and the church continued to decline.  I think there was a definite turning point when he called a series of meetings for Sunday School teachers so that we could, once again, go over his self-authored booklet outlining what the church was all about and what was expected of the membership.  I distinctly recall looking at another Sunday School teacher and saying, "So, I guess the problem is that the membership and teachers haven't been through this booklet enough times?"

Not too long after that, he apparently felt called to go into politics.  I will say no more save to note that it may have been a mistake.

When he left, the church--or, rather, a handful of committee members--invited one preacher after another to preach in our pulpit.  One or two of them I thought might have a chance, particularly one young fellow who, it seemed to me, actually demonstrated an attitude toward outreach and evangelism that might stand a chance of success in our neighborhood, which has changed dramatically since the church's heyday.

And then, they decided that the best thing to do was call back the interim preacher who'd been there when I first started visiting, five years earlier.

I found out later that this man and the music minister had worked together at another church before this.

And then, REMARKABLY, the next step in the plan toward reversing the decline was to call back the youth/education minister who'd been there when I started visiting, even though the man had been let go, oh, three years earlier, as the church had already declined to the point where we couldn't afford to pay him.

And just like THAT, the ministry team that had been there when I started visiting was reconstituted.  Was it intentional?  Was it planned to be like that from the moment our pastor left?  I do not know.  Maybe.

But whether it was planned or not, I couldn't help but think, "Wasn't the church declining under these people?  Why is rehiring them now considered a solution?"

But I know how these things typically go in church life.  I didn't say much, for I knew I'd be accused of divisiveness simply for asking reasonable questions.

Within, I think, six or eight months of this staff's return, attendance dropped from about 150 or so to about 80.  We do have some new members, but we have lost enough "old" members (for lack of a better term) to keep attendance at about that level (or so they say.  I never see more than about sixty.)

That is not a sustainable level for us to keep paying the kind of staff we have, pay the bills on a building the size of ours, and keep running the kinds of programs we always have.  We are either going to go to a totally bivocational staff and shut off parts of the  building and quit doing some things, or we are going to go bankrupt.  Or we are going to grow.

Naturally, NO BAPTIST CHURCH will EVER admit that they are not going to try to grow, so our new/old interim--now permanent, if part-time--pastor announced that the plan to grow was to become a "metro" church, by which he meant that it was time to quit worrying so much about the local population and let people know that we were "worth the drive."  I found this so much hubris--after all, we have a huge number of churches in our city, and saying that OURS was worth the drive necessarily involved saying that OTHERS were worth only driving PAST--and, without naming names or naming churches, said something to that effect on Facebook.

I was shortly told by the preacher that this was a Matthew 18 situation and advised that part of the plan was to do things in a spirit of unity and harmony.

He wouldn't have even seen my comment had he not been looking over the shoulder of a Facebook friend who was helping out in the church office.  He wasn't on my "friends" list and I have long had all my settings to "friends only," so make what you will out of his statement that he was in the habit of reading all the things I say on Facebook.

I agreed to keep any further comments off Facebook whilst noting that I disagreed with his proposed approach and, while I hoped to be proven wrong, I thought it likely that the church would be closing its doors within three years.  He agreed that we certainly had a challenge ahead of us.

Since then--several months now--"the plan" has come together.  It consisted of:

1) Removing the pews from our largish sanctuary and spending thousands of dollars on new chairs, and taking up much less space, so as to create a more intimate worship atmosphere.  I spoke in favor of that, actually; anything to get the members to do something DIFFERENT.

2) Focusing mainly on the Sunday morning worship service, de-emphasizing, to a degree, Sunday School, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday evenings--even going to the point of not having Sunday nights at all during the Summer and not having Wednesday evenings consistently.

3) Making sure that all our friends knew that we were worth the drive.

4) Reaching out to the neighborhood businesses.  Exactly why the local businesses were worth reaching out to when the local people were (at least initially) NOT is as unclear to me as it likely is to you.  In practice, all this has meant is that the local Wendy's has given us coupons for free Frosties to use as prizes for a few of our events.

5) Creating a "Welcome Center" for our guests.  In practice that has meant putting two airpots full of coffee, some donuts, and cups into what used to be the foyer and is now the welcome center.

6) Doing everything in a spirit of unity and harmony.  Since, as far as I know--actually, to my certain knowledge, in some cases--the staff has routinely but politely dismissed input from church members, and those members are now FORMER members, having voted with their feet, and I agreed not to put comments on Facebook and to keep my thoughts on these policies out of the church arena (remember: I blog anonymously, and I am naming neither people nor church here, and the odds are very good that only one of my readers even knows where I go to church), the staff may well not really know what it is to experience disunity and unharmoniousness. It seems to me that the staff may not be able to distinguish the silence of the silenced, disinterested, and tired from a spirit of unity and harmony.  It may be that they think a lack of open criticism constitutes having approval.  It may be that they don't realize our near-halved attendance, despite leaving only the non-critical in place, is indicative of anything but harmony and unity.

And maybe there really is unity.  Certainly they've gotten everything they wanted.  They got their old team back.  They got the Welcome Center.  They got the changes in the sanctuary.  They got the focus on the morning worship service.  They got "unity and harmony," or at least an absence of criticism and a series of near-unanimous votes.

So, my question: what now, guys?  The decline hasn't been halted, at least as far as I can tell.  I see nothing--zero, zip, zilch, nada--being either pursued or proposed that is in the smallest iota different from exactly what has failed for a quarter-century now.  We pretty much run the same programs in the same way.  We do nothing different in terms of outreach.  I don't even think we HAVE outreach, unless you want to pretend that doing VBS is outreach (which most churches do; they say that VBS is the church's greatest outreach effort of the year, which, if true, is pathetic, because it is, judging by the numbers I've seen for the last decade, a failure, year after year after year).

You got everything you said you wanted.  What now?  I'll give you credit for wanting to get something done.  But to tell the truth, you three--four, if you count the former pastor--have been instrumental in convincing me of something I had suspected for a long time: most professional ministry staff go to seminary and come away with no more idea what to do, no more real knowledge, no greater grasp of the Word, than the average old lady in the pews.  I suspect that the three of you, and probably certain committee members, thought that if only you were in place as a team again, people who'd left would come roaring back. That the church was declining under you, too, when you were together before, was overlooked.

You all read the same books and the same magazines and go to the same conferences and you all think the same officially approved groupthink.  You just don't THINK.  You just parrot the same stuff everyone else parrots,  and I really do think that if the decline of the North American church in general, and the Southern Baptist Convention specifically, is ever halted, it will be in spite of ministers like you instead of because of ministers like you.

Up to HERE with Bogus Applications of Matthew 18

Before I get started, here is the text in question, from the English Standard Version:

 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

Okay, there it is.  Got it?  Good.

Now, I have just about had it up to my eyeballs with bogus applications of this passage.  Let's just note the obvious first:

This passage assumes locality.  That is, this is not about something that occurred elsewhere in Christendom, maybe somewhere across the world.  At the time Jesus was speaking, you could go to the offender.  You could take other church members.  This was never about publicly responding to words published or spoken publicly to the whole of society.

The passage says, "...sins against you..."  Whether you take "you" to mean "you" personally as an individual or "you" as the local church (again, the passage assumes locality), the passage is not about something that the offender did to someone else, that is, it's not about--let's just pick something wild as a hypothetical--it's not about you seeing your ostensible brother beating the squeeze out of a little old lady and burning her house down, and then going to him alone, then with two or three brothers, and then, say, to the police.  

The passage says "sins."  This is not about questions of direction, wisdom, brass-tacks decisions, and so forth.

Now, for four quick examples, though many more could quickly--quickly!--be produced:

1) Remember when Brian McLaren was actually being listened to?  You remember Brian McLaren--high grand poo-bah of the so-called "Emergent Church?"  You remember how he wrote several books which, among other things, had pretty severe criticism for just about every stream of Christendom that has ever existed?

When I (and others) critiqued his books and his thinking, I (and presumably others) were piously asked if we had gone privately to Brian to express our concerns first.

Feh.  Fie on that.  He hadn't--at least not that I know of--sinned against me or my church.  What he'd done was very public and required public responses.  It was absurd to say that critiquing his critiques was a "Matthew 18" situation.  It was on the level of saying that the early church was obligated to go privately to Marcion first, before responding to his public heresy by publicly labeling it heresy.  It was on the level of saying that Martin Luther should have traveled to Rome to express his concerns to the pope before nailing up the 95 Theses.

2) Not all that long ago, I was driving down the road and noticed that a local church which I had formerly attended had changed its name to something "hipper," for lack of a better word.  And I observed on Facebook and Twitter that this would likely contribute nothing whatsoever to church growth.  Next thing you know, people were telling me it was a "Matthew 18" situation, that I should have first gone to the pastor to privately express my "concerns."

Say what?  Are you mad?  No sin involved, just a difference of opinion.

3) Again, not all that long ago, I made the dreadful mistake of observing that a change in a certain church's direction would a) likely not contribute a blessed thing to that church's growth and b) involved renouncing outreach to the people in the neighborhood.  I didn't mention the church's name nor any individual.  When I expressed my thoughts, I was expressing generalized thoughts about this sort of strategy's viability. But I was told that this, too, was a "Matthew 18" situation.

Again, difference of opinion, not sin.

4) Just over the last few days, there have been a couple of posts elsewhere in the blogosphere regarding the admission of Muslims to one of our Southern Baptist seminaries.  It will not surprise you to learn that one of the comments I read on those posts suggested to the blogger that this was a "Matthew 18" situation and that the blogger should have gone to the seminary president privately, etc., etc., etc.

Oh, for the...

First of all, who is the offended brother here?  Is there even a church in view?  I think not.  One of the offended parties is this man's employer, the Southern Baptist Convention, which--God knows I hate breaking it to you, but someone has to do it--is not the church.

Considering this quote, and assuming that the information is correct (I do not know from first-hand observation, obviously):

... In a faculty meeting in 2012, **************  warned anyone who questioned him about Muslims being admitted into ****************, or anyone who was disloyal to him and discussed this matter with others not associated with *************** would be terminated.

It is apparent that the other offended parties would have been those who were threatened with the loss of their jobs over a difference of opinion or--and this is critical--carrying out further steps in their own Matthew 18 process.

That's what I'm sayin': the blogger wasn't in a Matthew 18 situation; the threatened faculty were.

Over and over and over again, I see "Matthew 18!" being used as an excuse to stifle discussion, dissent, disagreement, criticism of actions and thinking.  It was never meant for any of those things.

This is getting ridiculous.

It Wasn't Always This Way

I'm not sayin' a word about the rest of the post from which this line comes--I gots my 'pinions, y'know, but I ain't gonna take the time ta lay 'em out tonight--but this line kind of caught my attention:

...a church system that exists primarily to pay professional ministers and to build and maintain buildings.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Y'know, it's kinda hard to dispute.

I don't have a problem with paying ministers. The Bible does actually say, you know, that preachers are entitled to get their living from preaching the Gospel, and I don't begrudge that one little bit. But is that the reason that the "church system" exists? To pay ministers?

To build and maintain buildings?

Well, I know those aren't supposed to be the reasons, but looking at what actually goes on in a lot of churches and para-church organizations might make you wonder.

Look at the Southern Baptist Convention. You know the reason it was formed, and what it was formed from? It was formed from a lot of Baptist churches--independent, every one of 'em--that wanted to have a means to cooperatively support missionaries and seminary education for preachers.

Looking at the SBC today, churches don't seem quite as independent as they used to be--or at least, as I've read they used to be. I really, strongly get the sense that the organization that was meant to be a tool for accomplishing the goals of the churches now sees the churches as tools for accomplishing the goals of the organization.

But maybe that's just me. And truth be known, the solution is always available: the people in the pews can always educate themselves and get involved. If they don't--

--well, they've no one to blame but themselves.

Random Thoughts on Why Our Churches Are Dying

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I started this post some few months ago, and then let it "sit," wondering if I would have much else to say. I didn't, not 'til the last couple of days, when I see from our local Baptist newspaper and some of what I see on Facebook that changing this situation is going to require the finger of God. If you're a Baptist, read on at your peril. I have added only a small amount of material since the original writing. I apologize if it doesn't seem a model of coherence. It was, after all, intended to be a "random thoughts" sort of post.

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Of course, your church may not be dying. "Church death" may not even be on your radar screen for one reason or another. You might find some of these thoughts useful for future reference anyway, if only to give yourself some ideas on some things to avoid.

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Our congregation was told some time ago that one of our full-time ministerial staff was being let go, due to a budget shortfall. In a way, it didn't really surprise me. I've been wondering how we afforded so much staff.

I'm not being negative about the man. The person who was let go is a wonderful guy. Very knowledgeable, very capable, universally loved (I know he's universally loved; I took over teaching the Sunday School class he taught. It took months for that stuff to settle down!). I'm sorry to see him go, I really am. But you have to wonder just how much full-time staff a church that (to the best of my knowledge) averages no more than two hundred people in worship on Sundays (and actually, I think it's less) can realistically afford to support.

You have to understand: it wasn't always this way. This church is somewhat more than fifty years old. Built shortly after World War II, as, I understand, a church plant from First Baptist, Tulsa. At the time, it was on the outskirts of town. Now, the part of Tulsa it's in is considered somewhat old and dilapidated. When it was built, the United States was in the middle of the legendary "baby boom." American economic power was at its zenith (economic power fueled, in large part, by a policy involving consumption taxes, the specific variety being tariffs, I might add). The population was growing and people had money. This church was built where all the young people with money were moving. It grew and grew rapidly. I believe that at one time there were about six hundred or so people in the services (I could be wrong on this), just like there was at another church built in the same time frame only a mile or two down the road. The population out there was growing so fast that you could hardly build churches fast enough or big enough--or at least I'm sure it seemed like that.

Take heed, those of you who live where the young people with money are moving now--places like Owasso, Jenks, Bixby, and so forth. There was a time when those old churches in central Tulsa fit the same profile you fit now.

I'm dead certain that when those rapidly-growing churches of the fifties and sixties were experiencing explosive growth, quite a lot of people saw that growth as a blessing from God and not a whole lot of people gave much thought to the possibility that they were doing some things drastically wrong. Why would they? I'm not sure it would occur to me, either. But in retrospect...

...You know, years ago I worked for a rather large restaurant chain. We had a location in Claremore that did pretty good business. One day I chanced to talk with the district manager who had that location. It seemed that a Wendy's had opened up down the road from our store--we called our restaurants "stores," for some reason--and business at our store had gone down. The district manager told me that he had been told that our store must be dirty. In other words, the problem, the business downturn, had to be the result of something the management and crew were doing wrong. It couldn't possibly be the result of a new competitor opening up. It couldn't be the result of a business plan that assumed the absence of real competition. It had to be something going wrong within the store. And before the Wendy's opened up? Presumably, their bang-up business must have been solely the result of excellence in product, cleanliness, and service. It must be very difficult to examine yourself and your business model for deficiencies when things are going smoothly and you are making good money. Why wouldn't you assume that what you are doing is correct? After all, you are making money--and isn't that the ultimate criteria for most businesses?

In the same way, I can't help but think that it must be very hard for a relatively new church experiencing explosive growth to examine itself and decide that it is doing some things wrong, or at least not as wisely as they might. It seems to me that just as most businesses operate on the assumption that massive profitability validates their business practices, most churches operate on the assumption that massive growth indicates that they are at least not doing too badly. When I've visited churches that are growing rapidly--the ones I've visited in the last few years are mostly out in Owasso--it seems to me that they have an undercurrent in their thinking, an assumption that their exploding numbers are at least partly the result of God's blessing and their own evangelistic fervor. Some seem to have a handle on the reality that Owasso and its churches are the beneficiaries of young couples with money moving out to the 'burbs, but others don't quite seem to "get" this and assume that their model of ministry must be okay.

To be fair, I'm not altogether sure that I would do things any differently in that situation. Looking at the situation in central Tulsa, my first thought was that it would have been better for those then-rapidly growing churches to have spun off more local, neighborhood churches than to build large buildings and grow themselves to enormous size. That way, I thought, when the younger folks moved out to go to college, then to the 'burbs and even to other states, the remaining, smaller congregations wouldn't have been faced with the problems of trying to maintain large buildings and large staffs on retirees' budgets. But then I remembered that the two churches I was thinking of most were within a mile-and-a-half of each other. How much more "local" can you get? Both those churches were running over 500 in attendance at one point! And they weren't the only churches in the neighborhood, not by a long shot!

Try convincing crowds like that that they do not, as a church, really know how to evangelize. I bring that up because, in retrospect, it seems clear that they did not. If they really knew how to evangelize, then would it not have been inevitable, as families moved out of the neighborhood and new families moved into those houses, that those new people would have been brought into the church in numbers proportional to those who had left? But that didn't happen. Instead, as families aged and children moved out of the neighborhood, those churches' attendance gradually dwindled. Since the houses in those neighborhoods are still occupied, I have to conclude that--for whatever reason--we are not taking the gospel to those new residents, at least not in the same way we did to the former residents.

This would certainly be consistent with my experience. Time and again, I'll bring up the topic of personal evangelism and witnessing and visitation to folks in our Sunday School class, and the folks in our Sunday School class will, time and again, aver that overall, they prefer "lifestyle evangelism." (They did not use this term; it is something I introduced to them.)

Do you know what lifestyle evangelism is? It is operating on the assumption that the people around you, on seeing how differently you live, will eventually be drawn to ask you what makes the difference in your life, giving you an opportunity to share the Gospel. And it is certainly true, in my opinion, that if you are going to go around sharing the Gospel, a lifestyle consistent with it certainly helps! And maybe this sort of thing was more effective back in the fifties and sixties, when central air conditioning and cable tv weren't ubiquitous and people spent more of their time outdoors, where their neighbors could see them. But now? Friends, for the most part, your neighbors don't even notice you, not unless your car is blocking their driveway. They are certainly not going to take notice of how holy your life is. And, too, ironically, the same people who seem to think that their lifestyles are so holy that they will attract people to Christ as lights attract moths will consistently confess that they need to grow in holiness! So, overall, what is lifestyle evangelism worth these days?

Sooner or later, you've got to go knock on some doors and at least pass out a tract. It's better to be able to say something, but--and yes, I have asked--most Christians don't feel terribly confident in their ability to clearly articulate the Gospel, or to answer questions and objections, so they don't even try. They just keep coming to Sunday School and church services, hoping all the while, I guess, that they will eventually gain enough knowledge to be able to tell other people what they believe about God, life, death, eternity, and salvation. To my mind, the situation looks like a massive, systemic failure to educate and train, despite a massive Sunday School program and the availability of enough literature to choke a moose.

You know how I teach Mexican immigrants to speak English? (I teach an ESL class on Sunday nights.) We have books, of course, and we use them, but class after class, I, as the teacher, get up there and make them speak English. They can help one another answer questions all they want, but they have to do it in English. The hands-on practice is far more valuable than the textbook study, important as that is.

I can't help but think that for decades, we've had evangelism books, seminars, and so forth, and all we've succeeded in doing is so clouding the issue that most people aren't sure that they can share the Gospel "correctly!" Great result, isn't it? Perhaps it would have been better to focus first on hands-on experience and supplement with the training. Perhaps not. Perhaps yet another model would have been better. But because we confused demographically-driven church growth with successful evangelism, the idea that the core of our evangelistic practices simply didn't work and needed to be revamped never gained traction. If the thought was ever voiced, which I rather doubt. And now, our once-full churches in central Tulsa are dying on the vine, despite the homes around them being occupied, and I predict that the same thing will eventually happen to the now-full churches in Owasso.

The final nail in the coffin of how I think of our evangelistic methods, so to speak, was a thought that--in all seriousness--took me years to develop. You may remember, if you're from around Tulsa, that Franklin Graham came to Tulsa several years ago. Of course, I signed up to be a counselor and went to all of the BGEA's training sessions. Most were forgettable, though I remember enjoying seeing some of the other churches 'round town, but one--I think it was the third one--was something I'll never forget, not as long as I live.

You see, at one point, the person leading the training session--it was at Christ United Methodist, I believe, and it was packed out, brothers and sisters--asked all the assembled, "How many people here came to Christ at a revival?"

And a few hands went up.

Then, "How many people here came to Christ because they saw Billy Graham on TV?"

And a few hands went up.

Then, "How many people here came to Christ because of an evangelistic tract?"

And a few more hands went up.

And then, finally, "How many people here came to Christ because a friend or relative told them about Christ?"

And the whole place went up!

And I thought, "Brother, you don't know it, but you just told me that I'm wasting my time here." And that thought stayed in my head for a long time, even though I continued with FAITH evangelism, with "Share Jesus Without Fear," and so forth, and was one of the most consistent people in visitation the church had.

Some few months back, I was, like I alluded to earlier, talking to my Sunday School class about personal evangelism, and a light bulb went on. "How many," I asked, "of you live within a three--mile-or-so radius of this church?"

One hand went up, as I recall. Then I asked, "How many of you have friends or relatives that live within a three-mile-or-so radius of this church?"

And nobody, friends, nobody said a word. And that is the reality, friends, of most of the churches dying around you, I am quite sure. Yes, your church members fail to evangelize--to strangers, with evangelistic models that were assumed to work because the churches that used them grew so rapidly in the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. But they continue to talk to their friends and relatives about Jesus, and their friends and relatives often end up coming to Jesus. And friends, if you haven't figured it out by now, by and large, your church members' friends and relatives, unless your church is in a growing suburb, don't live around your church, so, ironically, your church members' perfectly normal evangelistic practices don't actually end up doing your local congregation any good.

You will say, "But MOTW, just like you said, we've got to revamp evangelism training, have people learn by doing, so that they will evangelize strangers! We're supposed to carry the gospel to everyone." I would agree. I am not saying otherwise, not at all. I am simply pointing out that the actual evangelistic practice of most of the people in your congregation differs considerably from what your theoretical model of church growth would like it to be, that it conforms, I have no doubt, to the actual evangelistic practice of most believers throughout Christian history, and that if you succeed in turning the situation around in your church, the entire Southern Baptist Convention will immediately be beating a path to your door.

Somewhere along the line, we built our ideas about church growth and evangelism around an ideal model that we would like to see in action, instead of the actual practices of the people in the pews. How to solve it? I'm not entirely sure. But I am pretty sure that if we keep failing to work with the way most people actually evangelize instead of against it, we are not going to be altogether successful.

There are other problems. One of them is a cloud of ideas revolving around giving and money. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard sermons or comments to the effect that if only church members would do what they were "supposed to do," that is, to tithe, to give ten percent of their income, that we'd have the money to maintain the building, pay staff, and do ministry and evangelism correctly. "Correctly," of course, being the way it was done during that era of explosive church growth. And since that way wasn't/isn't working anymore, and most people don't actually tithe, it is pretty much a slam-dunk for many ministers to conclude that failure in evangelism is somehow connected to poor stewardship, to a failure to tithe. As a matter of fact, I just read another such column to that effect by the director of the BGCO in the Baptist Messenger!

It's an easy out that allows people to continue to ignore the massive failure of our evangelistic models. So is the classic, "There's sin in the camp!" (Somebody in here drinks beer!)

You know, the word "tithe" is not to be found in The Baptist Faith and Message. You know why? It's because--and this will come as complete and utter shock to some of you--there is no command, not one, not anywhere in Scripture, for Christians to give a specific amount or percentage to the work of the church. Go ahead. Use your Bible software and spend some time looking for one. You won't find it. It isn't there. No preacher in the world can point to one. Instead, they will tell you what all preachers tell their congregations when they want them to believe something that they can't actually find in Scripture: that there is a "principle" found in Scripture to that effect. And that isn't true, either, not on close examination. Not that these people are lying. I don't think that at all. They are just parroting what they've heard all their own lives.

The reality is that there is plenty of Biblical admonition for the Christian to give joyfully and generously, but there is no guidance as to specific amounts or percentages--and the further reality is that on average, if memory serves, most families give about three percent. You might argue that they should give more, and they would probably agree. But this is the situation that you, and they, are facing: they have so arranged their finances that they can't, not without leaving some bill or debt unpaid. Does it reflect poor financial practice? You bet it does--and I'm as guilty as anyone, trying to claw my way out of all my non-mortgage debt over the next two or three years. Perhaps it would help--over a period of years--for the church to teach sound personal financial management, but that is hardly a short-term solution.

It doesn't help to tell families in this situation to "step out on faith." Telling them to have faith that God will bless them--somehow, usually, the impression is left that the blessing will somehow be financial--for their obedience to a command that any idiot can see doesn't actually exist insults the intelligence of a ten-year-old.

At any rate, we have this situation: we have churches that were built and staffed back when the population was growing and personal income was high, that now do not draw percentages of neighborhood residents similar to what they once did, and even if they did, most of those residents are either retirees on relatively small and fixed incomes, or they are younger families who moved into the neighborhood specifically because the older homes there were cheaper--in other words, nobody in the neighborhood has big bucks, many, if not most of them, are hard-pressed financially, and yet we keep trying to operate those churches and to evangelize on the very mistaken assumption that all good Christians will give ten percent of their income to the church, when any idiot reading the Scriptures can see that such a command just isn't there, and ten percent of the "not much" in those neighborhoods might not be as much as our ministerial models would like to think anyway!

That's why I asked, back at the beginning, how much of a staff a congregation that averages two hundred in attendance (at best) can realistically support. When we were running five or six hundred, perhaps it made sense to have a full-time preacher, a full-time music minister, a full-time Sunday School minister, two secretaries, and a maintenance guy (and maybe more). But now? What's the point in suggesting to a financially limited and much smaller congregation that they aren't doing what they are supposed to do, when they can't possibly support a staff like that? Doesn't it make sense the staff be cut back to a level commensurate with the congregation's size instead? Doesn't it make sense to operate on the assumption that what members you do have will give what people on average actually give? Why continually operate as though the fact that a congregation of two hundred cannot do ministry on the same level as a congregation of six hundred means that the smaller congregation is somehow failing to do something the larger congregation did? That isn't the way it is, or was. The larger, richer congregation was the result of a unique confluence of demographics and economics, and may not ever be duplicated.

We can either change our assumptions and expectations, or we can teach people--perhaps, ironically, by immersion--how to clearly articulate the Gospel to strangers, and teach people how to manage their money, and how to give biblically--it's often called "grace giving," if you want to know. But that will take time--and a willingness to admit that despite having ostensibly been completed devoted to evangelism for decades, the reality is that we really only manage to successfully pass the Gospel on to our children, and some people don't even do that.

Dreadfully Disappointed

I'm dreadfully disappointed to find that Dr. James White has not seen fit to identify me as "The Smartest Southern Baptist Alive."

I guess I'll just have to settle for being the best-looking.

Or perhaps not.

A Big Part of the Problem

The remarkable Wade Burleson notes:

There comes a time when Southern Baptists need to realize that some growing, conservative, evangelical churches such as Sojourn are refusing to support the Southern Baptist Convention because of our silly extra-biblical traditions...

There's more to the post, of course, but that line stuck out. There is so much truth to it.

I once told a co-worker that when it came to clear-cut "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots," there just weren't all that many commands to the Christian in Scripture. There really aren't. Try reading through it and making a list sometime. But aggravatingly, the Southern Baptist Convention (along with many other churches and associations, it must be added) and its member churches all too often insist on creating more rules, or treating issues wherein they can make a good, but not ironclad, case for their interpretation as issues wherein disagreement justifies denying funding or cooperation that would otherwise be given. I don't believe that this is done out of meanness or spite. People honestly think that their ideas are correct. It's just that they--frankly, and shockingly, for a people that supposedly embraces no creed but the Bible--take it for granted that if the pastor, or Lifeway, or a visiting evangelist says it, well, they must know what they're talking about.

That's not really what being a Baptist is all about, you know. It's a whole lot more like Romanism. And please believe me, it's just not true anyway. Just as an example, you would not believe the number of people who manage to escape Southern Baptist seminaries without having actually read Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion or Luther's The Bondage of the Will, yet who will willingly preach (as I heard one evangelist do) that Calvinism is a "doctrine of the devil."

I found out a long time ago that a surprising amount of seminary time is devoted to things that, in my opinion, amount to "church management." Not as much theology as you would think. So why take it for granted that when people start preaching on doctrine and theology, they know more than you do? Make them prove it. That's not out of malice, it's just simple common sense.

I've often told the story of the man--highly placed in the BGCO at the time--who visited our church, and during the sermon, insisted that men should wear a coat and tie to Sunday services. His scriptural proof? None was offered. He made his case on the grounds that we would, after all, dress our best for a meeting with the boss, wouldn't we? And if so, how could we get away with not dressing our best to meet with God? I've run across others that hold the same position on much the same grounds.

I've often wanted to point out to those people that I know perfectly well that on most mornings, they meet with God whilst dressed in their underwear and drinking coffee, and they call it their "quiet time." But I'm sure that such a comment would be taken as evidence that I had a bad attitude.

I could produce more telling examples of attitudes held to be doctrines in many SBC (and other) churches. I chose that relatively innocuous one only because it I'm not in the mood to start a fight this morning. My point is that for many years now, many, many people in the SBC have been teaching as doctrines things for which they cannot actually produce a command from Scripture. If pressed to produce one, they will tell you that they've found "a principle" in Scripture, or they will--again, shockingly in my opinion, for a body that claims no creed but the Bible--appeal to church history. And I think that as long as this approach continues, you're going to find that people vote with their feet.

This isn't the only part of the Southern Baptist Convention's problem. But it's a big part.

A Favorite Schaeffer Passage

Because of a conversation that's come up at Oklahoma Lefty, it struck me that this might be a good time to quote one of my favorite passages from Francis Schaeffer's The God Who is There:

One day I was talking to a group of people in the room of a young South African in Cambridge University. Among others, there was present a young Indian who was of Sikh background but a Hindu by religion. He started to speak strongly against Christianity, but did not really understand the problems of his own beliefs. So I said, "Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no instrinsic difference between them?" He agreed. The people who listened and knew him as a delightful person, an "English gentleman" of the very best kind, looked up in amazement. But the student in whose room we met, who had clearly understood the implications of what the Sikh had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea, and stood with it steaming over the Indian's head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing, and he said with a cold yet gentle finality, "There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty." Thereupon the Hindu walked out into the night.

Do you understand what happened there? It is often said that all the world's religions are basically the same, and in some senses, this is true, or at least partially true. Pretty much everyone teaches that there are things you shouldn't do and things you should do. But it's not unfair to say that the dissimilarities begin there, which is awfully early in the discussion. The reality is that the religions of the world have radically different presuppositions on which they base their thinking, and have tremendously different answers to such questions as: What is Man? Where did he come from? Does he have a purpose? If so, what is it? Is there such a thing as an objectively identifiable good? Is the material world real or illusory? Etc. Etc. Etc.

The problem people run into--and in my experience, they run into it all the time, they just don't know it, or think about it--is that they want to live in a world reflecting presuppositions that they, or their worldview, actually deny. Atheists are often a terrific example of this, Richard Dawkins being one of the most notorious. He'll say that it's "wrong," morally "wrong" to teach children that there is a God, despite the fact that in an atheistic universe, children and teachers both have no moral status or purpose. They all arrived at their place in existence by sheer accident, without purpose, being, in fact, nothing more than meaningless machines that accomplish, bluntly, nothing more than eating and defecating and talking, all the while holding the same moral status as a rock, a tree, a dodo, a tiger, or any other accidentally-arrived-at eating-and-defecating mechanism. In such a universe, "morality" is nothing more than a survival mechanism.

In my experience, such people have a very plastic morality. When they wish to deny Judeo-Christian mores, they will deny that there is any basis for morality, following much the same line of thought as I have given. One blogger quotes Dawkins as saying, in his River Out of Eden:

...nature is not cruel, only pitiously indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose...

But when they wish to shape human behavior, they will--somehow!--find a way to label behavior and opinions they don't like as immoral--in Dawkins' case, "immoral" being more or less equivalent to being detrimental to the survival of the species. But to the question of why the species should survive, Dawkins can give no substantive answer. His "morality" ends up being a sort of purposeless utilitarianism.

I pick on atheists because they are such easy targets as to make excellent examples, but the same line of thinking can be found elsewhere. For example, I recall--will recall forever--a video clip I saw several years ago, which was shown to the people in our church as the Southern Baptist Convention was starting a period of outreach to Hindus. The clip showed a Hindu man engaged in various acts of worship, but what stuck out to me was the man's resolute insistence that it was "wrong," "very bad," a "very bad thing" for someone to say that someone else was a "sinner."

"Well," I thought, "Exactly what do you call someone who has done a 'very bad thing'?" The man wanted to live in a universe wherein there was no such thing as a sinner, but couldn't even articulate the thought without contradicting himself at a very basic level. And this sort of thing goes on all the time.

Schaeffer said elsewhere in his works that when it comes to the really big questions, there are really very few possible answers. Those answers are not the same from religion to religion; it is only wishful thinking on some peoples' part that makes it seem so.

Why I Choose to Remain a Southern Baptist

I have heard some of the oddest things while I've been a Southern Baptist. Most of them revolve around little cultural accretions that cling like barnacles to the actual contents of Scripture. More than a few times I've been absolutely gobsmacked by someone's insistence on something that is not merely a non-essential, but is flatly not to be found within the pages of Scripture. When challenged on such things, Southern Baptists (especially preachers) will claim to have found "a principle" in scripture, or they will appeal to "Baptist history," or "the majority of Southern Baptists." It's weird. We sometimes seem to hold one another more accountable for things that are not actually sins than we do for real sins. There are times that looking at how much time we invest in trivialities that are simply unaddressed in Scripture, I have almost felt the desire for heavy persecution to come along, just to help us focus. I have felt not unlike Frodo, when he said in The Lord of the Rings:

I should like to save the Shire, if I could--though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt than an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

We have a preferred eschatology (which I lean toward, by the way), the questioning of which often seems to elicit much the same reaction as would questioning the reality of Christ's resurrection.

I have heard people preach--or at least write--on the necessity of wearing a coat and tie to services, on the grounds that you'd dress your best to meet the boss, wouldn't you? Never a scrap of Scriptural support for this idea, mind you, but that doesn't stop people from teaching it.

Another oddball thing I've heard is the stunningly absurd, yet fairly typical, Southern Baptist position that drinking per se--that is, having a drink but not getting drunk--is not a sin, but God forbid anyone should actually have a drink! You can see this attitude displayed in fine form in the comments thread here. The same thing goes for smoking. Oddly, no one in the Southern Baptist Convention talks about gluttony and obesity, though. Or maybe it's not so odd. Too many grossly fat preachers.

One of the most common oddball things you'll hear in the Southern Baptist Convention is that God requires Christians to tithe. I say that it's oddball because you will search the Bible from cover to cover without finding one command for Christians to tithe. Oh, you'll find plenty of commands for them to give generously and joyously, but never a command for any specific amount. This is one of those areas, though, where preachers will tell you they've found an applicable "principle" in Scripture. Not a command, but a principle. Kind of like the way the Supreme Court found a "right to privacy" in the "emanations and penumbras" of the Constitution.

I've heard that no Christian should read the Harry Potter books. I can understand that one, to a degree. I had heard--can't recall where--that those books stimulated an interest in real witchcraft. However, I have the advantage of actually having known witches as personal friends and doing at least a little research into their beliefs (an excellent book on the subject, written from an educated Christian point of view, is Craig S. Hawkins' Witchcraft: Exploring the World of Wicca), and when we started actually looking into the Harry Potter books instead of just taking someone else's word for it, I was quick to see that the "witchcraft" in the Potter books bears no resemblance whatever to the real thing. What's amazing to me is not just that so few others in the Southern Baptist Convention--at least that I know--have done the small amount of personal investigation necessary to find this out, but that so many of them have the audacity to compare reading the things with, say, adultery.

I'm not kidding about that. Someone in our household once actually heard a conversation along these lines:

"How do you know the Potter books are bad, if you've never read one of them?"

"Oh, do I need to experience adultery in order to know it's bad?"

Well, of course you don't, for at least one simple reason: there is actually Biblical instruction on the subject of adultery.

Then there's our oddball insistence on teaching the children's Sunday School lessons to our adults (we just use bigger words). This has been so bad for so long that we now have adults that react to being asked anything but multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions as though they've been whacked with a red-hot poker. We do this on the grounds--as far as I've been told, anyway--that we want to avoid having the classes so "advanced" that a new person would feel uncomfortable in them.

Got news for y'all: We hardly ever have any new people in our classes. That's the least of our problems, okay? And trust me on this, it's not because our Sunday School material is too complex for them, either.

I've noticed that a lot of Southern Baptists don't react so well to being told that, either.

Then there are the oddball things that we do, like maintaining programs and entities long after they have ceased to achieve the things they were intended to achieve or to have any relevance to any situation currently existing.

There are other things, things that are so "hot" that I can't talk about them without possibly getting other people into trouble.

So why, I was asked recently, if I disagree with so many common Southern Baptist positions and programs, do I continue to remain a Southern Baptist? Wouldn't it be more honest to go somewhere else?

My answer is no, and this is why I choose to remain a Southern Baptist:

1) In the main, Southern Baptists continue to get the gospel right. Though I am sure that most Southern Baptists would not know the differences between a five-pointer, a four-pointer, and an Arminian if they collectively bled to death on their church steps, I have ample reason to believe that most Southern Baptists believe that salvation is to be found by faith alone in Christ alone, by grace alone, and they would never dream of thinking that man, in any way, can claim even the teensiest bit of credit for it.

2) Southern Baptists generally maintain a high view of Scripture, generally holding to inerrancy and infallibility.

3) Southern Baptists fund the mightiest missionary force on the globe.

4) Southern Baptists know how, when, and why to baptize.

5) There ain't no cookin' like Southern Baptist cookin'.

6) The oddball positions alluded to above generally have the proverbial snowball's chance of actually making it into the closest thing we have to an official, Convention-wide doctrinal statement, the Baptist Faith and Message. Southern Baptists are so independent-minded that the odds of enough of them agreeing on any one point to successfully hold someone accountable for any one of those oddball positions are slim indeed.

7) You will generally find the same sorts of problems in other denominations, so why bother to jump from the frying pan into the fire?

8) Calvinism is on the rise in the Southern Baptist Convention. The Conservative Resurgence has borne unexpected fruit in this regard. As more and more Southern Baptists have gone to seminary and been told to pay attention to Scripture as the authoritative rule for faith and practice, they have not unnaturally concluded that God is sovereign in salvation and that He not only knows the future, He has determined the future. The day may be coming when the Southern Baptist Convention will once again be a solidly Calvinist body.

9) Most Southern Baptists are Red-Staters. Not that they're all Southerners, but they mostly ain't Yankees. I don't really have to explain this one, do I?

10) My Southern Baptist woman!

No, I may read Presbyterians, Lutherans, and even a few Anglicans, but I ain't a-goin' nowhere. The Southern Baptist Convention is stuck with me.

Book Review: By His Grace and For His Glory

Sometimes it seems that Calvinism, and Calvinists, are in such disrepute in the Southern Baptist Convention--some might say in the larger Evangelical world--that one might reasonably conclude that Calvinism was some sort of New Age cult being surreptitiously foisted off on Southern Baptists by evil men of the worst sort. From the time I was brought to Christ under the preaching of a man who said--at considerable volume--that five-point Calvinism was a "doctrine of the devil" until recently, when a Southern Baptist seminary president tried to prune all the Calvinist professors from his faculty, it has been made abundantly clear that much of the Convention views Calvinism with the same sort of disdain with which one might regard an unsightly pimple on a hog's rear.

Indeed, Calvinism is in such disrepute in some quarters of the Convention that one might wholly despair of finding any Baptist church teaching it in any given city or town. It would not, for example, be a surprise to me to find that if a small town had only two or three Baptist churches, they were all opposed to Calvinism. Of course, it is also true that it would not surprise me to find that most of the members of such hypothetical churches had never heard of Calvinism or the TULIP acronym in the first place.

Has it always been this way? Have Baptists always--speaking generally--rejected the doctrines of grace? In By His Grace and for His Glory: A Historical, Theological, and Practical Study of the Doctrines of Grace in Baptist Life, Dr. Thomas J. Nettles sets out to prove his thesis

...that Calvinism, popularly called the Doctrines of Grace, prevailed in the most influential and enduring arenas of Baptist denominational life until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century.

It is a substantial work--somewhat over four hundred pages. The introduction alone runs on for forty pages. Nor is it easy going. By that, I do not mean that it is incomprehensible or understandable only by theological professionals. I mean only that it is not a book you can skim. Your full attention is required, but if you are willing to give it, you will find yourself thoroughly rewarded.

"Landmark" Baptist historians will take issue with some of Dr. Nettles' history, for he dates Baptist history as beginning with Smyth and Helwys in the early seventeenth century, as do most historians--and as do I. I promise, I will get around to dealing with The Trail of Blood stuff eventually, but for now, whether you agree with Nettles' starting point or not, you can at least evaluate his argument as it dates back to the seventeenth century, certainly preceding the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Smyth and Helwys were not themselves Calvinists, but by 1644, Calvinistic--or Particular--Baptists were numerous enough to produce the First London Confession. It is a solidly Calvinist document, stating specifically in one part, emphasis mine,

...and touching his creature man God had in Christ before the foundation of the world according to the good pleasure of his will foreordained some men to eternal life through Jesus Christ to the praise and glory of his grace leaving the rest in their sin to their just condemnation to the praise of his justice.

And in another part,

...faith is ordinarily begot by the preaching of the gospel or word of Christ without respect to any power or capacity in the creature but it is wholly passive being dead in sins and trespasses, doth believe, and is converted by no less power, than that which raised Christ from the dead.

Amid much other solidly Calvinistic thought.

Some few years later, Baptists produced the Second London Confession, which closely followed the famously Calvinistic Westminster Confession of Faith, at least in matters touching on predestination and salvation. From there, Nettles
traces Calvinism in Baptist life through the life, teaching, and ministry of Benjamin Keach, John Bunyan, John Gill, and Andrew Fuller, all Englishmen, and all influential throughout the Baptist world of the time--including the North American continent.

I found the section on Dr. Gill particularly interesting. Gill is often accused of being a hyper-Calvinist, but Nettles defends him from the charge, and I think he is successful.

I did find it somewhat disappointing that Dr. Nettles dealt so little with C.H. Spurgeon, the "Prince of Preachers" and one of the best-known Calvinists in Baptist history. However, since Dr. Nettles' focus is principally on the Southern Baptist Convention, I suppose it is understandable that he chose not to dwell on Spurgeon.

In North America, Nettles proves that such Baptist luminaries as Isaac Backus, John Leland, Luther Rice, the famous missionary Adoniram Judson, Francis Wayland, and David Benedict all supported and taught Calvinist doctrine. Then, dealing specifically with the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, he shows that W.B. Johnson, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (hereafter "SBC") from 1845-1851 was a bold Calvinist; so was R.B.C. Howell, SBC president from 1851-1859; so also was Richard Fuller, SBC president from 1859-1863. Nettles shows--at some length--that J.L. Dagg was a staunch Calvinist, and I found out something at that point: the SBC has made use of catechisms.

In 1879...the SBC passed a resolution asking John L. Dagg to write a catechism for the instruction of children and servants. This action stands as firm testimony to the confidence Southern Baptists had in the theological position of Dagg, in that they were willing to submit the religious impressions of their children to his hands.

Why do we not, in the modern SBC, use catechisms? They are obviously not a strictly Catholic or Lutheran device, and I wonder if some of the theological ignorance rampant throughout our convention might not be remedied through their use.

Then there was P.H. Mell, a friend of Dagg's and president of the SBC some fourteen times, and also a firm Calvinist.

Moving on from there, we find that

The first seminary in Southern Baptist life rested on a Calvinistic foundation. In fact, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in the eyes of its founders, constituted a bulwark against the gradual encroachments of the Arminian fox into the Southern Baptist vineyard. The seminary's four faculty members, Boyce, Broadus, Manly, Jr., and Williams, as well as its most ardent promoter, Basil Manly, Sr., shared a common and aggressive commitment to the Doctrines of Grace.

Many other Southern Baptist notables are examined, and the slow, thorough decline of Calvinist thought in the SBC outlined and explained, and possibly linked to the treatment of the new (in the 1920s) Cooperative Program as being more important than the doctrine underlying it.

There is no doubt after reading the first section that Dr. Nettles has proved that a thoroughly Calvinistic history undergirds the SBC; the second section of the book sets out to expound the doctrines of grace, with a view to proving their worth and that the SBC ought to return to them. Unconditional Election, Depravity and Effectual Calling, Limited Atonement, Perseverance of the Saints, and the Doctrine of Assurance are all thoroughly explained and dealt with from a historic SBC perspective.

The last two chapters of the book deal with Liberty of Conscience and World Missions and Bold Evangelism--the last of particular interest because of Nettles' exploration of the weaknesses of modern, man-centered evangelistic techniques and approaches.

No doubt many of my readers will find their eyes glazing over at the very thought of pursuing what they consider to be theological obscurities for the length of 428 pages. But for those interested in the subject, particularly those Southern Baptists with questions and concerns about their history and theological heritage, you really cannot do better than this book. I'd go so far as to say that you cannot properly understand SBC history and theology without this book. Since I originally wrote this review, Dr. Nettles has produced a revised version.