• SBC

    Amending the Baptist Faith & Message Shouldn’t Be This Easy

    In yesterday’s post about what happened at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), I mentioned that messengers voted to amend our doctrinal statement, The Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M). For me, this was perhaps the most stunning and slightly terrifying things that happened at our annual meeting. What do I mean by that? I agree with the changes theologically but I don’t agree with what we did procedurally. All it takes is a motion and a simple majority vote to amend the BF&M. There is no way that it should be that easy to change our entire denomination’s doctrinal basis. Our SBC seminaries and mission boards already must subscribe to the…

  • SBC

    The SBC in the Big Easy: What Happened?

    The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is now in the books, and this one was pretty epic. The reason we exist as a denomination is to partner together for the purposes of the Great Commission. Which is just another way of saying that we believe that like-minded believers can reach more people for the gospel and train more ministers for the work if we pool our resources together. That is what we have been doing for over a century and a half, and that is what we are doing now. That’s why the sending ceremony for our missionaries encapsulates for everyone every year why we do what…

  • SBC

    Evaluating a New Proposal for Restructuring SBC Cooperation

    Yesterday, Colin Smothers and I released a podcast previewing some of the items that will be coming before the SBC next week. Because it is the CBMW podcast, we focused entirely on issues related to gender and sexuality, and we spent the bulk of our time talking about Saddleback, Rick Warren, and female pastors. We spoke a little bit about the various proposals for structural change that have been circulating, and I reiterated my support for the Law amendment. But by far, I do believe that the most important matter before messengers on the question of female pastors is how the convention deals with Saddleback. It’s very important that the…

  • Theology/Bible

    A Critical Review of Matt Walsh’s Documentary

    Matt Walsh’s watershed documentary What Is a Woman? made its debut over a year ago, but he recently made it available for people to view for free on Twitter. It was supposed to be available only for 24 hours, but as I type this it is still available and has a staggering 161 million views. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend that you watch it. It really is a cultural watershed, as I tried to explain in my review a year ago: Matt Walsh has done the planet a great service by producing this film. It is a case study of what happens when fantasy meets hard…

  • SBC

    Warren at War with the BF&M

    Liberalism and pragmatism aren’t the same thing, but they often lead to the same destination. Liberalism guts the authority of Scripture by assaulting the Bible’s integrity. Pragmatism guts the authority of scripture by pitting “what works” against “what’s true.” The latter approach is on full display in a recent mass email that Rick Warren has sent to as many Southern Baptist pastors as he could find. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. There are a number of howlers in this thing, but the gist of Warren’s message is that Southern Baptists have to make a choice between following a confession or doing the Great Commission.…

  • SBC

    A Resolution on Opposing Gender Transitions

    One of the most astonishing developments of late modernity has been the mainstreaming of transgenderism. In retrospect, the path to our current moment is clear enough (see Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing grown men in earnest behaving like a cartoonish caricature of an adolescent girl. And yet examples of this kind of thing are proliferating, and anyone refusing to go along with this risks all manner of social and perhaps even professional ostracism and recriminations. It is like Americans have gotten a really bad fever with no indication in sight that the fever will ever break.…

  • SBC

    Responding to the Baptist21 Proposal

    Southern Baptists have been having an intramural debate about how to ensure that our complementarian convictions remain a firm part of our cooperative effort together. Thankfully, there seems to be broad agreement with what the Baptist Faith & Message (BF&M) says. We can’t be certain until the annual meeting next month, but I’m reasonably confident that we have broad agreement about what to do with Saddleback. Nevertheless, there is still some disagreement about other measures that we might take to make sure our complementarian commitments are clear. Pastor Mike Law has proposed an amendment to the SBC Constitution that would add some clarity, and I have already endorsed that proposal…

  • Christianity,  Sermon,  Theology/Bible

    Preaching the Trinity from John’s Gospel

    I have recently begun preaching through the Gospel of John at our church. The first three messages have been on John’s prologue. (Sorry, Peter Williams, but I still think John 1:1-18 is a prologue!) As many of you already know, John’s prologue is thick with the grist of Nicene Trinitarianism and Chalcedonian Christology. I do not claim that these messages are the best there has ever been on these verses. Far from it. But I do want to acknowledge that I couldn’t have preached these messages seven years ago. For all the unpleasantness of the so-called “Trinity Debate” of 2016, the Lord has used it for good in my life.…

  • Complementarianism,  SBC,  Theology/Bible

    A Word about Spurgeon and Female Pastors

    Earlier this week, it was announced that Rick Warren had been installed as the honorary Chancellor of Spurgeon’s College in London. After his installation, Warren took the opportunity to double-down on his support for female pastors and to claim that “my views on ordination are identical to Spurgeon’s.” I am no expert on Spurgeon, but I am reasonably certain that Warren’s views on ordination are not identical to Spurgeon’s—at least insofar as it relates to the ordination of female pastors. In his book Lectures to My Students, Spurgeon devotes an entire chapter to “The Call to the Ministry.”* In that chapter, I can see at least three differences between Spurgeon’s…