Southwestern Baptist Theological SeminaryCheck out Dana Hall McCain’s piece on Paige Patterson and the Southern Baptist Convention at Al.Com:
I care about the Southern Baptist Convention. I was brought up in an SBC church, heard the gospel and was baptized there, and have spent a significant portion of my adult life worshipping and serving in an SBC church. This body is not just an ideological football to me, to be kicked around like a any political party or secular institution.Â
But the problem is that America’s largest protestant denomination conducts itself like any political party or secular institution much of the time, and that makes it really, really hard. And heartbreaking.
These days, the main fight within the convention is between two factions: generally younger pastors and seminarians (many of whom have Calvinist theological leanings), who value diversity and racial reconciliation within the church, and who espouse a high view of women, even if they stop short of desiring to ordain women for pastoral leadership. On the other side are largely older Southern Baptists, who give major side-eye to Calvinism and see the desire to do better by minorities and women as a symptom of liberalism.
You see, the SBC is controlled by the president and a couple of key committees. In order to dictate the agenda and narrative, the ideological war horses will broker back-room deals to gain control of those positions, trading busloads of presidential votes at the annual meeting for things like trustee seats at key SBC institutions.
The swamp’s got nothing on the SBC.
Last week I published a piece at Religion Dispatches on Jimmy Carter’s visit to Liberty University. In his commencement speech at Liberty, Carter mentioned his attempts, in the years after his presidency, to bring unity to the Southern Baptist convention. Here is what I wrote:
Carter urged Liberty graduates to fight “discrimination against women and girls in the world.” He lamented the divisions over doctrine in his own denomination—the Southern Baptist Convention—and told a story about how he made efforts, in the years after he left the office, to heal divisions in the Convention. Carter’s attempts, he said, failed because Southern Baptist leaders were unwilling to compromise on the status of women in the church. (It’s hard to think about Carter’s comments on this front without reflecting on the recent controversial remarks of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary president Paige Patterson).
The conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention made the role of women an important piece of their so-called “takeover” in the late 1970s. Today it is the place of women in the church that may lead to its implosion.
Dear Dana Hall McCain,
I sympathize with you and your pain. However, the sad truth is that this is what the Southern Baptist Convention is, this is what the SBC always is going to be, and the SBC can never be anything other than this, because if the SBC tried to be anything other than this, then it would cease to be the SBC. The SBC is simply unreformable.
All I can tell you is to either embrace Catholicism or embrace Orthodoxy.
Young calvinist pro diversity vs old anti calvinist and anti diversity is a suprising division
Young and pro diversity isn’t so surprising but anyone have insight about why calvinism has become an intergenerational dispute in sbc for those of us on the outside?
In a recent Patheos blog, Roger Olson made the argument that John Piper is the most influential current American theologian, largely because of his success in communicating to and reaching a broad younger audience through conferences, social media, books, etc. That may provide one example of the success neo-Calvinists have had in reaching the younger generation. There is a whole Calvinist movement that is often described as “the young, restless and reformed.”