SBCOutpost

(Dr. Rick Davis offers another post as an “Interested Outsider.)

I am not going to rejoin yours and you are not joining mine but I could join you and you could welcome me.

Historically, we have thought of three ways to speak to conventions, state and national. In ascending order, they are mail, messengers and money.

Mail exercises the right of petition. Petition has very little effect when it comes after the act or to a leadership bent on a particular path. Effective mail campaigns, after the fact or in the face of elitist leadership, go to the masses rather than to the ruling cabal.

Bloggers are mega-mailers. Five or six hundred hits per day blossom into multiple links, ideas enter the body politic and positions are changed from the grass roots. Read the rest of this entry »

(In 1985 our family moved to Dallas to attend Seminary. We visited a number of churches. A good friend suggested I visit a church in far southwest Dallas. Not a year later, I was asked to serve on staff of this church and would do so for three years while finishing the M.Div. at SWBTS. Dr. Rick Davis served the church as pastor. He would become my mentor. Now more than 20 years we continue to mentor one another. Rick served in evangelism as the Evangelism Director for the BGCT before moving to FBC, Brownwood, TX. I have asked him to write from time to time as an “Interested Outsider.” Rick writes at Aintsobad.)

Once more, I will spare readers the clichéd assertions of my once inviolable fealty for the old SBC. I ask you to please spare me the questions of my stance on inerrancy (Chicago statement, fine), churchmanship, evangelistic fervor, et al. We are not talking about some emotional reunion where we all join hands around the campfire to sing Kumbiya. I already said I am not coming back and you rightly answered, “Who cares?”

Today I just want to give a little primer on baptist politics by poking (okay, gouging) at the practices of our preeminent politicians.
 

• Never believe what a baptist politician tells you in private. Unlike national, secular politicians who lie to you in public and deal with you honestly in private, a baptist politician will lie to you privately and tell the truth in public. Believe nothing you hear in the conference room. Believe what the baptist politician can defend in public to his clients.
• Understand there is gold in them ‘thar hills. A fellow who organizes and votes himself into a high denominational post can retire a wealthy person. Do not underestimate avarice.
• Take care when God is brought in to shore up a weak position.
• Watch how far a baptist politician runs from inerrancy when it threatens something he said long ago, uncovered by some eighteen year old on google.
• Watch how fast a baptist politician runs to inerrancy as the be-all, end-all, when his stance disagrees with another baptist politician on any issue.

Please take these insights in the cynical, disbelieving, sick of it all spirit in which they are intended. 

… of organizatinoal reconciliation between batpist Christians in America in this generation.

(In 1985 our family moved to Dallas to attend Seminary. We visited a number of churches. A good friend suggested I visit a church in far southwest Dallas. Not a year later, I was asked to serve on staff of this church and would do so for three years while finishing the M.Div. at SWBTS. Dr. Rick Davis served the church as pastor. He would become my mentor. Now more than 20 years we continue to mentor one another. Rick served in evangelism as the Evangelism Director for the BGCT before moving to FBC, Brownwood, TX. I have asked him to write from time to time as an “Interested Outsider.” Rick writes at Aintsobad.)

I was invited to a wedding. A friend’s daughter is to be married. He said to me, “You may not wish to come. They are using an SBT church for their wedding.”

SBT stands for Southern Baptists of Texas, a convention split from the old BGCT structure to maintain closer ties to the old SBC structure. A known BGCT guy like me is on thin ice when in an SBT setting. Of course, with my recent habit of questioning the BGCT leadership, I am on thinner ice with them.

Perhaps I should take up ice fishing. At least then there is the promise of some reward when one punches a hole through the surface.

Sigh. I remember when a friend’s daughter’s wedding involved finding where they were registered, buying a place setting and getting to the church on time for cake. There are so many considerations these days.

I am going to the wedding, of course. Friends are friends.

Maybe that is the hope. Friend are friends.

I will not sign your SBC 2000 BF & M in order to do business with you.

You will not cross my CBF inclinations to commune with me.

Ok. I get this.

But, when a person has a heart attack, don’t the little blood vessels immediately start to try to put out feelers to get things back together and heal the organ? Maybe the bigger, blocked vessels never operate the same again. Perhaps the organ itself has damage. Still, the little vessels can help the body function, despite the heart damage.

Reach across the aisle. Perhaps there is a hand extended to you. Maybe neither of us can see it because of the haze of battle smoke.

(In 1985 our family moved to Dallas to attend Seminary. We visited a number of churches. A good friend suggested I visit a church in far southwest Dallas. Not a year later, I was asked to serve on staff of this church and would do so for three years while finishing the M.Div. at SWBTS. Dr. Rick Davis served the church as pastor. He would become my mentor. Now more than 20 years we continue to mentor one another. Rick served in evangelism as the Evangelism Director for the BGCT before moving to FBC, Brownwood, TX. I have asked him to write from time to time as an “Interested Outsider.” Rick writes at Aintsobad.)

I have the papers sitting around here to sign up for the Episcopalian priesthood, the Methodist pastorate, the DOC ministry and one, I think, that would allow me to join a coven. I keep them the way we all used to keep typed resignation letters in our files to sign each Monday, so we could throw them away on Wednesday.

Let me spare you the clichés of the old SBC churches who nurtured and nourished me. They are gone, as gone as gone can get, quite because of some changes in them and many, many changes in me. I can cherish their memory as I do memories of my father’s big old Ford car. I would not drive one and I would not go back to the same old SBC type church of my childhood.

Let me skip over most of the usual platitudes about how the state conventions and local associations meet our needs better and more effectively than national conventions once did for us. My local association does what my state convention does for me. They hold endless, poorly attended old model meetings to appear busy, issue updated but hopelessly outdated mission statements and ask for another one per cent of my budget. Read the rest of this entry »

(In 1985 our family moved to Dallas to attend Seminary. We visited a number of churches. A good friend suggested I visit a church in far southwest Dallas. Not a year later, I was asked to serve on staff of this church and would do so for three years while finishing the M.Div. at SWBTS. Dr. Rick Davis served the church as pastor. He would become my mentor. Now more than 20 years we continue to mentor one another. Rick served in evangelism as the Evangelism Director for the BGCT before moving to FBC, Brownwood, TX. I have asked him to write from time to time as an “Interested Outsider.” Rick writes at Aintsobad.)

The most evangelistic thing we may ever do as Church is worship. If we can do it more or less together, it is no more evangelistic but is possibly more effective evangelism.

At FBC, Midlothian, TX a few years ago, I knew a small Pentecostal church near us was in a building program. They were excited (Pentecostals are always excited, even when they are sad) about moving into their new place. At the last minute, a city inspector decided they would need just a little more cement in the parking lot before they could occupy. This scrape and fill congregation was about as close to raising the additional $9,000 as I am to buying Trump Tower.

They were excited. And devastated.

I went to my (pick one) leaders, deacons, elders at First Baptist and asked them for $3, 000 for this Pentecostal group. They refused to give what I asked. Instead, they doubled the amount to $6,000 and a few private donations later, we were excited to get the whole amount.

Never let the left hand know the activity of the right, surely, but you cannot keep this kind of story quiet. Soon, everyone in town knew.

Amazingly, people began to stop us on the street to talk about one church supporting another in what the local public seemed to understand as an endless competition of “My Steeple is Taller Than Yours.”

Please understand, at the Pentecostal church, they think we are a tad, well, baptist. I do not think they mean this as a compliment. They get excited, beat drums and engage in general euphoria, inciting interpretation of tongues, encouraging women to speak (aloud, presumably) in church. They are fired up, wired up and ready to ride before we pass out all our worship folders.

How is it we can participate in evangelistic worship across the denominational divide? If Christian unity is evangelism in the active tense, how can we manage to cooperate with persons of variant polity and practice without the alteration of the system generally brought on by active observation?

I suppose we should first ask if this kind of evangelism is interesting to us. For me, the answer is in the positive.

If there is a next step to practice unified Christian worship as evangelism, I suppose a definition is needed. I do not have one, however, and you will have to settle for my groping toward it.

By unified Christian worship, I do not mean the All Faith Worship Service we have at Thanksgiving. I do not mean the monthly ministerial lunch in the basement of the local Presbyterian Church. I do not mean we all join the Roman Universal Church, itself an oxymoronic term, imperium notwithstanding.

In short, I am not talking about the ultimate blended worship service, designed like a body shop, “Beat to fit, paint to match and certain to offend all.”

I do mean, by unified Christian worship as evangelism, the unique individual experience of reconciliation. We do not need four denominations gathering in one place, trying to decide if Amen is pronounced A-Men or Ah-Men in the closing prayer.

In fact, it would be a worshipful occurrence worthy of note if one baptist Christian church (anyone, anywhere, any time) could meet in a spirit of soul salvation generated by the source of light in God the Father, refracted through the prism of God the Holy Spirit and so warming/illuminating worshippers in the embodiment of God the Son. Christ draws nigh to us in order to draw us nigh to the Father. We snuggle up to Him as though He is our sister who keeps us safe, our mistress who excites us, our wife to satisfy and correct us.

I use baptist as an adjective rather than as a noun. Spell check tells me this is incorrect, because I do not use the capital letter. Spell check must be run from Louisville or Fort Worth.

Baptist Christians just barely need God in our churches. We have our doctrine, our Bible, our organizations. Baptist Christians might seek the unique individual experience of reconciliation to make us comprehensible to the portion of the world not yet drawn close to God. Just look one pew over or barely outside the door.

I posit reconciliation as the balancing of accounts, like when your bank statement shows you have as much in your account as the bank thinks. Then, you are reconciled.

This is a unique individual experience each time. We may be reconciled in a mass meeting, a prayer meeting, a meeting by the road. Whether we come as one of thousands or one of ones, we still experience reconciliation as a unique, individual experience. Salvation, like a hug, comes breast to breast, or it is cursory.

If unified worship is better evangelism, as it declares and manifests the faith simultaneously, the barrier to reaching people outside the covenant community may simply be we do not have anything of durative quality to show them. To be sought by a love-crazed God willing to literally die to meet us is the beginning statement of reconciliatory living.