Weekend Extra: Something Else

by Frank Turk

Dear Southern Baptist Convention,

Back in 1994, I was baptized as a new believer in a small church in Upstate New York after coming to Christ three years earlier, and since that time I have been a willing, faithful and eager SBC congregant even in the wilds of northern WI, Western PA, and the back woods of Northwest AR. I count these years as precious to me spiritually and I count these congregations as my spiritual family and friends. When I left my last SBC church, it was with deep regret, but after searching for work for almost 2 years to replace my previous job, I had to move my family to fill my role as provider. I am sure many adult men can relate to this directly, and I list it here not for pity but to simply spell out the background of this note.

In the SBC, there are over 42,000 churches – and we were relocating inside Arkansas, so I believed that the odds of us finding an SBC church into which we could transfer our membership was at least very good. However, after two years of looking, two weeks ago my wife and I took the plunge and joined the Bible Church of Little Rock, a church which is doctrinally baptistic but technically independent and non-denominational. Because this is a fairly-significant change for us, I wanted to tell you about it and see if it can’t offer you some insight into what happened here and whether or not you should care.

To that latter point, you should not care that some random blogger who rides the coat-tails of his brilliant and famous friends left a small SBC church in a small town for a larger non-denom church in a larger town because he changed jobs. I am sure the local church will miss my giving, but the SBC will survive without my paltry mite. The reason you should care, I think, is that my wife and I are predisposed to want to join an SBC church, and have joined several in the past that were in need of hands and feet because we believe that the local church is God’s plan for the world, and that the SBC has, historically, been a place where that work happens best. God’s word is preached. Discipleship is made. Community is built. God’s glory is displayed – even if sometimes it is a glory from a run-down building or a worn-out hymn book. It has always seemed to me that when we are decreased, He is increased in right-minded John-the-Baptist fashion. That we could not find a church in Little Rock which we felt free to join is bothersome to us, and perhaps it should be bothersome to you as well.

That said, in our move we began our search geographically, and with the SBC churches which seemed at least to have the lights on. We visited churches of a variety of sizes, building types, and congregation demographics. For the sake of this letter, I’m not going to name names, but I am going to list some issues which I think are broadly useful in understanding our decision in membership.

Leadership

My wife would probably not list this as a category at all as it may turn out that this is really about something other than actual leadership, but the truth is that the local churches in the SBC have a gigantic vacuum in leadership. I am sure that you will read this and perhaps brush it off as a hollow criticism because almost all the churches we visited had a sitting senior pastor. However, of the 20-ish churches we did visit over 2 years, most of them had pastors who were there 5 years or less, and two had pastors actually leave for another church (not to plant another church, mind you: to go to a bigger church) during our search period.

Mobility is not necessarily the best measure of whether a church is being lead spiritually though, right? Paul was mobile and we aren’t casting stones at his spiritual leadership. What I saw in these churches is simply put: the goal was to run a tidy community center where there was lots of middle-class activity. Some of them had bookstores. Some of them had nicer sports facilities than the local municipality or high school. Some of them sponsored private schools. Some of them were much simpler than that, but their objective was not to be that simple in the future.

These places are run by nice men – extremely nice and polite and socially-graceful men who in many cases are also very bright and forward-looking. If you were measuring them by any business process gage of organizational strategy, I’d call most of them intermediate practitioners of the art of management. They are for the most part competent handlers of the small-sized businesses which they are all running.

But that’s the actual problem, isn’t it? The local church is not a business. It is not an alternative to the boys club/girls club. It’s not a competitor with the local Chamber of Commerce in the sense that the CoC is promoting business opportunities for social networking. The concerns of most (not all – I admit that a minority are not caught in this trap, but we’ll get to that in a second) of these fellows circle around making sure the church stays as big as possible and as centrally-managed as possible, and that there is a measurable financial outcome for the effort which is engaged.

It seems to me that most of these men do not know most of their congregants, and this is OK with them. As long as most people show up on Sunday, and their kids go home unharmed (note: not necessarily better, but unscathed), and no one leaves wondering if their time has been wasted or if they need to do something different next week, all is well.

I wonder if that’s what the SBC really stands for, given that this is what the churches in the SBC are doing right smack in the heart of SBC home territory.

Ministry

Maybe my concern about “Leadership” is really a concern about what constitutes “ministry”. For example, when I coached soccer for my son’s teams, I coached in the town leagues which are not run by any church rather than the local “UPWARD” league – because that’s where the lost kids are. The lost kids have parents who are concerned that they are not “good people”, and that in the church league their kids are going to have to worry about having hand-me-down cleats and shin-guards because the “better” families can pay to play in those league. So when I wind up with a team full of kids from broken or mixed homes, my opportunity for ministry is greater than the opportunity for ministry in a league where there’s a devotional every week. See: one of these options is a good system, and the other is looking for the people that good systems wash out.

So my concern here is that the paradigm for “ministry” that’s going on in SBC churches is that we are looking for good, MBA-approved systems which are easy to administrate once you have the volunteers, and that this version of “ministry” misses the fact that the church is not for the nice people who work well in good systems, but it is in fact for people who need Christ and his church, rather than a good system which will send them to the bottom of the list because they are needy, weak, tired, underfunded, and generally not socially-mobile.

And in that, it’s also a little alarming that what this leads to is what I witnessed in several churches as day-care masquerading as child ministry. It’s something to witness that once a church gets a system it can use to administrate a program, it generally dumbs down that program to the place where what is being “taught” there (and I use that word generously) is that Jesus is a kind of cartoon character or Muppet – or worse, he’s just a logo on the brand of entertainment we have selected.

Y’all: we’re the ones who fought the battle of inerrancy, and we won. If we have an inerrant Bible which contains the very word of God, and the very person of God died in accordance with that Scripture, maybe we should have “ministry” which is somehow delivering that real-world real-person message rather than a canned message. Somehow our ministries have to be more serious about real people – and maybe they aren’t suitable for mass production, scalability, and reproducibility.

Gravitas

That leads into my next concern, which I have labeled “Gravitas”, but by that I mean that somehow the local SBC churches cannot muster enough credibility and seriousness on any subject to be taken seriously – let alone prophetically (in the sense not that we have new revelation, but that we have the once for all time faith which God has given which we can declare with confidence). At best, we’re quibblers with an intellectual hobby we’re sort of private about – unless, of course, we are denouncing Calvinism and Homosexuals. We are on-record about that, thank God. But there aren’t any SBC pastors locally who are men of serious intention and thoughtfulness who can say something publicly without being broadly ignored – as if they were merely extremist bloggers or twitterers.

And that’s not merely a statement about influence in the community at large – that’s a statement about how what gets preached in the pulpit and what gets taught in the classrooms is received by people who have frankly turned out to hear it. Think about this: I visited churches in the last two years who had adult Sunday school lessons on what we can learn from Gilligan’s Island. I visited churches in which it was more important to talk about how we feel about our marriages than about why marriage is a specifically-Christian institution founded on the work of Christ. I visited churches in which the Bible was not opened from the pulpit on some (not all) Sundays.

Those are simply and obviously pleas for attention – pleas made in order to get a place on the stage of people’s attention rather than assuming, as Paul and Peter did, that their message was more important than whether or not they were popular or well-respected.

This is no small matter. My opinion is that we have an army of men who have adopted a professional ethic in order to present a pleasing product to a world which has fleeting appetites, and that has made us, like those who are famous only for being famous, eager to change our message and literally say anything in order to keep other people’s attention.

We have traded credibility, seriousness, and the ability to actually speak the truth (let alone the truth in love) for the ability to maintain a slot in people’s DVR.

Community

Which also brings up another important issue: because our view of leadership is a business-based model, and our view of ministry is both pragmatic and simplistic, and we have traded seriousness and sincere forthrightness for anything else that will hold people’s attention, we have no communities. Isn’t it ironic that we have medium- and large-sized social institutions which we can run with competent ability, but all that competence and professionalism really has put us in a place where the people involved don’t even really know each other?



Here’s what I mean by that: we visited more than a dozen local SBC adult Sunday school classes over the last two years. And while I think the content had a lot of variation and inconsistency, only one of those groups ever visited us or called us back to make sure we came at least a second time. One? Really? And here’s the thing: it was the one guy running a Sunday school class in an SBC church who was a Calvinist, surprised to find another Calvinist coming to an SBC church! How does that happen?

In a community, new people are recognized, and if the community is growing or seeking to grow, they are welcomed. Someone takes time to invest in those new people and make sure they know they can belong. And they don’t do it because that’s what the handbook from Lifeway says they should do it: they do it because it’s an urgent part of the culture to welcome the stranger and plug them into the community.

Back when I was a Sunday school teacher in an SBC church, a new person in class was usually a little overwhelmed by the real open hand we offered to them to join us – come to lunch, come to supper tonight, come to our prayer group, come visit. We did this because we loved people – not our church institution or our business process. We acted like we were friends to other people because we knew that God was our friend, our provider, and our savior.

Theology

Which of course leads to my next point: the lack of theology in SBC churches is alarming. And by “theology” I do not mean the number of copies of the BFM which are available to take away. There are plenty of those. I mean the reality of what happens when people actually are taught the Gospel, take it away as true, and then live as if it’s true the same way the performance of the Razorbacks in the SEC is true and an actionable item in life.

You know: I get it that “Calvinists” are sort of skinny little fellas with gigantic heads who often lecture the unsuspecting about points of minute doctrine. I realize that there are plenty on that team who earn that reputation honestly. But here’s the thing: if the SBC response against this is what we have today in the churches I visited, we could use some Calvinism for one reason only: to find out whether or not we have ever heard of the Good News of Jesus Christ, and whether or not we really believe it or if we just use it as a slogan to collect $11 billion in funds for various local civic organizations which we call “churches” for tax and political convenience-sake.

The reason we have lame communities is that we have personal convictions which do not include Jesus except as an ornament. The reason we have no gravitas is that Jesus is not the reason we preach: getting market share is the reason we preach. The reason we have the kind of ministry we have is that Jesus is not the reason for ministry: social order and repeatability is the reason. The reason we have the kind of leadership we have is not that Jesus was this kind of leader, or any kind of leader: it is because leadership has been lopped off from Jesus who is both Lord and Christ.

And let’s make it as clear as possible: these are all expressions of theology – the problem for these churches is that they are expressions of wrong theology. By “wrong” I do not mean “not Calvinist”: it would have been informative and edifying to find a non-Calvinist theology in a church which was being lived out and preached – and to be honest, I found it in at least one Arminian-oriented Missionary Baptist church in our search. I mean “not about Jesus.”

Jesus Christ

That’s the final rub, dear SBC: after I put all the issues on the table, and worked hard to be faithful to the discipleship and love given to me by the faithful and godly SBC churches and pastors I have been in fellowship with since 1994, there was a very sad lack of Jesus in the SBC churches I attended.

That’s an outrageous statement, I am sure, but let me flesh that out for you.

Jesus is God, but he didn't try to remain equal with God. Instead he gave up everything and became a slave, when he became like one of us. Jesus was humble the way only God can be humble. He obeyed God and even died on a cross. And when we say this, we should say this, when we tell people this, they should get it. Jesus is not just some icon of spiritual truth; his story is not just a story about truth: he's the one guy who understands our weaknesses because he has suffered through them, and then he died for them.

There’s nothing specifically-“Calvinist” about that, is there? That’s Colossians and Hebrews. Yet this message is almost unfound among the SBC churches I visited, and it’s certainly not applied in any meaningful way. Instead what we find are youth buildings that are more like 1980’s arcades or gaudy public gymnasiums than places in which call people to repentance and new life; we find Sunday school classes that talk about local politics and last week’s TV schedule more robustly than they do about the cost of discipleship; we find pastors who want to be separated from the complexity of living with real people like a shepherd and would rather live above them or apart from them like a CEO.

So I have chosen something else for my family, and for myself. That is: I have chosen a church which, in spite of its weaknesses and its limits, is seeking to preach Christ and live as if His death and resurrection are true. It has some people in it which may never be my friends, and the elders there do some things I will never agree with. It has disgruntled ex-members. It has its own challenges. But Christ is there, and in Him I can be reconciled to all manner of people because sin-sick, sad, weak and washed-out Me has been reconciled to God – as have all the other sinners.

It’s possible I’m wrong about you and our kin here in Little Rock, but I leave it to you to think about. I think it’s really the issue with Baptist identity we face – and I say “we” because I think you are still my brothers and sisters in Christ. I send you this letter in love and hope for your future.

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