Texas Baptist Forum_72604

Posted: 7/23/04

TEXAS BAPTIST FORUM:
Editor should join 'outfit'

I received my July 12 Baptist Standard the other day, and it seems the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has taken over our editor and the Baptist Standard.

I would suggest that you resign and join that outfit. Don't drag Texas Baptists down with you.

The Bible says that in the latter days, there will be a falling away of the elite. I see it happening.

I hope Texas Baptists will open their eyes before it is too late.

Gerald Callon

Tyler

SBC leaders won battle, lost war

Some statements made by some of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention at this year's annual meeting were both revealing and surprising.

Surprising when Morris Chapman, president of the SBC Executive Committee stated: “We cannot let the convention be driven by politics. Politics for the sake of control by a few is not how our forefathers envisioned the operations of our convention.” His words have a hollow ring, since he was one of those who exercised the politics that moved the fundamentalist takeover and control of the convention.

Jimmy Draper, president of the SBC's LifeWay Christian Resources, stated the steady drop in numbers of baptisms within the convention “reflects a denomination that has lost its focus.” I submit that it is not the result of a loss of focus but rather 25 years of misguided focus.

The focus has been power and control and extraneous issues like denouncing public schools to the detriment of building the kingdom and taking the gospel to a lost world.

For too long, the convention has made itself very clear on what and whom it dislikes. It is well past the time to start telling the world about a loving and compassionate God.

The fundamentalists stand in full control of the convention but have no standing with the very ones who need to know of a loving God and a living Savior.

They may have won their battle, but they are losing the war.

Does anyone remember Bold Mission Thrust?

Forrest Dickerson

Carlsbad, N.M

Is NAE 'conservative'?

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson claims the Baptist World Alliance is not a “conservative, evangelical” fellowship in part because it tolerates member bodies that support women as pastors (July 12).

I do not know whether SWBTS is affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals, but surely even Patterson would not deny that it is a group of conservative, evangelical denominations, churches and institutions. The NAE includes the Conservative Baptist Association, the Church of the Nazarene, the Presbyterian Church of America (a very conservative, confessional Presbyterian body) and about 48 more conservative, evangelical denominations.

Some of them ordain women to ministry and have women pastors. These include the Free Methodist Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church, the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Anderson, Ind.) and many more.

To make women pastors a litmus test of being conservative and evangelical is simply to ignore the plain facts of the American evangelical scene. Many very conservative and strongly evangelical churches and bodies do have women pastors and have had women pastors for decades.

The Free Methodist Church first ordained women as pastors in the 19th century; numerous Holiness groups such as the Church of the Nazarene have historically harbored women pastors.

If the Standard's report of what Patterson said in this matter is accurate, then Patterson should not consider the National Association of Evangelicals a “conservative, evangelical” fellowship. That would be a striking irony.

Roger E. Olson

Waco

Obey God on marriage

Marriage is the union of one man and one woman as established by God in the beginning.

God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their homosexual practice. If same-sex marriages are legalized in America, will God apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, or will he also destroy America?

We are told, “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). We better obey God.

Elsie Graham

Responsibility of faith

Joel Gregory's exhortation for Baptists to exercise their freedom (July 12) was prophetic to the continuation of faithful Baptist standards.

These past 25 years of fighting have taken their toll on Baptist heritage, and the political fighting has taken its toll on the Baptist witness in this world. These priorities will re-emerge only as we give up this dishonorable fight.

This fight is political, regardless of the reasons men and women give it. We have been fighting a war of politics and power, not a battle for souls. We have been fighting a war for naming rights to be Southern Baptists instead of the responsibility to be Christ's followers.

In this complex age, lies can be as convincing as truth, fantasy as real as reality and spin a substitute for honesty.

Pretentious politics and religiosity have seduced some of us. We should now go forward as new Baptists, committed to the same truth we have been trying to reclaim, including religious and individual freedom from the oppressive fundamentalist right.

We must reclaim the right and responsibility to find God with fear and trembling through the personal responsibility of faith.

Jesus never brought up the issues we fight today–inerrancy, creationism and creeds. He did condemn the spiritual leaders of his day who misled many. He called them heretics, hypocrites and false prophets through their dangerous marriage to political leaders and in their desire to control, use and even steal from the people of their day.

Charles Ledbetter

Cleburne

Public prayer

Many Christians support prayer in public schools, at graduations and sporting events. Didn't Jesus consider people who pray in public to be hypocrites–especially those who pray standing in churches and on street corners?

Didn't he say that when you pray, “enter thy closet and pray to (your) Father in secret”?

Are we all hypocrites? Or is it OK to overlook his views on public prayer?

Chuck Mann

Greensboro, N.C.

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