“Local church autonomy” is a Baptist distinctive selectively used.
As evidence, consider Al Mohler’s position on Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., 25 years ago when then-President Bill Clinton was a member there. Mohler, relatively new as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., declared the Arkansas congregation should “church” Clinton because of his improper relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
A Baptist Press story published on Sept. 11, 1998, and written by none-other than Russell Moore — who at the time was working as Mohler’s apologist — said this:
Mark Wingfield
Church discipline according to the New Testament, Mohler explained, aims toward the goal of restoration, not retribution. A church member’s sin, Mohler said, is not the problem of only the erring individual, but is in fact “a matter of accountability of the whole congregation.” He said a failure to exercise church discipline would demonstrate “a very superficial view of sin and an inadequate understanding of what it means to be the church.”
“The situation in Washington is spoken of, appropriately so, as a crisis,” Mohler explained. “But the deeper crisis I’m concerned about for the president of the United States is as a brother in Christ and it is the state of his soul.
“The last thing he needs is to be left alone,” Mohler said. “The last thing he needs is for the church to become complicit in his sin.”
Now contrast that with Mohler’s words this week in relation to sexual abuse scandal actually inside Immanuel Baptist Church, where Pastor Steven Smith and a few church leaders hid knowledge of abuse and have yet to come clean about who knew what when. Here’s what the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported this week about the Little Rock church:
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., this week cautioned against making snap judgments, while also emphasizing the importance of protecting Southern Baptists from abuse.
“It is important that we respect the responsibility of local churches to deal with these matters and to do so rightly.”
“It is important that we respect the responsibility of local churches to deal with these matters and to do so rightly. At the same time, we must call upon those churches to do what is right, just and honest about any situation in which there is an accusation of abuse, and the first priority must be the protection of the vulnerable. There are principles we should all follow, and it is good that we remember that our first instinct must be to protect the vulnerable, to contact authorities and to be fully committed to all that is required for the protection of those who are endangered,” he said.
On one hand, we might say Mohler has matured in his understanding of local church autonomy. On the other hand, we might say he selectively applies it. Is this tilt based in politics or conviction?
After all, Mohler is part of that Southern Baptist crowd who despised Clinton — a Southern Baptist himself — and now embraces Donald Trump, who is the actual antithesis of anything remotely Christlike.
Those concerned about sexual abuse in the SBC see Mohler as yet another denominational leader who doesn’t really care about addressing sexual abuse in SBC churches.
The local church autonomy argument is the most frequent explanation given by denominational leaders for why more has not been done and cannot be done to prevent known sexual abusers hopping from church to church without detection. Unlike Methodists or Catholics, SBC leaders aren’t bishops and don’t have authority over what individual churches do.
Even though, this week Baptist Press published an homage to Mohler written by David Dockery, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, lauding him as the longest-serving president of any SBC seminary anywhere ever.
“If the SBC has any bishops, Mohler certainly would qualify as an archbishop.”
If the SBC has any bishops, Mohler certainly would qualify as an archbishop. His influence is tremendous. If he were to take a strident attitude toward Immanuel Baptist today as he did in 1998, it would make a difference in how the story plays out.
In full disclosure, I played a minor role in the 1998 story. At the time, I was serving as editor of the Western Recorder, the state Baptist newspaper in Kentucky. After Mohler initially wrote about his preference for how the Arkansas church should relate to its most famous member, I wrote an editorial with the headline, “Telling Another Church What to Do Is Wrong.”
In that editorial, I noted there’s a difference between condemning Clinton’s behavior — which pretty much everyone was doing — and telling his church what they ought to do about it.
That editorial prompted Russell Moore’s piece for Baptist Press where he reported on Mohler’s instruction to the Arkansas church and on the faculty of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. — then led by none other than Paige Patterson — repudiating me publicly for my editorial.
Moore reported in Baptist Press:
During the chapel service immediately preceding the news conference, Patterson read an affirmation by the Southeastern Seminary faculty in support of Mohler’s stance. The affirmation repudiated a Sept. 1 editorial by Western Recorder editor Mark Wingfield, a frequent critic of Mohler, which alleged Mohler had been less than an “authentic Baptist” by “instructing” another church on how to conduct its business.
Mohler said his call for Immanuel Baptist to exercise church discipline was not motivated by a desire for retaliation against Clinton, but instead by Mohler’s concern for the president as a professing Christian and member of a Southern Baptist congregation who is living in a “consistent pattern of sin.”
“I believed in local church autonomy then, and I believe in it today.”
I believed in local church autonomy then, and I believe in it today. In proper Baptist polity, no denominational official should tell a local church how to conduct its business. State conventions and the national convention certainly have the right to determine who they will cooperate with — a reality we’ve seen the SBC exercise against female-clergy-affirming churches lately — but they do not get to dictate what any church must do.
That was true in 1998, and it’s true today.
If the state of Bill Clinton’s soul was Mohler’s true concern in 1998, then the state of Steven Smith’s soul in 2023 ought to be too. As well as the state of the souls of the several children reportedly abused at the Little Rock church.
Irony and hypocrisy run deep these days among evangelical leaders who hated Clinton but now embrace Trump, whose known sins make Clinton look like an underachiever.
Here’s what Patterson said in that 1998 Baptist Press story:
“I don’t think you need to have anybody in the presidency of the United States or any other major leadership position who is unfaithful to the most basic covenant human beings can make together, namely marriage,” Patterson said. “Whenever there is the demise of the home in society, the whole society is not far behind it. If any place we ought to have exemplary leadership, it ought to be in the presidency of the United States.”
And Mohler echoed Patterson’s faux piety:
“The events of the last several weeks are proving to the American people that morality matters,” Mohler asserted. “To paraphrase Edmund Burke, ‘Standing on the gallows has an amazing way of clearing the mind.’ We are seeing Americans increasingly, hour by hour and day by day, saying morality does matter, character does matter. We are facing a crisis of this presidency.”
What are we to make of all this? Seems to me the lessons are clear: Use the Bible and ignore Baptist polity to damn your political enemies but ignore the Bible and use Baptist polity to protect your friends.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of the new book Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.