The headlines each year going into the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting seem to focus on Southern Baptists’ latest attempts to put women in their place and keep them there. Whether they were voting to remove Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church from SBC membership, voting on the Law Amendment or this year’s “Truth and Unity” amendment proposed by Al Mohler, many outsiders have the idea the annual meetings are primarily about male power.
To be sure, all those attempts to institutionalize gendered authority and submission hierarchies are real and should be exposed. But as I’ve watched the annual meetings over the past few years, the primary focus of the meetings hasn’t been on male power but on spreading the gospel through missions.
On Tuesday morning this week, Paul Chitwood, president of the International Mission Board, announced they were sending 63 new Southern Baptist missionaries “to pursue lostness around the world.”
“Lostness is the world’s greatest problem,” Chitwood said. “The gospel is the only solution to that problem.”
“The reason Southern Baptists believe ‘lostness’ is the world’s greatest problem is that they believe in hell as eternal conscious torment.”
The reason Southern Baptists believe “lostness” is the world’s greatest problem is that they believe in hell as eternal conscious torment. As the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 states, “The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment.”
In 2011, the SBC annual meeting passed a resolution “On the Reality of Hell” that rejected any views of hell as the annihilation of unbelievers or as a purifying process of universal restoration, and affirmed “the reality of a literal hell” as “conscious, eternal suffering.”
To put it bluntly, anyone who doesn’t bend the knee to Southern Baptist atonement theology will be sent to a literal lake of fire and brimstone to burn for eternity.
As former Reformed Baptist pastor Steve Lawson once described: “Those in hell are thrown almost as if they’re being thrown into an active volcano and find themselves submerged in the red-hot molten lava that is spewing out of the volcano, yet with this new body able to stay alive and not be consumed. People are literally baptized in fire. They are immersed in fire. They are swimming in fire. They are engulfed in fire, yet never able to swim out of the lake of fire. They are forever preserved in this lake of fire. They are drowning in fire with the wrath of God inflicting pain from the top of their head to the bottom of their feet to every extremity in their body forever and ever and ever. … They will be roasted alive, yet they will never be able to die.”
Funding missions to help people avoid that end is the heartbeat of SBC annual meetings.
With video clips of smiling people being baptized set to hopeful, celebratory music, the IMB promo video rejoiced in how “the gospel changes everything” by turning idolators into new worshipers.
But while celebration abounds, there’s an underlying gravity to the meetings that makes outsiders wonder: Do any of these Southern Baptists have any self-awareness for how horrible this worldview sounds?
Billions of burning souls
After Chitwood’s introduction, messengers were shown videos of their new missionaries sharing their stories and asking for prayer. Missionaries going to areas more hostile to Christianity had their identities hidden. But no matter where they were coming from or where they were going, many of their stories had two things in common: The number of people going to hell forever was overwhelming, and hardly any of the people would ever be given a chance to hear the gospel.
“To Southern Baptists, every one of these men, women and children wake up screaming to flames licking their skin forever.”
One missionary shared that what stirred her to missions was the realization that, “while I had so many opportunities to hear the gospel growing up, billions of people around the world never get that chance.”
Another added, “As a child, I learned that billions of people have never heard the gospel.”
One couple said they were going to “a country with only 300 believers.”
Another said he was called to a city of more than 20 million people “with almost no Christ followers.”
“I didn’t grow up in a Christian home. But I always longed to know God,” one woman explained. “In college, I realized millions around the world share the same hunger to know the God who loves them but have no one to tell them about Jesus.”
Then when they were all done sharing, Chitwood affirmed: “This is the most important work. Billions of people on the planet are spiritually lost; 160,101 people each day this year will pass into eternity having not heard the gospel or having rejected the gospel they have heard.”
To Southern Baptists, every one of these men, women and children wake up screaming to flames licking their skin forever.
What kind of God would create such a reality?
Sure, the missionaries come across as nice people, concerned for the well-being of their neighbors. But what kind of reality is this? And what does it say about a God who would create such a reality?
“How can an omnipotent God claim to love the world with such low numbers?”
How can an omnipotent God claim to love the world with such low numbers? After all, Revelation 9:9 envisions the inhabitants of heaven as including “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.” It’s written as if the numbers are impressive. But to hear the leaders and missionaries of the SBC talk, the numbers of people going to heaven are meager, including ranges of zero to 300 for entire cities and countries.
What makes the Southern Baptist gospel even more untenable is how it fails to fit what Jesus taught about the rich and the poor. The convention is being hosted in the wealthiest nation in human history. It’s taking place in Orlando, with the SBC annual meeting website advertising specials for Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort, Fun Spot and Seaworld Orlando. And the outgoing SBC president, Clint Pressley, is on stage in a three-piece suit. Yet, they’re asking us to believe the God who cares about the poor and the least of these overwhelmingly gave these rich guys the gospel while completely ignoring billions of poor people. It makes no sense. If the Southern Baptist gospel is true, then the health and wealth gospel is true.
But according to Pressley, justice will come to pass in the end, not through the revelation of a Matthew 25 God whose brothers and sisters are the least of these, but through a God who kills. As Pressley defined the gospel after the presentation of the missionaries, for Southern Baptists, “God the Father killed his own son instead of killing you.”
“God the Father killed his own son instead of killing you.”
For God to know the creation of humanity would lead to such constant killing and infinite suffering, and to do so anyway, the only conclusion one could make would be that this God doesn’t love humans in a way that wills the good of the other, as Thomas Aquinas defined love in the 13th century.
To the contrary, this God would be about something else entirely.
‘The worship he is due’
The ultimate theme the missionaries consistently referred to was worship. As John Piper often says, “Worship is the goal and fuel of missions.”
“I am so grateful and privileged to be laboring to see Jesus receive the worship he is due,” one of the missionaries said.
“He is worthy of all praise,” added another.
After the presentation of the missionaries, a worship team took the stage and led the assembly in singing, “There is no more for heaven now to give.”
No more? Because based on how bleak the picture was the SBC missionaries depicted, it sure seems like God could do a bit more for the poor and the least of these who never have heard God loves them.
But ironically, despite worship being their ultimate aim, it’s there, in worship, where Southern Baptists’ neighbor awareness fades.
“The night is dark, but I am not forsaken,” they sang. “For by my side, the Savior he will stay.”
None of the pronouns are communal. It’s about God being on my side.
Another line added that “my shepherd will defend me. Through the deepest valley, he will lead.”
Again, these are people in the wealthiest nation in human history meeting in Orlando with special discounts to Disney World.
It’s essentially a group of individuals singing about having an individual relationship with God that joyfully celebrates how free the individual is while cozying up to a God who will angrily and violently torture billions of their neighbors forever.
Even if we accept the premise that God primarily cares about self-glory and receiving worship, then according to Scripture, God could’ve gotten that through the rocks and the trees without having to torture anyone.
But for Southern Baptists and their God, that’s not enough. To them, people who don’t submit to their gospel have to die violent deaths. As Pressley preached, they believe in the good news of a God who kills for self-glory.
That gospel changes hearts, they suggest.
And on that point, as we look around at the justice as ego-driven retributive violence that’s running rampant on the right in the United States today, I think we agree.
Rick Pidcock
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.