What do you think might count as a “distraction” from the gospel?
To Southern Baptist Convention presidential candidate David Allen, all the sexual abuse cases piling up against the SBC and its churches are a “distraction.”
To North American Mission Board President Kevin Ezell, the defamation lawsuit brought against him and his agency by Will McRaney is a “petty distraction.”
Both these men made their public comments within about a week of each other, a month before Southern Baptists gather in Indianapolis for their annual meeting, where messengers will be asked to give a second vote of approval to a constitutional amendment clearly disqualifying women from preaching or serving as “pastor.” Some folks think that whole thing is a distraction from the gospel as well.
Mark Wingfield
For the uninitiated, in Southern Baptist speak, “the gospel” is the No. 1 imperative — or so it should be — to fulfill Jesus’ Great Commission to go into all the world, teach, baptize and make disciples. This is a denomination birthed from old-fashioned evangelism.
Across more than a century and a half, Southern Baptists from birth to death have been taught the foremost task of the Christian and the church is to preach the gospel message of good news through Jesus Christ’s birth, death, resurrection and sure return. Everything else should line up in service of this mandate.
Which may be why Southern Baptists are now so “distracted” from their one imperative. They’ve paid less attention to everything else Jesus and the Bible call us to do: Feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, welcome strangers, bless the children, do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God, serve others, love those who persecute you.
Evangelism loses its savor when all these other things are neglected. What’s left is a loveless transaction that’s about boarding the bus to heaven and driving right past hell on earth.
“What’s left is a loveless transaction that’s about boarding the bus to heaven and driving right past hell on earth.”
Back in the glory days of the SBC — before Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler had their way with us — social justice and evangelism went hand in hand. Both were gospel mandates. At home and abroad, Southern Baptist missions was not just about preaching and church planting. Southern Baptists were known for their medical work, their educational work, their agricultural work, their compassionate care.
One immediate change of the “conservative resurgence” was making Christian social ministries have to justify themselves in terms of conversions and church plants. I know this because I was there when it happened. I served three years on the national staff of the SBC Home Mission Board (predecessor to NAMB) as it was taking money away from every other program to give more to evangelism and church planting and requiring soup kitchens to count conversions more than cups of cold water given in Jesus’ name.
Similar things happened at the SBC Foreign Mission Board (predecessor to International Mission Board) as hospitals, seminaries and social service ministries were sold off or given away. The entire missions philosophy shifted from demonstrating the love of Christ to preaching the love of Christ — what the author of James called “faith without works.”
In time, the same thing happened at the six SBC seminaries, most notably at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where newly installed President Al Mohler declared the tenets of social work education “incompatible with the gospel.” That led to the firing of Dean Diana Garland and the closure of the Carver School of Church Social Work.
I know about that one firsthand too because I was there writing the weekly stories about the transition at Southern Seminary.
Over the next three decades, Southern Seminary and Southwestern Seminary — then the two largest in the SBC — took different paths forward. While Southwestern focused mainly on conversion counts and revivals (anyone remember Patterson’s big game men’s rallies?), Southern focused on doctrine and orthodoxy.
“The SBC was fighting ‘woke’ social ministries and ideology before anyone used the word ‘woke.’”
The SBC was fighting “woke” social ministries and ideology before anyone used the word “woke.”
The rotten fruit of that almost singular focus on conversion evangelism has become today’s “distraction”: The failure to listen to and care for people sexually abused by clergy and other church leaders, the banishment of women from church leadership, and the rise of egomaniacal agency heads who demand everyone downline in their kingdom bow to their commands.
All this has been facilitated by trustees who have been asleep at the switch for decades now — happy to have been selected to places of honor and mostly unwilling to challenge the entity heads they are supposed to supervise.
Not even the most liberal Southern Baptist in the 1970s opposed evangelism and church planting. But the most conservative Southern Baptists definitely opposed Christian social ministries. And that’s where the wheels on the cart became unbalanced.
When “the gospel” is defined only as evangelism or orthodox belief, it is easy to justify ignoring anything else that might be a “distraction.” We should not be surprised, then, that two prominent SBC men see those who have been harmed as obstacles to overcome.
Victims of sexual abuse, marginalized women and mistreated denominational employees are not distractions from the gospel. They call us to understand the full gospel.
Count up the number of “conversions” Jesus notched on his belt versus the number of people he healed. Pondering that might be a true distraction.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His forthcoming book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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