The would-be president of the Southern Baptist Convention on Thursday denounced today’s LGBTQ movement as a rebellion against God’s word.
Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on his daily podcast that except for their success as a common political front, those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning or queer really don’t have much in common – until it comes to the Bible.
“Every single one of those letters is a rebellion against the ontological order of creation,” Mohler said. “Every single one of those letters is united in the fact that it is a direct act of revolution and rebellion against the order of creation and the law of God, that God has established for his glory and for human good.”
Mohler is one of two candidates announced so far to replace current two-term SBC President J.D. Greear, who is ineligible to run at the 2020 SBC annual meeting June 9-10 in Orlando, Florida.
Greear, pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, has drawn praise for his efforts to combat sexual abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant group, but critics from the right perceive him as soft on homosexuality.
In an August 2019 article titled Three Ways We Go Wrong When Discussing Homosexuality, Greear said the Bible does not present same-sex behavior “as a sort of uber-sin in a categorically different realm” from other sins found in the American church today.
Mark Creech, an ordained Baptist minister who leads the Christian Action League of North Carolina, differed sharply is a column published by the Christian Post.
“Homosexuality is emphatically different than other sins,” Creech wrote. “It poses an enormous threat to family, health, the hope of a bright future for our country, and even the propagation of the gospel.”
“Let’s not also forget the political left is counting on the easing of resistance and acceptance of homosexuality as a major means of shutting down religious liberty,” added Creech, a same-sex marriage opponent who lobbies on behalf of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.
Mohler – in 2017 an initial signer of the Nashville Statement labeling homosexuality “an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness” – said one factor dividing the LGBTQ spectrum is a generational shift based on rapidly changing experiences that “renders today’s certainties to tomorrow’s irrelevancies.”
“It reminds us of the fact that our authority for knowing anything is the word of God that does not change,” Mohler said. “If the word of God did change, then we would be absolutely lost in confusion and incoherence.”
“It is impossible that if our certainties are based rightly on Scripture that they can in any way become tomorrow’s irrelevancies,” Mohler said. “In a biblically ordered church, that is actually impossible.”
Randy Adams
Mohler’s lone opposition at this time for SBC president is Randy Adams, executive director of the Northwest Baptist Convention. Adams, who announced his candidacy Jan. 14, is running on a platform of reversing numerical decline.
Adams says recommendations 10 years ago by a blue-ribbon Great Commission Task Force have not delivered on their promise of an evangelistic “resurgence” similar to the so-called Conservative Resurgence that brought doctrinal uniformity in the 1980s.
“A clear-headed assessment of Southern Baptist mission efforts reveals the steepest decline in evangelistic effectiveness in our 175-year history,” Adams wrote in a blog. “In the past decade baptisms have fallen to a 75-year low, with the last four years being the lowest four years since 1947. New church starts have plummeted over 50 percent in the past decade to at least a 40-year low, with the last four years being the lowest four years in decades, and this while the church planting budget grew from $22 million to $75 million in less than 10 years.”
Solutions proposed by Adams include putting the SBC’s evangelistic mission ahead of secondary “intra-convention politics or pet projects” and for national leaders to “support and work through local and state convention partners, who have local knowledge and for whom the work is most personal because it concerns the eternal destiny of their closest neighbors.”