North American Missions: Laredo, TX

This is the season in which we emphasize North American missions as a part of our annual Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions. As your church contemplates how to be involved in reaching North America for Christ, consider among your other options the needs of Laredo, TX.

Diversity

A Study in Contrasts from Bart Barber on Vimeo.

The Great Commission: Teach!

So, after such a hiatus, what prompted me to get the next installment of my Great Commission series recorded and posted? Well, as of my last little article, I had 666 posts on this blog, and I wanted to move on past that number!

So, here is my latest episode of my reflections on the Great Commission.

Great Anecdote on the Blessings of Mutual Congregational Accountability

Yesterday through our local NPR station (listening to NPR is a regular form of espionage that I practice) I became acquainted with the story of Delsie Bailey. Ms. Bailey is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill who became pregnant in high school. She is a devout Christian and the daughter of an elder in her church. Although the blog of the organization with which she volunteers refers to her as "a huge proponent of using protection," as you will hear in the audio of the interview, her message to teens is to abstain. WARNING: Her story is the third feature on the audio, and you'll have to skip down past the halfway point to get to her poignant account.

But the best part of the story, in my estimation, has nothing to do with premarital sex or pregnancy out of wedlock. Ms. Bailey describes in the interview the day in which she stood before her 400-500 member congregation, admitted her sinfulness, and informed them of her pregnancy. Many would fear that she would face a barrage of judgmental condemnation, but you've got to hear her description of what happened next.

Maybe ignoring sin and its destruction in the lives of our fellow believers and church members isn't the loving thing to do at all. Maybe we deprive one another of something important that we all need when we cover up our failures.

Great Resource on the Trinity

I highly recommend the slides from Dr. Malcolm Yarnell's recent series on the Trinity. Several years ago Dr. James Leo Garrett startled me somewhat when he observed that Christians are writing very little and thinking very little about the Trinity—one of the central questions about the nature of God, with implications upon the gospel and every aspect of Christian living. The first and most persistent deviancies from biblical faith that Christians have rejected as damnable heresy are those that deny the Trinity. If we ignore Trinitarianism, our churches will eventually depart from the faith.

Not-Yet-Aging (Much) Speakers

I write today in the context of an article by Brad Whitt and a response by Ed Stetzer (UPDATE: Peter Lumpkins has entered the conversation as well with this article, which actually was up before mine was). The general subject matter, although much is involved here, is the content of the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors Conference vis-à-vis the various demographics within (and semi-within) the Southern Baptist Convention.

Participating in the comment streams of these articles provided me with some insight as to how other people have perceived past speakers at various Southern Baptist conferences. Learning to understand other people's point of view, even when it does not produce agreement, always is helpful.

Dr. Stetzer's article expresses amazement that anyone could possibly believe that "traditional" (whatever that means) Southern Baptists are being marginalized. What I'd like to do in this article, as benignly as I know how, is to offer a way for him and for any who share his puzzlement to gain some insight.

First, I think it is not exactly on-target to analyze past pastors conferences as though they were evidence relevant to what Dr. Whitt has written. Traditionalists in Southern Baptist life may be a bit like conservatives in political life. Those who are not conservative will generally tolerate (while arguing with) most conservatives, but they will not tolerate a Clarence Thomas or a Sarah Palin. Being conservative is mildly irritating, but being a black conservative is traitorous and being a female conservative makes one deserving of caricature.

What is necessary, I think, to answer Dr. Whitt's post is some exemplar of any room for a YOUNG traditionalist like Brad Whitt to have a voice in national Southern Baptist life. Otherwise, it is possible that young non-traditionalists (again, whatever that means) are, instead of tolerant to diversity, merely patient.

Second, just as it is helpful for Dr. Stetzer to help somebody like me to understand what kinds of things can happen at SBC Pastors Conferences to marginalize and build ill-will among that group of methodologically diverse Southern Baptists who also happen to share with us a commitment to Southern Baptist ministries and theology, perhaps it would be helpful to give an example of the kind of thing that can happen at a conference to prod and provoke people like myself.

Fresh in my memory is an occasion at which a very young pastor of a large church was invited to speak at a Southern Baptist gathering. Here is a summary of his time at the microphone:

1. He began—I kid you not…the first words out of his mouth—by correcting the person who introduced him to let everyone know that his church was actually a good bit bigger than the introduction had let on. The figures were a couple of months out-of-date, you see, and he wanted to make sure that everybody understood that his church had gotten to be even more massive since then.
2. So, his church was very successful, and for this he was thankful, but he was really worried because not many churches are as successful as his. So, the purpose of his talk would be to "give you a couple of reasons why your church is not successful."
3. The first reason why most people's churches aren't as successful as his? Our churches don't have any relationships with any lost people. And, in fact, a church just like our churches fired him from being a youth minister solely because he wanted to have relationships with lost people and they (pastor, administrative pastor, chairman of deacons, and…nemesis of nemeses…an old person) hated lost people and hated him for not hating lost people. By this point in his speech, I must confess that I was already seeing a thing or two in his personal attitudes that seemed to me more likely to give him employment troubles at a church than his passion for lost people.
4. The second reason why most people's churches aren't as successful as his? If the people in our churches were to develop any relationships with lost people, our churches are the last place that they would dare to bring them. We wear ties and suits. We sing the wrong music. We talk about theology. We fail to let demographic research be THE driving factor shaping our entire practice of church. All of these things, he said, we must change or die. Nothing about this speech sounded like an engraved invitation for all of us to join in a methodological chorus.
5. I keep calling it a speech, because it cannot in good conscience be classified as a sermon. There was no text…no real reference to the Bible anywhere in the lot of this. If he needed help with finding an appropriate scriptural springboard for what he had to say, I might have suggested the story of Rehoboam.

So, perhaps this will pull back the veil a bit and help those who were disturbed by Brad Whitt's post to gain some understanding of whence his angst arises. When I walk out of a speech like that, I don't feel congenial. Just writing about it some time after the fact, I still have to work at feeling congenial when I relive the moment.

But I'd like to feel congenial. I have no problem with methodological diversity that is truly nothing more than that. We have a pretty wide array of methodological diversity within our own congregation—a good bit more, I imagine, than does the speaker I mentioned above. Theology matters to me. Theology and methodology are not non-overlapping regions. Some methodology arises out of or reflects a church's theology. We've got things to work out as we go forward that are not easy. I know that. I believe that we can do it nonetheless.

It will help us to find a stable working relationship among our diverse churches if we hear less of these types of speeches at our conferences. It will also help if some acknowledgement is made of young Southern Baptists in the mold of Brad Whitt. It seems to me that the instance I gave above is not isolated and represents a phenomenon not acknowledged by Dr. Stetzer's analysis, which seemed to portray a convention in which traditionalists are judgmental toward non-traditionalists, who are tolerant and kind and sweet and celebrative of diversity. I'm suggesting that Brad Whitt has accurately noted a widespread (but not universal) non-traditionalist expectation that the death of ministries like Brad Whitt's and mine is merely a matter of time.

Aging Heroes

Look for December 2012 to be an season of great fanfare within the Southern Baptist Convention. I'm already making special plans for our annual Christmas Eve Candlelight Service at FBC Farmersville. December 24, 2012, you see, will be the 100^th anniversary of the death of Lottie Moon, the matron saint of Southern Baptist international missions.

Lottie Moon was not the last heroic Southern Baptist missionary, but she is the last (so-far) of our Southern Baptist missionary heroes. In our culture it is a bit harder to have heroes than it was a century ago—the arena of Southern Baptist missions is not the only milieu suffering from this reality. With each passing year, the strength of Lottie's influence fades a bit, except for the historically obsessed like myself. This is the inexorable arc of heroism. People may know the story of Perpetua, Hus, Tyndale, Helwys, or Moon, but the farther back into bygone days these historical heroes are, the less connected many readers feel with them. These heroes may continue to impress, but they become less effective (across the broad swath of the population) to inspire.

It is when someone much like yourself does something inspirational that you are most likely to ask the question, "Shouldn't I be doing something like that, too?"

The most inspirational act within Christianity has always been martyrdom. I confess that my own feelings about martyrdom are strikingly similar to the attitude about chastity held by Augustine ("Give me chastity and continence—but not yet"). I am going to die (unless Christ returns first). I would far rather that I die a meaningful death for my Lord as a martyr than to expire on a hospital bed. But I don't plan to be on the hospital bed anytime soon (not that it is within my power to enact my plans), and it is really the manner of my death, not its timing, that I would like to change. Lord, give me martyrdom—but not yet!

The International Missions Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, it seems to me, is structured to avoid inspirational martyrdom. Our most dangerous missions activities are closely-guarded secrets, unable to inspire anyone but a select few. We do have missionaries who die in missionary service, some of whom die not because of medical conditions or crime but because of anti-Christian hostility. Of these, some number die from meeting anti-Christian hostility while in the midst of delivering a bold verbal witness for Christ, I'm sure. These are the kinds of stories that inspire. The passionaries and martyrologies of earlier eras in Christian history are instructive here.

Tertullian said that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." But we need to add to Tertullian's insight something gleaned from the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, who opined that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The blood of martyrdom is not only the seed of the church and her mission, but is some portion of her ongoing sustenance as well. We still need to tell the story of Lottie Moon. We still ought to have the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, and it needs to remain under precisely that name. But we have need of new heroes, and hard fields await the gospel where nothing short of ongoing repetitive martyrdom will lead to the widespread dissemination of the gospel. Among the enormous questions facing the future of Southern Baptist missions is the question of who tomorrow's heroes will be and how they will be made.