Another Issue with Lemke’s paper…

In Steve Lemke’s exhaustive offering that has been circulating in the blogosphere lately, I found something quite interesting and something I have issues with. He rejects, as does the BF&M 2000 the office of elders. He states:

Another common divergence from traditional Baptist distinctives concerns the appropriate offices of the church. According to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the two “scriptural offices� of a New Testament church are pastor and deacon. Many young ministers, sometimes driven by anecdotal horror stories about deacons, have followed pied Pipers from other denominations to add another office of elder and/or delete the office of deacon. However, I believe that you and I do not have the right to arbitrarily change the church offices delineated in Scripture. Elders are synonymous in Scripture with pastors or bishops, not another office. If young pastors want to force a Presbyterian form of church government on a church, they should have the integrity before they are called as pastor to speak honestly and openly with the church regarding their disagreement with article VI of the Baptist Faith and Message and their intention to lead the church to have a Presbyterian church governance.

I happen to pastor a church that has elders, and until our deacon resigned, deacons. I didn’t form it that way, it started that way as a church plant. I as the pastor am an elder. There is another elder who is a Senior level manager at a very large consulting firm. I don’t make decisions and he doesn’t make decisions. We as elders make the decisions. He is a pastor of the church. He is not the Senior Pastor, but a pastor nonetheless. We handle the administrative issues of the church and seek to empower the members to do ministry.

Our deacons handle things like benevolence and are very service oriented, not decision-makers. Unfortunately, in the typical polity of a baptist church, the deacons are the decision makers. This was not their role, especially in the beginning, and thus appears to demonstrate that those churches are operating in an unbiblical manner. So if I were to pastor a church with deacons who needed to decide everything am I being Biblical?

In Baptist polity, we are congregational, meaning we should vote on everything. But if you take a trip through scripture, you find very little about voting. From what I have seen, the only 2 votes taken in the Bible kept the Isrealites out of the Promised Land the first time and resulted in the crucifixion of Jesus. Are we unbiblical in our polity then because we vote? Maybe we could write a paper on “Voting in the Church, a Baptist Perspective”. I’d love to see how that would turn out!

The issue isn’t names but functions. Pastors/Elders/Overseers, from what I can discern and how it is worked out practically in our church, are the decision-makers, the main teachers when the church comes together for corporate worship, and the leaders of the church. The deacons have been set aside as helpers, doing things like serving tables and benevolence. I would like to think those within the SBC who are moving towards an elder model are using it functionally as we do, not trying to create a heirarchial, presbyterian model of church governance.

Heck, we’re even considering going from elders to a management team. Is there a difference? In name yes, in function, no! Doesn’t scripture even use different words for the same function? Hmmm…Hardline name vs. function.

That’s just my view…

A critic of Dr. Steve Lemke’s article on hyper-calvinism

This article is very interesting.

He concludes his well said remarks with the following:

In my estimation, this part of the paper is seriously flawed. Though unintended, it has become ammunition used by others who do not have the generous spirit of Dr. Lemke to attack those affiliated with Founders Ministries.

Let me say this though, I have found Calvinistic churches that are lacking in evangelistic/missional zeal and work. Is this the fruit of bad theology? I would say it is the fruit of incomplete theology, or more often the result of being more about doctrine than God and people. This is something the more theologically oriented churches have to guard against. It is possible to miss the theological forest for the trees.

Everyone involved is concerned with the future of the SBC. But what those concerns are and how we address them varies based on perspective. This is what makes dialogue so important, and I am grateful for Dr. Lemke’s willingness to talk.

Excellent thoughts Joe!

Are we just whiners?

Joe’s done an excellent job of stating the mindset of younger SBC Leaders.

He asks:

Are younger leaders in the SBC doing anything, or are they only complaining about what’s wrong with our Convention? This has been brought up a few times recently, and even tonight I was asked, “What are you doing besides talking to bring about the change you desire in the SBC?� While I cannot speak for all of the younger leaders and churches, I can speak for some of us. What are we doing?

Great Job Joe!

Link up and read!

SBC Insider Critiques ‘Unregenerate’ Contemporary Southern Baptists

I’ve been keeping up with the issues of Bobby Welch’s little article throwing fire on the Reformed vs. Non-Reformed theology and its impact on Evangelism and the reaction among SBC young leaders.

Jim Elliff, who may or may not now be an insider, has come out with a strong statement that would push back on Welch’s zeal. In an Agape Press article, Elliff states,

We have a bad habit sometimes of just assuming because a person has an emotional quiver at a certain moment that they’re a true believer, and we’re very quick to get them on the rolls of our churches…
…
“This has proven to be disastrous,” the CCW founder continues. “I think many of these people don’t even show up in the weeks following the time we’ve accepted them into membership.”
…
In days when we grew excessively and reached many people in a serious way, we cared very much about the church being regenerate. In fact, Baptists have a great history of some people who believed in dying for the regenerate church. But today we’ve become very proficient in adding numbers to the roll that do not represent true Christians

Elliff has a full article on this issue at his website.

Here’s some interesting thoughts about the timing of all this. A summation (I think) of his own website’s article appeared in the July 11 edition of Baptist Press. Bobby Welch’s article is interesting in that it comes within his church’s own newsletter. About that, I think is odd that he would be discussing such an inflamatory issue with people in his church though I know that he sends it out to other ministers and is using it to influence people within the convention as a whole. So while Welch fired the first salvo (possibly), it was followed up with a watered down version (wonder why they did that?) on BP of Elliff’s original article. Agape Press’ article is dated July 26. Elliff has reformed theology (see his bio on the webite for The OKC Conference on Reformed Theology). There is no date on Elliff’s full article on his website.

I really encourage you to read Elliff’s article. He makes a tremendous statement towards the end of the article:

We might reverse some of our proclivity to continue as normal if we introduced our preachers more accurately in our evangelism meetings and convention settings. Try using this introduction: “Here is Brother ______, pastor of a church of 10,000 members, 6400 of whom do not bother to come on a given Sunday morning, and 8600 of whom do not come on Sunday evening. He is here to tell us about how to have a healthy, evangelistic church.”

Here’s the thing. We have to understand the power of multiplication and discipleship. The issue shouldn’t be baptizing 1 million people next year. The issue should be helping people become passionate for their God. Passionate people are passionate about people and seek every opportunity to share.

If we express this in numbers we can see the impact:

1 person leads 5 people to Christ and disciples them. (6)
Those 6 people each lead 5 people to Christ and disciple them (30)
Those 30 people each lead 5 people to Christ and disciple them (150)
Those 150 people each lead 5 people to Christ and disciple them (450)
Those 450 people each lead 5 people to Christ and disciple them (2,25o)
Those 2,250 people each lead 5 people to Christ and disciple them (11,250)
Those 11, 250 people each lead 5 people to Christ and disciple them (56,250)

So in 7 cycles, if we effectively taught people to be passionate about Christ through discipleship as well as continuing to model evangelism, by each person just reaching 5 people per cycle we could win a medium-sized city. The collarteral impact would be over 100,000 people. All of this is assuming my numbers are correct.

One of the reasons we’re not baptizing more is we’re not helping people through discipleship to fall in love with the God (and I know that really is a God thing, but we can create healthy discipleship environments). What we’re doing is dunking people (saved or not) and since there was little to no discipleship, they will not be a part of the reproductive cycle in evangelism.

Again, the numbers for me are worthless. It’s not an issue of baptisms, it’s an issue of disciples. Always has, and always will be. Jesus could draw crowds with the best of them. But he chose, intentionally I might add, to reproduce himself in a small number who would reproduce themselves and get the cycle going.

Just my view..

SBC Pastor’s Conference president is asking younger leaders their opinion for the Pastor’s Conference.

Bryant Wright, who is the newly elected president of the SBC pastor’s conference, sent an email asking me to take a survey about what would get me to the pastor’s conference. There were some very good questions, and at least it shows that someone is interested. Here’s the link if you would like to take the survey:

[LINK]

Next Page »