Letter to the Conservative Baptist Network Steering Council
Thoughts for the New Year.
by Rod D. Martin
January 8, 2022
Dear Steering Council Members,
A Happy New Year to you all.
I want to encourage you as we enter 2022. We are just five months from another Annual Meeting, in Anaheim. There is much to do, and we are counting on all of you.
Our numbers grow, both churches and individuals. Our events flourish. In one CBN-sponsored revival this fall, led by our friend and Steering Council member Stoney Benfield, two pastors were saved! God is working among us. We must work too.
This week you will receive a press release announcing the addition of our friend Voddie Baucham to CBN’s Steering Council. There are more coming. The movement grows.
There have been disappointments. In Nashville, though we doubled turnout from around 8,000 to over 16,000 and our candidate Mike Stone won handsomely on the first ballot, he came just short on the second. If we’d flipped 300 votes he’d be President. And it turned out that mattered more than we thought, as the victor turned out to be an unrepentant serial plagiarist and his public sins were affirmed and excused by senior Convention leaders. We learned sad lessons there we had hoped were not true. Those same men and women doubled down on multiple doctrinal errors that just take my breath away, the most recent being David Platt’s statement on transgenderism which honestly can only be described as blasphemous. It is heartbreaking to watch.
The result has been that the SBC has lost churches, a lot of them. Last week we lost Josh Buice and his church. Josh’s conferences attract more than 6,000 attendees: he’s one of the “big names”. It is telling that when we lost Ralph West and Charlie Dates — who thought the Convention doesn’t support Critical Race Theory enough — and when we lost egalitarian-in-all-but-name Beth Moore, Convention leaders called on us to “mourn”; but when Josh left over what he termed “liberal drift”, he was subjected by those same leaders to outright scorn.
There’s your drift, folks, plain for all to see.
Some of our friends see these things and throw up their hands. Josh did, and though I love him I disagree strongly with his decision. Some say an election in Anaheim is unwinnable, forgetting that in the Resurgence years we won both in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Some are just tired, albeit after only a single year of organizing: the Resurgence generation found energy to fight for over a decade, and surely we do not wish to stand at the Judgment and explain why we did not.
If you know nothing else, know this: the SBC has only 11% of America’s churches, but its six seminaries educate 1/3 of America’s seminary students. We are not just fighting for the SBC: we are defending the pulpits of all of evangelical Christendom. Countless denominations and independent churches beyond the SBC are counting on us, whether they realize it or not. Can you go independent? Sure. Can you start a new denomination? Maybe. But you leave those seminaries to your opponents if you do. And they won’t go away any more than have Harvard, Princeton or Baylor.
We are called to this, now. If we don’t stand in the hour God has given us, what is our excuse?
This is a numbers game. 86% of 14 million Southern Baptists voted for Trump: whatever else you may say about that, what is certain is that they are NOT Woke. They just aren’t organized. But the Woke always are.
Focus on turning out the faithful. They are legion. They will overwhelm the insider elitists if they just show up. We don’t need 14 million. We might not even need 14,000.
This will not be a movement of the leadership. Don’t wait for an Adrian Rogers: it’s not going to work that way this time. Stop fretting about what you don’t have and where the meeting won’t be and start going up into the Promised Land and defeating the Canaanites. Be strong and courageous. Don’t be the ten spies who doomed Israel to 40 years of wandering. Be Joshua and Caleb. Acquit yourselves as men.
This is God’s house, He built it, and we should take glory in the opportunity to defend what is His.
Oh, and start praying more. A lot more. A lot more.
Happy New Year. Let us, by God’s grace, make it a happy new year.
