Short Take 4: Resurgence Turned Divergence, Part 3

For people listening out there today who may not be Southern Baptists, who are just thinking about their own church, maybe their own Christian school, their own Christian college, or whatever they're involved in, who see some drift taking place within their own organization or church, how can this story of potentially what's taking place in the Southern Baptist Convention—I call it resurgence, turning, divergence—how can that be avoided for a church, a denomination, an organization, or really getting down to the specifics, or an individual in their own life?

Yeah, that's a great question, and the bottom line is there are no guarantees. No entity, no Christian organization ever drifts conservative. We always drift liberal. We have a devil. He hates us. This world is opposed to us.

Our own sin wants to be satisfied and those enemies combined to draw us away from Christ. And so we need to be aware of that, and it just comes down to taking God seriously, taking His Word seriously. Believe what He has to say.

I think a very helpful tool for every Christian individually and certainly for churches and any kind of Christian organization is confessionalism, and by that I mean to adopt a biblical confession. Declare what you believe clearly. Nail your colors to the mast and be as simple and succinct as you can be saying, this is what we believe. Here we stand so that you're not always having to come back and ask the question, what do we think about this? Is Jesus really God, or do we believe God's Trinity?

No. Nail your colors to the mast and be as explicit as you can be in it so that when the questions come up, you're already pre-committed to the big issues, and you're not having to rethink everything all the time. But confessionalism is no guarantee. Just look at the institutions you referred to in the Ivy League and look at some of the Presbyterian denominations that had the Westminster Confession of Faith, and so you can have good confessions and still drift. But I think having a good confession and revisiting your commitment to it and maintaining the teachings of the scripture that you confess in it can be a very healthy tool. A second thing, and this is where I believe conservative Christians get tripped up very easily, is we cannot afford to assume the gospel.

And by that I mean conservative Christians lose the gospel not by one night going to bed and waking up the next morning and say, hey, I no longer believe the gospel, but rather over months and years and maybe decades assuming the gospel. Of course we're all narrators. Of course we all believe the gospel is above all, when in reality we started operating very subtly and over a period of time with assuming the truth of the gospel in our organization with our stated purposes. The final thing I would say is that ultimately we are dependent upon the Spirit of God. We can have the best confession in the world. We can have the greatest intent in the world with the greatest care to make sure that we're dotting the I's and crossing the T's on gospel teaching. But apart from the Spirit, we're going to drift. Apart from the Spirit, we can't do what needs to be done, and we will be easy pickings for our enemies. And so we've got to be people who cry out to God, who plead with Him to acknowledge our weakness and our dependence and to look to Him for the grace and the strength that is needed for us to stand.