Sadly, Dr. Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has weighed in supporting Ronnie Floyd’s nomination. It appears his email was written and delivered after Dr. Chapman’s most excellent piece.
I’ve referred to Dr. Chapman’s blog post, entitled Diminishing Returns, several times in the past couple of days. For you lazy readers who won’t click the link, let me include some of my favorite lines.
“We are drawn to do things as the world does them. To lose power from above all too often drives us to generate artificial power of our own making.”
This is my favorite. This is a concise summary of the problem facing our denomination. No further comment needed.
“When a president of an entity publicly endorses a potential nominee or nominates a candidate for elected office, he potentially alienates some who otherwise hold him in high esteem because they differ with the person he has embraced publicly for an elected office.”
This is exactly what has happened in my mind regarding Drs. Patterson and Akin. Why are agency presidents, dependent upon generous support by Southern Baptists of the Cooperative Program, so publicly and enthusiastically support a pastor from a church that gives only either .27% or 1.8% to the CP or “joint SB causes”, depending on which number you go with? These men are presuming upon the generousness of churches like mine (currently 10%...up from 7% six years ago).
“Among the other 16 million people are there not sufficient leaders to make and accept nominations for the elected offices of the Convention?”
Thank you, Dr. Chapman (president and chief executive officer of the SBC Executive Committee, arguably the most powerful SBC entity) for enlarging the tent. Yes, I believe there are such leaders and am hopeful they will emerge before we convene our annual meeting in Greensboro.
1 comment:
I think that you have made some serious mistakes in your assumptions and analysis. I hope you will check out my thoughts regarding Chapman's comments that are found on my blog.
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