As we wake to the final day of the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC18 or is it SBCAM18?), I am encouraged. I didn’t fly into Dallas encouraged. I flew in concerned about the division and decimation of our convention in recent weeks. I flew in concerned about the mood of the meetings. In fact, I even commented to several people that I would have been nervous to have brought my children with me this week because of the potential for argument and division. But, today I am encouraged.
The recent downfall of Paige Patterson and the continuing fall-out of his failures and the failures of others are a black cloud hanging over our meetings, but Dr. Patterson’s failures do not represent the failure of the Conservative Resurgence. I’ve read some claim that the Conservative Resurgence was nothing but a thinly veiled attempt for Patterson to gain control and for women to be silenced, but history simply doesn’t tell that story.
Here, in Dallas, we have been reminded of a similar meeting in 1985 that included over four times as many messengers. Dallas was flooded that year with over 45,000 messengers to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and they came for one reason: to save their beloved convention from the liberalism that had crept in through her unguarded backdoor.
Paige Patterson was a significant leader in the Conservative Resurgence, but Paige Patterson was not the Conservative Resurgence. The Conservative Resurgence was a grassroots effort of rank-and-file Southern Baptists who refused to sit in their pews and watch their seminaries, institutions, and churches move away from the Bible. The Conservative Resurgence was a blue-collar effort to take back the denomination from some cultural and intellectual elites who had a different vision of the church than did church members in places like Cowpens, Tuscaloosa, Jackson, Gainesville, Boone, and Paducah. Southern Baptists from no-name places turned out en-masse and demanded that their leaders answer to God’s Word and God’s Word alone.
I saw one Twitter user lament that the election of J. D. Greear was a “liberal take-over.” This is ridiculous. There is no liberal take-over. #SBCAM18 is evidence that the Conservative Resurgence worked. Our conversations, our votes, and even our disagreements are over methods and minutiae. We didn’t vote this year between a liberal and a conservative, but between two men who love Jesus and his Word.
Some of our heroes have fallen, but God’s word stands forever. Our leaders have let us down, but the Conservative Resurgence was never about those leaders for rank-and-file Southern Baptists, it was always about the Bible and the Bible continues to stand strong.
Some in the Conservative Resurgence may have meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
I’m reminded of a story from a Southern Baptist church in the mountains of North Carolina. It was revealed that the pastor of that small church who had led many to Christ was a hypocrite. He preached on Sunday, but left on Sunday night with a wagon load of liquor and shacked up with a woman on the other side of the mountain. This revelation left many of the people in that church distraught, not only over his actions, but over the question of their salvation.
But, of course, they were as saved as they could be because their salvation did not depend on any man, but on Christ alone who is able to save.
Our foundations have been shaken, but our convictions hold fast. As Ravi Zacharias said just last night, “opinions are things that we hold, but convictions are those things that hold us.” Our conviction on the authoritative, infallible, and inerrant Word of God will hold us fast and it has served us well, even in this time of lament and division.
