SBC EC presidential search team close to announcing candidate
By Laura Erlanson/Baptist Press
NASHVILLE (BP) – Though the committee charged with finding the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee’s new president and CEO had hoped to introduce a candidate at the EC’s February meeting, search team chairman Adron Robinson said the wait will be a bit longer.
“We had hoped to have a candidate locked in,” Robinson said. “It looks like that’s not going to happen, but in spite of that, the process is going well.”
Robinson, pastor of Hillcrest Baptist Church in Country Club Hills, Ill., said the team is taking its time, wanting to get it right.
“I am proud of the committee and the work they have done, how we have come together as a team, working together as brothers and sisters in Christ,” he said. “We have a strong finalist group, and we’re just trying to pray our way through that group to be sure that we have the best person for the job – God’s person for the job.”
He asked for very specific help from Southern Baptists.
“The best thing Southern Baptists can do is continue to lift us in prayer – prayer for the candidates and prayer for the committee,” he said. “We know God is able to give us clarity about this decision, and our trust is in Him.”
The full EC’s next meeting is Feb. 20 and 21 in Nashville.
Mohler: Without God’s Word, SBTS curriculum would be ‘a vapor’
By Jeff Robinson/SBTS
LOUISVILLE, Ky (BP) – The foundation for Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s curriculum by which it trains ministers may be boiled down to one truth, President Albert Mohler said Thursday (Feb. 2) in his annual spring convocation address: God has spoken.
Speaking on Isaiah 40:1-5, Mohler said that the most important truth humans can know is that “the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” The existence of the self-revealing God is the irreducible foundation for the entire Christian faith. Thus, those truths undergird every class and every program in Southern Seminary’s curriculum. Convocation service was held Thursday after it was postponed Tuesday due to inclement weather.
“In the college and seminary, we are unashamedly and unabashedly committed to the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” Mohler said. “And we only know what it (the faith) is because He is there, and He is not silent. We only have a clue what Christianity is because He is there, and He is not silent. We have no way to know what is right belief and what is wrong belief except for this: He is there, and He is not silent.
“We don’t know what to teach. We don’t know what to accept. We only know what is right to convey to others and what is right to give to the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in the feeding of the flock because He is there, and He is not silent; both of those sentences are absolutely necessary.”
Mohler said God calls all faithful churches and Christian institutions to embrace, proclaim and teach the centrality of divine revelation in the Bible and the climax of that revelation in the Messiah, the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ. Because Southern Seminary is Scripture-centered, it is also Christ-centered, he said.
“There would be no church if God didn’t speak, and in these days, He has spoken in His Son,” Mohler said. “In the Son, the Father speaks redemption. In this passage (Isaiah 40), it is about the prophetic Word where the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
Without the Word of God, there would be no reason for Southern Seminary to exist, Mohler said, because there would be nothing to say about God.
“We are able to do what we do here for only one reason: the Word of God is, the Word of God stands, the Word of God endures forever. Otherwise, we would have no idea what to teach; our curriculum would be nothing but a vapor. Frankly, it would be artificial. It might be accidentally helpful because it would accidentally correspond with the truth. We don’t want to accidentally correspond with truth, we just want to teach truth.
“We don’t apologize for the centrality of the Bible in the curriculum of the institution. We don’t apologize for the fact that, if we didn’t do anything else, we would do biblical studies. If we did nothing else, we would just turn to the Word of God. We have to start with the Bible because we have no other place to start.”
