CHARLESTON, S.C. (BP)–An American church infiltrated by the culture’s declining sexual standards can still make a difference by proclaiming and applying God’s Word, speakers declared at the annual seminar of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
In several addresses March 2-4 at a seminar focusing on the theme, “The Family & Human Sexuality: Reaffirming God’s Design,” speakers counted the cost of a sexual revolution that has engulfed American society. They called on the church to restore crippled individuals and families.
“We have let the world sell us a cheap bill of goods,” said Ed Young, pastor of Second Baptist Church, Houston, of many in the church who have adopted society’s view of sexuality.
Such a godless approach to sex will affect all areas of culture, Young said. “We will all be splattered by it,” he said. “Don’t think you will be safe in your gated communities or the suburbs or behind the stained glass of our churches.”
Speakers provided plenty of evidence of the detrimental impact distorted views of sex and marriage are having on the culture.
The risks of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease “are enormously more . than they ever have been,” said sexual health specialist Joe McIlhaney. As evidence, he said:
— 12 million Americans get a new STD infection each year;
— Five of the 10 most frequently reported infectious diseases in the United States are STDs;
— There are more than 25 significant STDs today, while there were only two before 1960.
Linda Keener, executive director of a Chattanooga, Tenn., crisis pregnancy center, cited a recent report showing 43 percent of American women will have an abortion in their lifetime.
National Fatherhood Initiative President Wade Horn said:
— Nearly four of 10 children do not have a father at home;
— It is estimated six of 10 children born in the United States in the 1990s will spend a “significant portion of their childhood” in a home without their father.
Only 55 percent of American adults are married — the lowest percentage ever, said columnist and author Michael McManus. His wife, Harriet, said, “Marriage is a neglected topic in our churches. We talk about weddings. Pastors perform weddings. Yet a wedding is for a day; a marriage is for a lifetime.”
South Carolina pastor Hal Lane said in one of the five sessions, “The biblical church must make the task of affirming the biblical family one of its most important and sacred duties. Never before has it been more important for the church to teach the biblical view of marriage and family.”
Among the ways the church can strengthen the family, Lane said, are by preaching and teaching what the Bible says about marriage and by upholding biblical standards of church leadership.
While the church should help the family, the government should make sure to not harm the family, said South Carolina Gov. David Beasley.
Speaking about applying his Christian faith to public policy, Beasley said government in recent decades has designed well-intentioned programs that “tore apart” the family. “Here was government, an ordained institution of God, trying to break apart another institution of God,” he said, while the church “was sitting back on the sideline not being salt and light.”
“Government isn’t the answer to all of our problems. The state should allow families to do what God wants for them, not what the government wants for them,” Beasley said.
A seminary professor challenged the leadership of the ERLC and the Southern Baptist Convention to attack the problem of sexual abuse.
The convention’s leadership needs to speak out and act on behalf of women and children “who are sexually abused, neglected and forgotten,” said Paul House, Old Testament professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The SBC needs to exert purposeful leadership that goes “beyond perennially important matters such as marriage and family, homosexuality and heterosexuality, divorce, chastity and promiscuity,” he said.
“Let me be blunt,” House said. “The SBC must do more to expose pedophiles, urge their prosecution and expose how utterly evil individuals are who rape our children, damage our marriages and foul our culture. I pray that Southern Baptists will act before a generation of our children rises up and condemns us for remaining silent, soothing ourselves with the notion that everybody is against child abuse and there is not much we can do.”
Another issue Christians need to address is pornography, ERLC President Richard Land said.
“One reason we have been as susceptible as a society to pornography as we have is that far too often in the history of the American church, particularly in conservative churches, we have shied away from teaching the full biblical revelation concerning human sexuality,” Land said.
“If ‘salt of the earth’ means anything, it means burning this cancer out of our nation. It will not happen unless we insist that it happen. .(T)he future of our children and our grandchildren and the future of our nation is at stake.”
Christians “must fight these battles” against the tide of sexual immorality, said Barrett Duke, the ERLC’s director of denominational relations. “I understand that we must love the sinner and give him time to repent, but I also know that while we are being patient the very attitudes and lifestyles that these people are promoting are stealing our children, and it must stop.”
Famous sex researcher Alfred Kinsey provided the fraudulent data used to liberalize laws against sex crimes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution, said researcher and author Judith Reisman. Not only has it been confirmed recently by his own institute Kinsey was a homosexual and masochist, she said, but his fraudulently obtained findings were designed to produce his “major accomplishment” — a liberalization of laws on fornication, adultery, rape, molestation and even abortion.
Fatherhood needs to be recaptured in the society, in part by men following God’s example, Horn said. Men “don’t have to write (their) own fatherhood script. We have a model of what a good father is.
“A good father, a biblical father, must be love, the embodiment of love for his children,” he said. “Such biblical fatherhood combines love with discipline, compassion with justice.”
In speaking on biblical womanhood, Dorothy Patterson, wife of Southeastern Seminary President Paige Patterson, said God’s plan is “for a woman with a ‘gentle and quiet spirit’ who ‘fears the Lord’ to link her life to and submit herself to a man who ‘loves her as Christ loved the church’ and who accordingly, as a servant-leader, provides for and protects her.” Such a marriage, she said, is “a fail-safe combination that enables the home and the relationships within its confines to be a divine metaphor for God’s revelation of himself to his creation.”
Other speakers at the seminar were former homosexual Michael Johnston and evangelist Rick Stanley.
The unofficial total attendance for the seminar was about 275. The evening sessions of the seminar were held at Citadel Square Baptist Church, while the daytime sessions were at the Francis Marion Hotel.
King Sanders contributed to this article.
