[1]LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)–The Southern Baptist Convention may be “off the scale of political correctness,” but it will stay the course even if “faithfulness requires the slings and arrows of outraged opponents,” wrote R. Albert Mohler Jr. in a June 19 op-ed piece in The New York Times.
Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky., addressed the recent changes made to the SBC’s Baptist Faith and Message statement of beliefs that were overwhelmingly approved by messengers to the June 13-14 SBC annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.
Mohler said the messengers democratically reaffirmed traditional SBC beliefs by passing a revised confession of faith, restating SBC beliefs, urging Christians to oppose racism and stating that the office of pastor in the SBC “is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
In response to questions about why the SBC denounces abortion and homosexuality while supporting the traditional roles for women, Mohler explained that the convention is rooted in the Word of God, not popular culture.
“The answer is that as the culture moves steadily away from a biblical morality, our 16 million members and 41,000 churches are applying the brakes,” Mohler wrote.
“Southern Baptists know they are in a race against time and the direction of the culture,” he continued. “As issues like homosexual marriage, abortion, euthanasia and attacks upon the natural family have exploded, Baptists have held themselves captive to God’s word.”
[2]Mohler pointed out that so-called moderates have mostly left the convention, forming shadow organizations, “each of which emerges with a larger letterhead and smaller numbers.”
The SBC, on the other hand, has become “the evangelical behemoth, more than twice the size of any other Protestant body, with congregations in all 50 states and 1,000 new churches each year.”
“To the cultured critics of religion,” he wrote, “we are the cantankerous holdouts against the inevitable. But so far as the Southern Baptist Convention is concerned, the future is in God’s hands.”