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Tyler and Jemar are joined with SBC Pastor Earon James to discuss the controversy that surrounded the Southern Baptist Convention’s 2017 annual meeting.
Jemar
It feels like theological policing. That an African American pastor in good standing authored this resolution, it was deemed-the wording was deemed-too inflammatory, confrontational, however you want to describe it. And so, a group of mostly white men has to rewrite it? And that’s the one that gets passed? That’s troublesome to me.
It became something that would not ruffle the feathers of a majority of messengers there.
We need to do an autopsy of this whole event. And figure out cause of death. Why was this resolution killed in committee in the first place? Why did it take the outcry, mainly of African Americans, and on social media, to bring this to the level of attention that it got?
This is the household of God and there’s supposed to be a sense of supernatural unity. Which is why, when you feel that otherness, it hurts so bad & it gets so exhausting.
Earon
If we were willing to settle for the window dressing version, for just simply the aesthetics of multi ethnic community, than that would be a lot easier. But that’s not what we’re after because that’s not the biblical model. The biblical model is when there is, not simply different ethnicities worshiping together, but when white believers are able and willing to submit to black leadership. When there is genuine mixture of cultures that are expressed in worship from a liturgical standpoint. When church staffs, and worship teams or choirs, really mirror that. And that is genuinely a hard road.
I could not help but see it as a link in a chain of events that stretches back for centuries.
I’m not waiting forever. It is not the design of God for Christians to live in a subservient manner to other Christians culturally, liturgically, ecclesiologically, any other way in the context of Christian community. That is not the design of God, that is not the nature of his kingdom. So, quite simply, something has to give.
Tyler
What’s the end game? Is the end game just to exist for the hope of racial reconciliation? Or is the end game to see measurable acceptance?
The question is, when presented with the evidence do you fully and totally and completely repent and forsake it?
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