Doggedly and Patiently Organizing Toward Victory
My church body, The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, has, since the time of Billy Graham, been called a “sleeping giant” in American religious life and politics. Its influence is large (nearly 2 million members), but mostly concentrated in areas where Germans settled. Its politics are conservative, but generally German-immigrants and Lutherans are less active and more deferential in politics; few LCMS members hold national office.
The Southern Baptist Convention is a living giant. It is the largest Protestant church body in the world’s largest Protestant country. What happens in its seminaries and its churches has a profound influence on American religious life. Its politics are conservative, and its members hold office in larger numbers than the LCMS.
The LCMS and SBC are organized quite differently. LCMS organizes independent congregations (which call their own pastors, for instance) within a synod. Congregations unite with one another through a shared confession of faith. Synod hierarchy facilitates cooperation, puts together a roster of pastors, and conducts oversight. Congregations united through Synod to build the Concordia system, the LCMS grouping of universities and colleges. Presidents of colleges and seminaries are chosen by boards of trustees and must be approved by the Synod presidents–and they must hew to the Augsburg Confession or face consequences from Synod. Same with the two seminaries.
In comparison, SBC is a decentralized network of fully independent and self-governing churches. These autonomous congregational churches call their own pastors and, within the boundaries of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, have leeway to adopt different doctrinal commitments and practices for themselves. The SBC is an interesting mixture of unity in diversity, conscribed by certain guardrails, which appear to be increasingly less enforced today than they should be. The president is important, but has no authority in overseeing congregations. Donations fund common missions and seminaries. Its six seminary presidents are selected by boards of trustees appointed by the SBC in convention, but the SBC president has no veto power over these selections. Congregations can be excluded from the convention for heterodoxy, like in 2023 when several were booted for having female pastors.
These differences are important. The Left tried to take over the LCMS in the 1950s and 1960s (the Seminex episode). Since the LCMS has a broadly empowered centralized synod, acting under policies from the convention, determined presidential leadership was necessary to beat back and reverse the Left’s gains. Winning the Synod presidency meant having a working majority in convention, and that working majority sustained determined efforts to investigate, fire, and replace heterodox professors at a prominent seminary. Over the course of a decade, boards of trustees were replaced; orthodox professors identified and hired; heterodox district presidents were ousted. LCMS has, with some hiccups, been moving rightward since. Its oversight over universities and seminaries has, in a sense, never been more orthodox than it is today (but there is always work to do).
The Left has been attacking the SBC pretty continuously for decades. It is a large, important prize. The SBC’s decentralized structure seems to insulate individual churches from the Left’s efforts. The Left must corrupt many institutions and disseminate much bad doctrine to individual churches. The Left has undertaken such efforts. Lefty groups produce liberal content for individual pastors, church curriculum for individual churches, and abet the election of liberals in convention, as long as liberals are willing to play at conservatism in convention. The SBC’s lobbying arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), has been captured. (See here, here, here). Many of its seminaries and colleges are captured or nearly captured by progressive liberal activists hiding behind the fig leaf of their signature next to conservative theological commitments. Call them “theoretical inerrantists.”
SBC churches may react to such institutional capture by retreating into their self-governing individual churches. At least our church is not corrupt! A strategy of retreat, however, will kill the SBC in the long-term. Even a decentralized church body like the SBC needs common institutions to promote the gospel, to train pastors, to educate faithful children, and to build a Christian culture through advocacy.
For this, lessons from the LCMS may be useful, since the LCMS has a conservative majority ready for action.
First, sufficient concern for the corruption of institutions must be built within the SBC. For the LCMS, laymen became concerned when they found out seminary professors denied the inerrancy of scripture, just as the “Battle of the Bible” was happening in the SBC, too. Working majorities in convention must be forged around similar issues for the SBC. My recommendation would be to target one or two institutions with particularly egregious problems–ERLC, especially, and one seminary, perhaps. The rifle works better than the shotgun when building a case in a decentralized church body.
Second, working majorities at the SBC convention must be formed and sustained through the selection of messengers. In LCMS, this organization of conservative congregations runs deep and generally allows for the control of Synod conventions.
Third, these working majorities must have a plan of action and a list of approved leaders. In the LCMS, acceptable orthodox candidates for Synod offices and boards have been vetted and assembled onto a list of candidates, driving LCMS liberals crazy. The SBC must create similar lists of candidates who are aligned, serious, competent, and ambitious (but not necessarily experienced!) for relevant boards. For SBC, this means having a list of candidates, vetted and aligned, for positions on relevant boards of trustees for seminaries and colleges and for overseeing missions and for overseeing ERLC.
Fourth, define success and doggedly pursue it despite the costs. It is easy to think that experienced leaders are best, but too often, experience means being steeped in the wrong kind of ideology. In the LCMS, our seminaries had great publication records as they were being corrupted; laudets poured in from Princeton Seminary and the New York Times for the enlightenment of our seminary professors. It was necessary to scorn the world’s standards and embrace God’s standards when cleaning house. This comes with costs. The new LCMS professors were orthodox, but not necessarily great teachers, for example. The SBC may experience the same reform pains. That is the price for orthodoxy.
Christian denominations will continually be under attack from the world and the devil. The SBC must have a plan for combating these attacks, just as the LCMS has had. None is foolproof. Many are band-aids. But there is no substitute for staying and doggedly and patiently organizing toward victory.
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