I have been a life long Southern Baptist, and have heard my whole life about how simple and easy Salvation is. A decision, a quick prayer and the deed is done. You get dunked later on and you get to eat the cracker and drink grape juice from a little thimble looking cup. It’s easy and simple, yet as I look at the words of Jesus, I see some things that scare me, some things that make me think we are doing things the wrong way.

In Luke 9, Jesus shares the cost of being a follower, He said that “no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (vs 62). Jesus told us the road to Salvation is narrow, few find it. That only 1 in 4 seeds bear fruit. In Luke 9:23-25 Jesus tells us to be a disciple, we must take up our cross and follow, losing life to gain it. This seems like it’s not as easy as we have tried to pretend it is.  Jesus shared with His disciples that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. We live in one of the richest nations on earth. Jesus tells us that Salvation isn’t easy.

We have also seemed to miss the requirement of the word we use so frequently. We say “make Jesus your Lord”, but we don’t tell people to make Him Lord. We say “confess Him as Lord”, and act like it means if we just say “oh ya, He’s Lord” but don’t make Him Lord it’s ok. Lord means boss, chief, master, ruler, guy in charge. It means we give up anything, everything, we change our lives, our actions. Sure, it happens gradually as sanctification happens, but it happens. We don’t see it happening in scripture someday or eventually. Fishermen left nets, tax collectors came out of trees and gave stuff away, Gentiles spoke in tongues and lives demonstrated the power of God’s transformation. It didn’t take months and years, transformation started immediately.

Now of course there are plenty who figure out how to fake it for a while. Many said the right words, but Jesus was never Lord. 1 John 2:19 talks about those who were with us but not of us because the walked away. They walked away to show who they really were.  How many of our weekend prayer reciters walk away? I will admit that I have led many in prayer and never saw them again. Maybe they moved or found another church, or maybe they went out to show who they are.

It gets even more complicated because Jesus said that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” gets into Heaven. If they said Lord, isn’t that confessing Jesus as Lord? Isn’t that our prerequisite? Jesus said that saying it doesn’t equate to doing it. Even worse, these people did some stuff after confessing. The preached (prophesied) and did ministry (cast out demons) in the name of Christ. They talked to people about God and stood up in front of people and did ministry, these were not Sunday-go-to-meeting people, these were leaders. They are pastors, elders, deacons and they will spend eternity in hell. Why?  Because they don’t know Jesus as Lord, they only know Him as guy they do stuff for. Sure, they can get excited and yell and scream, but so can a Muslim. They blow themselves up for their God, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Jesus tells us it’s hard, the road is hard, the gate is narrow, few find it. The soil is often hard or rocky or full of thorns, and it’s really hard for rich people to get too. On top of that, if you won’t give up everything, don’t even bother. If you are gonna look back, just stay home.  This doesn’t sound like what I hear on a Sunday Morning.  Jesus said if you are gonna be a disciple, you should count the cost. Shouldn’t we be honest with people, tell them the cost, or are we trying to sell them a used car? Just a thought.

Today I want to address an issue I have seen in Sunday Schools all over. There seems to be a conflict about how to make disciples and teach and have deep learning, yet be open group and grow your Sunday School and church at the same time. I want to propose my suggestion to you today. If I was building a program, this is how I would set it up.

First, and I have said this over and over, Sunday School needs to have a 3 fold function of fellowship/connecting people, teaching them scripture, and sharing the Gospel/ outreach. With this function Sunday School needs to be fluid, open group with basic teaching. I know some hairs bristled at the idea of basic teaching, but stick with me, we will get there. The Sunday School classes need to be growing and changing, people coming in and people going out to do other ministry. They are fluid, so each lesson needs to stand on it’s own. Don’t make a plan to build a class of 25 people who will stay together for 20 years. Plan for 8 people who will someday make up 8 classes of 10 people.  Plan to grow and expand.

Make departments, not classes. Focus on building a department full of classes, with a department head. Make a Young Adult department, encourage them to coordinate between classes, have activities together and do ministry as a department. Grow that department, add classes and teachers and workers. Think bigger and more forward.

Build a ministry based on a philosophy of reaching people, teaching them about God’s word and growing them into community. We have to change the mindset that we can put people into a 50 minute Sunday School and have them come out mature disciples. Stay with me here, what I am going to suggest next I think is the key and the answer. You can disagree with me, but this is what I’ve seen and experienced.

Mature believers have no business sitting in a Sunday School. The key to maturing believers in Sunday School is service. The structure I proposed and will continue to propose needs people to serve. To grow classes and keep them at the optimal range of 8 to 12 people, you need a lot of teachers. Each class should have a teacher, an assistant or apprentice, a prayer coordinator, a secretary and maybe a fellowship coordinator. Each department needs a department head, a secretary and an activities coordinator. The entire Sunday School needs a director, secretary and activities coordinator. You should have a person or group working on outreach and evangelism connected to Sunday School. Classes need to contact, visit and reach out. There is a lot to be done, and the people need to be mobilized. Real discipleship happens while serving. The Bible teaching is important, but if you want people to go deep, have them teach.

Remember, the goal of Sunday School is life transformation the other 6 days a week. We are not teaching simple facts, we are giving people the opportunity to discover something that will change their lives, then asking them to use it. They use it in service. If someone is a mature believer, they need to be in service. Everyone can do something, they can pray or send a postcard. Even your children need service roles and opportunities.

In addition to Sunday School, I recommend a Small Group or Discipleship training time to do some more in depth, closed material. I recommend people together for 1 on 1 mentoring, for closed small group discipleship and mission projects in addition to Sunday School. This gives them a chance to learn, and to apply what they have learned, and help your church achieve the mission of going and making disciples.  I pray your SS is growing, vibrant and healthy. If you would like consultation on your Sunday School, please email me at jdanbarnes@yahoo.com.

This has been said before, and I’m not the first to say it, but today I want to get out a soap box. You can disagree with me, tell me I’m wrong and crazy, but this is something I feel strongly about. In the SBC, we are the “people of the Book” and we say the Bible is sufficient, but there is one area I see we don’t live it. I have torn a page out of the handbook for cooperate America and grafted it in our New Testament. That is this fascination with purpose statements, mission statements, vision casting and marketing. It’s become ludicrous how much we would rather look like GE or IBM than like the body of Christ.

OK, here is issue number one, and for me it’s a biggie. Jesus is the head, He’s the boss. He’s in charge of the entire church from the universal down to the local church level. Jesus is the head, the boss, the man in charge, He gave us our mission and purpose. What business do we have rewriting what the boss already gave? Great Commission, it’s the vision, it’s the purpose, that’s it. We don’t need to recraft one, Jesus wrote it and it’s sufficient. Did Jesus botch it? Do we need to fix what Jesus wrote? We get all antsy that Jesus didn’t include the 5 Purposes, if they were that important, Jesus would have said it. Pastor Rick Warren is a nice guy, met him a few years ago, but he’s not Jesus. Jesus gave us Mission, Purpose, Vision, wrapped it all up. If you need more, throw in Acts 1:8.

Number two we do vision casting, a vision caught from the Pastor and giving control from Christ to the lead pastor. I believe that God will lead and speak too a pastor, but I also believe in the priesthood of the believer, a plurality of elders, individuals who hear from God. I believe in cooperate prayer and God moving His body. I have seen pastors become tyrants in their visions, moving churches to bankruptcy, division, even death. Peach the Word fellas, stop using scripture to promote your agenda. God will cast vision in the people through His word, and it will cause much less division.

Third, cooperate expansion. How we love the mega church. It’s big business, we love to promote our mega church pastors cause big church = success. If at the end of three years you are abandoned and people want you put to death, you have failed. Yes, that wasn’t subtle at all. Jesus would be a failure in our modern paradigm. The new movement is muti-site, multi campus so we can lead and be in control of bigger and better. We want our vision, our mission, our leadership and our strategy to be spread, after all, we are successful, right? We have adopted a cooperate/franchise model of success where more money and more people is a win.  That isn’t what I see in the New Testament, I see Paul training new leaders, leaving them in charge, encouraging them, teaching them, but planting new churches.  We need to give new leaders and new churches an opportunity to reach new people.

OK, last one I promise. We are totally in love with Christian books on how to grow a church like a business or a sports team. We use cooperate training, cooperate alignment, cooperate principles and we have strayed from New Testament. Our churches have personnel teams, yearly employee reviews, internships. I understand the need for these things, but each step brings us closer to being Church Inc. Pastors and Leaders are now simply paid employees trying to please the clients and no longer serving Jesus. There is high pressure for results, for growth and baptisms, so we throw out Spirit leadership and rely on new methods. We need achievement, so we fire the coaching staff, get a new quarterback and redo the playbook. All the while, are we really being people of the Book, or have we found a new set of rules.

I once heard Francis Chan ask, if a group of people were stranded on an Island with only the NT, and came to America having only the NT to guide their understanding of the church, would they recognise what we do as church? What would the church look like today if you only used the Word, and not 200 years of American tradition? I don’t think we would work so hard to craft a purpose statement. Do you?

Today I was talking to a friend about my faults. I have many, and one of them is my lack of motivation for things I don’t see as important or worthwhile. If I have something to do that I know I should do, but fail to see it as valuable, effective or fruitful, I have a hard time doing. I am definitely the student who said “why do I have to learn this if I’m never gonna use it”. I am working on just doing what I need to do, even if I think it’s pointless, but I find the number of kindred spirits growing. My generation, the Xers and the generations to follow seem more than unmotivated, they seem unwilling to do things they don’t find valuable.

This is impacting churches, we are seeing individuals leaving church and the main reason is, they don’t see value in Sunday Morning. They don’t feel the message is valuable, they don’t feel like they are really connecting with people, they don’t feel like the worship time is of value, and they would rather stay home.  They are uninterested and disengaged. They want authenticity, they are finding it in Bible Study at home, in groups of friends but not at church. Why? Here are a few of my thoughts, feel free to disagree.

1. We have stopped being real. Sunday Morning is a great time for everyone to play the role of Happy Christian, because our people judge each other, gossip and slander. People are afraid to admit problems at church because they “prayer chain” will ignite with stories of “can you believe that. . . .”  Christians often eat their wounded, so we hide the wounds and act like we have it all together. I admit, I’ve done it, it’s easier than having people tell me how to fix my problems.

2. We fix everything. We, Jesus is the answer, but we have stopped listening to the question. When a 27 year old guy says “I can’t make my marriage work” we will tell him all the things he needs to do better. Guess what, he’s not coming back. He doesn’t need Dr. Phil, he needs a Paul and he is longing to be Timothy. He needs support, not advice.  We have advice, and lots of it.

3. We think of the church as the only activity in people’s lives. I have been on full time staff, I have spent most of my waking hours in the church, it’s easy to forget people don’t live to come to church. Guess what, they don’t. Jesus came to the temple often, but most of His ministry was in communities, on the roads and off the beaten path. He called guys down from trees, talked to a woman at a well, almost got thrown off a cliff, taught on a hill, out of a boat and fed people when town was too far. He did ministry out, do we expect people to spend so much time in the building they don’t have time for ministry? That lacks some authenticity, if we value our communities, let’s serve them.

Now this isn’t an exhaustive list, and others have written far better works on this subject. Check out Millennials By Dr Rainer, great stuff.  Today I wanted to share this because it’s on my heart. I want to be more like Jesus, more authentic and less guarded, hidden and secret. I hope you’ll join me.

We are waist deep in a new focus on discipleship, but I want to touch an issue that I am seeing in our new “culture of discipleship”. We are working hard to make a packaged product that we can use, calling it multiplication and reproduction, but it’s more like cloning. Reproducing disciples is good, cloning however is not working.

We can see the difference with a simple look at biology. In reproduction, a new individual is created that has similarities to the parents, but is unique. This new individual has opportunity to grow and mature in it’s own way. It’s a unique person. Cloning however is different. It takes an individual and makes an exact copy in an attempt to recreate the first individual. There is no room for individuality, just duplication. In our discipleship, I am seeing more and more and more corporate modeling, we use works like alignment and unity, but often we are attempting to make clones, people who do what we would do, when and how, with the same ideas, the same passions and the same expected outcomes. We want our disciples to do what we want, how we want it done and when we think it should be done.

This leads us back to a very old issue. We want to be with people like us, we assume people think like us and act like us. We want people to have our priorities, visions and expectations. We spend a great deal of time pushing others to be more like us. Discipleship should be helping others to be more like Christ. During the process of discipling others, we should be continuing to be transformed into the image of Christ. We should look more like Christ, but also be functioning as our part of the body. We have to disciple others to become their part of the body. A hand should teach a foot to relate to the head, a hand shouldn’t teach a foot to be a hand. If we do, we become frustrated because the foot can’t be a hand, and the foot is not equipped to be a foot.

So, what discipleship should be is training in proper use of the Word. We should teach others how to read, study and apply scripture. We should teach them how to pray, how to love and care. We encourage these things, we model these things. We take disciples with us and show them how we serve, understanding they may never serve in the area that we do. We should not spend time teaching them to do what we do, guilting them into serving where we think they should serve or making specific life decisions that fit our agenda. We want to create followers of Christ who are also followers of us and are made in our image. This mode of discipleship, cloning may be a great resource in the corporate world, but in the church, I believe it is causing a great amount of destruction. I one heard something attributed to Spurgeon that Christ used two vessels on the night of the Passover. A cup of wine to drink and a basin of water to wash feet. Spurgeon says we need to let the cup be the cup and the basin be the basin. If you are a cup, disciple basins and not just cups.

Sunday School is an old program that is out of date and has many holes. It requires space for classrooms and teacher training and plans and development. It can be hard to staff, hard to manage, and hard to find space. You should absolutely find a way to tackle these issues and have a Sunday School program. Many churches are moving to small group programs, and by all means have small groups, but don’t give up on Sunday School.

Here is why.

1. Sunday School is for the family. Sunday School should be age graded and ideally use a family oriented curriculum. This means that every class is talking about a similar theme or topic. This gives parents the opportunity to discuss the topic with their children, even through different ages and classes. There should be a class for every age and stage in life, giving everyone in the family a class. I have asked many Pastors and Small Group leaders in churches with great small groups what to do with kids. In all the answers, I have seen one trend. Small Group is often (not always) for adults. Sunday School is for everyone, and it disciples babies (yes, they have material) through adults.

2. Sunday School is at the right time. Most people in the US still associate Church with Sunday mornings. They think about that as the time frame for church and often have it open to attend. The people at your church who are not in Sunday School is your first area of enlistment. You can build a solid program with who you have. Then, believe it or not, Sunday School is a good, solid place to bring and invite people too. That is because of point #3.

3. Sunday School is (or should be) open group. This means that this weeks lesson stands alone, it doesn’t require you too have been here last week. Many Small Group Bible Studies build on the lessons week to week. You use information from last week in this weeks lesson. That is awesome and needs to happen for good discipleship, but it should happen in Sunday School. You want someone who walks into your church for the first time to feel like they fit in the class they attend. The open group setting is a perfect place to invite people, to connect with people and grow and learn.

4. Sunday School reaches beyond Sunday Morning. The most effective classes have fellowships and activities, missions and outreach. They support each other, enjoy one another and work beside each other. The smaller group that is age graded is effective for this type of activity. Preschoolers can learn about the local food bank on a field trip, High School class can do a food drive, and the adults can volunteer at the food bank. Groups can have Christmas parties and summer BBQs. These are fun, and give a great place to invite people to connect. People are drawn to these activities and want to be part of a group that is changing the world.

5. Sunday School has possibilities. Don’t be limited by space, be creative. Find the unused space. College and Career classes and adult classes who are empty nesters can meet in a nearby coffee shop or a home. Use all the space you have, get your money’s worth out of every square foot of your building. Have classes in the kitchen, in the hall way. I once offered to teach a men’s class in the men’s restroom. Make the space, make it happen.

6. there are great resources. You probably know that LifeWay was once known as The Sunday School Board. LifeWay offers much more than Sunday School material, but they have excellent material, that is their foundation. David Francis has written great material on how to do amazing things through Sunday School. Josh Hunt has some great resources to grow your church through Sunday School and how to have a powerful Sunday School. There are so many great books and materials, trainings and helps, it’s a ministry with 100+ years of backing.

If this hasn’t convinced you to do Sunday School, write me at jdanbarnes@yahoo.com and I will help you develop a comprehensive Sunday School plan to help your church grow and reach people. It’s a powerful ministry and too important to ignore.

I doubt it. As tempted as I am to leave that as the entire blog, I will explain my thoughts. I think we as the SBC have become stagnant. There are some alive, vibrant churches out there, but as a whole, we have become still water. The push and pull and twist and tug have all negated each other and movement has stopped. Here are the root issues as I see them (this is my opinion).

1. The move to be missional has become a drive to reach people like us. Let’s face it, the world has changed and we haven’t. We are still fighting about hymns and organs, using powerpoint and under use online tech. We don’t use the tech advances in one line content, cloud tech and streaming media effectively. The modern tech using person doesn’t want to sit in a church service for 60 to 90 minutes. They want a focused time with a focused message. They want a class or a worship service or a time of prayer. The Baptist Liturgy includes preaching, teaching, worship, evangelism, prayer and anything else we need to do. We wouldn’t even discuss breaking that apart to reach others.  We wouldn’t even consider changing the service.  We still fight over Sunday night service, no one messes with Sunday morning. We don’t like to change, so we want the people to be like us, so we don’t have too.

2. We do too much for us, even if we claim it’s for others. Look at our buildings. Who are they for? They are for the people in the building. We hope more people come into our building, but we want a nice place to do the stuff we want to do. We do the ministries we like and feel called too.  We do lots of stuff for our own comfort, assuming others will like the same things we do, and will come. If we like the building, so will they. If we like the music, so will they. If we like the preaching, so will they, so we open the doors and wait for the people. Unfortunately, they are not like us.

3. We don’t like theology. Most of the theological discussions in the SBC consists of people throwing preconviced notions at one another without listening. We only listen, read or pay attention to find something we can disagree with. We seldom hear each other out, and refuse to admit we could be wrong. We are stubborn and don’t want to listen. There is little to no chance of a compromise in the convention, because it’s us against them. Our doctrines are weak because we want to include everyone to the point we are barely able to articulate what our churches really stand for. We use the Bible like the 9th circuit court uses the constitution, we make it say what fits our ideas and ignore the rest. We claim to be a people of the book, but won’t use the whole cannon in context, if we did we could come to some theological commonality. I refuse to believe that God’s word is so vague that we can’t find doctrinal unity. We just choose not to use the word with diligence. The early church had doctrinal unity, but now we have too many “scholars”. If we are to be conformed to Christ, have the mind of Christ, why are we so divided? Is Christ divided?

4. We are angry people. We have yelling pastors, angry deacons, name calling bloggers, sarcasm at conventions, divisions and factions and all sorts of negative press. We have a tendency to be less than desirable around during business meetings. I have been yelled at by preachers, leaders, DOMs, deacons and lots of members over things like music, budget and changes (like adding a service). Change stuff, we get mad.

I’m sure it all boils down to pride and selfishness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling you selfish, so don’t get mad at me. No one wants to be called selfish or angry or prideful or unteachable. I know I wouldn’t want to be called out, but I ask myself, am I those things? Yes, I struggle with being selfish and angry and not wanting to change. I assume others will (or should) think like I do and agree with every word. I assume I’m right, or I wouldn’t say it. I have to be willing to change, and it’s hard. It’s called transformation, reformation, restoration. Can we do it?

I was looking at Genesis today, and noticed something I had taken for granted. Ever notice what was there before God starts to create? The first thing God created was light, the energy that is radiated from a light source, God created light before the sun and the stars, He of course is the original light source. For light to exist, it had to be created. If you go back, you see before there was light, it was dark. This is sort of a “duh” sort of thing, if there is no light, it’s dark. Darkness, however, exists before creation, it’s not a created thing. It is, in fact, the absence of a thing. It’s not stated, but cold probably existed before creation because God created the sources of heat. Darkness is the absence of light, cold is the absence of heat, when there is no light, there is total darkness, no heat is absolute zero.

So, did God create evil? We are a society who believes more and more in duality, but are good and evil really opposing forces? Light and dark seem to be, yet there is no power in dark, just it’s existence without light. We don’t let cold in, we simply let heat out, the absence is then cold. It is not the cold floor we feel, it’s the heat leaving our feet, flowing from areas of high concentration to low concentration. Evil then is not a dual force, but the absence of the good.

In the garden, God created good in the form of obedience. Adam and Eve had no knowledge of good and evil, yet they did good and were able to walk with God. They were simply good, and by being obedient they were good. In the moment of sin, they chose to forsake good, leaving the void where good once was. God did not create evil, just as He didn’t create darkness, it is the void left in the absence of good.  Simply put, evil exists where there is no good.  This was an ah ha moment, when I realized something. Energy is required to create both heat and light. Without an energy source, there is no heat, there is no light and cold and darkness reign.

Evil too has the presence of cold and shadow. Even with the brightest flashlight, it is dark everywhere the beam doesn’t shine. You lose heat the farther you get from the source. The energy must be present, or the emptiness will fill the void. God has given His energy to His elect, just as Romans 8:33 says “Who will bring charges against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.” His power is poured into our lives, as long as we use the power that flows in. There is an outlet, there is a blast heater. There is a powerful light source, ready to be switched on. The lost world doesn’t have it, they walk in darkness with cold hearts. Will the children of God let the heat go out and shut off the light?

My undergraduate work was in English Literature, and so I tend to see the world in more literary terms. Ya, I’m sorta nerdy like that. One thing that I have really begun to see is the meta-narrative issue leading people astray.  You probably have read that our good friend Rob Bell support same gender marriage.  How did Rob get to this place? I think it’s the danger of the meta-narrative.

What happens with the meta-narrative is it connects all things into one big ongoing story. We are linked in one big plot progression. The danger of the meta-narrative is it makes the entire story dynamic. Simply stated, everything is connected and therefore can progress and change. This includes the interpretation of scripture and the redefinition of our value system. Homosexuality may have been a sin in Ancient Israel, but the meta-narrative says as time progresses, those values can change, and since God is love, He becomes more accepting.

We fall into danger when we begin to define God apart from His revelation of Himself. When God spoke to Moses and said I Am Who I Am, there was a definitive statement made, God just is. Time and space and values and opinions have no effect. God is not subject to the idea of the meta-narrative, and God is not progressive. There is nothing about God that needs too or will change, He just Is!  The meta-narrative tries to put God as a character of the story who changes and learns and becomes more.

We can’t define or redefine God, and the truth of who God is will never change.  We can toss to and fro with opinions, ideas, understandings, theologies, and creeds, but it will never change who God is. To find the truth I believe we must reject the notion of the meta-narrative with God as participant and embrace the unchanging, eternal, limitless and perfectly complete nature of I Am.

I have been out of the blog-o-sphere for a little while, dropping a few things on my personal blog.  I am slowing creeping back, trying to be careful.  In my time away, I have been in some great discussions and there is something that is clawing at my mind.  I am as waist deep in this Calvinism/Traditionalism debate as anyone.  If you are familiar with my writings or my theology, you know I am a Wovenist, the first and maybe only Wovenist.  There are things I have written here and there, but many would say that I am much closer to the Calvinist side.  I believe in the elect, in predestination, I affirm most of the Calvinistic points, my theological difference is how I see time working and how God acts in, out and through time.  That’s another blog.  Let’s just suffice it to say I’m not a Traditionalist.

In this whole scenario, great people are trying to help us work together.  Guys like Dr. Frank Page who I think is one of the most humble yet brilliant men in the SBC, yet he and I are not on the same theological page.  There are lots of guys who I think are great, wonderful men of God, yet the theology they teach makes me nervous.  So yes, you can go ahead and slap the label on me of a Calvinist who thinks I’m  right (but I’m really a Wovenist who thinks I’m right).  After all, if I didn’t think I was right, why on earth would I believe it?  No one really enjoys holding to the losing side. . . except for Yankee fans.  Sorry Dave, couldn’t resist.  Whatever camp you are in, you think you are right. When it comes to something like Salvation, I believe the Bible teaches election.  I do believe there is human responsibility, there is choice, but I believe the concept of Free Will is a heresy that was given to the church by the enlightenment and the scientific age.  If man has evolved, man must be the highest form of life in the universe, therefore there is nothing to limit the will of man, it’s free.  I don’t see this idea supported, I see the idea of slaves of sin or slaves to Christ.

I’m not trying to tell anyone they are wrong, but I do of course think I am right.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t believe it.  It’s not being conceded, it’s just being sure in your position.  I am sure many of you don’t like that I just called Free Will a pagan idea, and furthermore, I think it imposes itself on the throne and dominion of the Father, which would make it fall in line with the original lie, that we can be like God.  I am sure some hair just stood up on the back of the necks of some.  It’s not that I don’t love Traditionalists, I just think they are wrong.  I am sure they love me, but think I am wrong and many want to call me bad names and throw things in my general direction.  I don’t believe in Universal Atonement, I don’t know how to make it work without making Salvation a work.  Sorry guys, but I think those of you who hold to Universal Atonement are on the edge of heresy.  On top of the rest of it, I think the SBC has roots in the Separatist movement, the Puritans and. . . well a bunch of Calvinists.  I think we are linked to Particular Baptists and Calvinistic theology is our legacy.

Ok, so by a show of hands, how many would like to excommunicate me, stone me and throw me to the Presbyterians?  Thank you, I see that hand.  This brings me to my actually point, can we really just agree to disagree?  At some point, are we as Southern Baptists going to have to take a firm foundation on a statement on one side or the other?  Both have implications.  The Traditionalists would say that Calvinism will destroy evangelism.  Calvinists would say the Traditionalists will lead to false conversion.  The Wovenist would say that you both have some things right but you have to take in the consideration that God is not subjected to or limited by time and or space, therefore the whole argument is humanistic in nature and. . . I digress.  There is a problem, and I think the posts that may or may not follow this article may shed some light.  Some may encourage me, some will support me, some will call for my head to be brought in on a silver platter.  We are a convention with a deep divide over the foundational issue of Salvation.  It is not a little problem.  I am so glad we have men like Dr. Page to talk with people over this issue, but what will it take to resolve it?  What sort of
SBC will grow for my children, and will I be a part of it?  After this post, will I be welcome to be a part of it?  Only time will tell.