The Voices guy says, “Give me a shot of the strongest stuff you’ve got. We gotta guy here who writes stuff, every word his own and under his own name and people blame the rest of us for it. Then he deletes it all by himself and people complain that we deleted it – sucker punched both ways.”
The CBN guy, sitting as far from the Voices guy as he can get, says, “You think you’ve got problems. Nobody likes our conspiracy movie. I watched it myself and now I’m depressed.”
The duck says, “I’m going to another bar. I don’t have a single friend anymore. They all became Southern Baptists like you two and now all they do is squawk at each other on Twitter.”
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I’m not looking for an award for original humor but a sense of humor goes a long way in our Grand Old Convention. You can’t make up stuff like we’re seeing.
May I offer a clear-eyed, positive view of a few things relative to our convention. If these drive you to drink get your heart right and don’t blame me.
- Our most important entity, the International Mission Board was allowed to degrade financially to the point where we lost over 1,100 overseas personnel. Those represented thousands of years of mission experience. We’re solidly on the road to recovery from that. The IMB is healthy and is adding hundreds of personnel per year and is receiving record mission offering totals.
- Our second most important entity, the North American Mission Board has captured the enthusiasm and support of a new generation of church planters, and that while receiving unrelenting and withering criticism from a small cadre of disgruntled SBCers. The NAMB offering is at record levels.
- The six Cooperative Program supported seminaries are all conservative by any sane definition of the term. They all have solid leaders, many of them a new generation of SBC leadership, and healthy enrollment totals.
- There is good evidence that at least for the next statistical report baptisms in the SBC will be up from the previous year. It may or may not represent a longer term trend but will be welcome news.
As Adrian might say, “I’m not mad at anyone but the devil.” I went to church today and enjoyed it. Not a syllable about SBC politics.
Cheers, brethren and sistren.
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And, while I could see the Dawg debacle of yesterday coming (we have a history of this), at least there’s a second chance available. We won the last game with Michigan 15-7 in Ann Arbor when I was a whippersnapper teen. There were spontaneous parades in Athens that day.