An SBC Blog Experiment

The SBC, through it’s flagship misison board, IMB, has the ability and resources to attemt to fulfill the Great Commission, a reality made possible by our common desire to do that and by the pooling of our resources. I love the fact that whatever controversies or disputes there have been and are among us, there has always been general agreement about the primacy of this task.

My church (Grace Covenant Community Church Brea, CA) is starting a visual theology service tonight. My friend is at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary and is also a Hollywood story board artist. He’s always used visuals in his teaching, so now we’re combining art, technology and preaching in our unique service. To give you an idea of what we’re aiming for, here is a video he made called “What is Truth?” http://blepotheology.com/2012/02/what-is-truth-2/. Please pray for our first service tonight.

My favorite thing about the SBC is our unfailing commitment that the Bible is God’s Word and everything we do as a convention is based on that fact.

I always enjoy Sundays, but this morning was special. We had a missionary to Greece talk about his work in our missions Moment, had the Lord’s Supper and Baptized a teenager… can’t get much better than that!

Our association hosted an On Mission Celebration, last weekend. It was great to meet many of our missionaries, state, NAMB, IMB.

I am not sure Rick understood the rules.

I love the fact we are …and always have been… “People of The Book”, who value solid Biblical teaching & application to personal lives. I love how we are big on missions & on how we encourage & support each other. Most of all, I love how we can celebrate our diversity because it is in just that in which we find our strength.

I love the diversity in the SBC. This is remarkable because I used to not appreciate it at all. I used to want a much, much smaller theological SBC umbrella. Now I view it as a beautiful picture of Christ’s body: “For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12 NKJV). I now view the diversity among us as a helpful checks and balances.

I went through the SBC Conservative Resurgence and praise God that Southern Baptists today stand unapologetically for the inerrancy of the Bible.
We stand for the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.
We stand for the moral absolutes in Scripture.

Southern Baptists are a great testimony to the nation and the world on these issues.
David R. Brumbelow

As a pastor in Montgomery Alabama, we have witnessed the painful reality of severe weather. I am convinced that some of our greatest people are involved with SBC Disaster Relief. These guys and gals come into a painful situation and share the love of Christ. Great ministry and one we can all be proud of!

Wade Rials

I thank God for Gideons International. I was saved upon reading 2Timothy 4:6-8 from a Gideon Bible I had taken from a motel. Due to that, I have been invited to speak at many Gideon meetings through the years.

The Gideons are missionaries in the truest sense of the word. They are now operational in 194 countries. I would like to encourage all of you who serve as local church pastors to invite a Gideon speaker into your church. Encourage business men in your church to join the Gideons. May their tribe increase.

My favorite thing about the SBC is the Cooperative Program. As broken as it may be, as frustrating as we may think it is, it’s the best way to fund missionaries I’ve ever seen.

I grew up IFB (hardcore version — don’t worry, I got better) and I dreaded missions conference week. Missionaries would show up and tell us how much money they needed to be able to go back on the field, and the pastor would get up and berate us for not giving the missionaries more money. I decided that missions work was for suckers.

In college, I started going to a Southern Baptist church with my girlfriend. After I got over the shock (I was taught that Southern Baptists were Bible denyng heathens who were just one short step away from Hell itself), I found myself enjoying the church. Then came missions conference. I braced myself.

Imagine my shock when the missionaries came out and didn’t have to beg for funds! They were telling about what God had done, and what plans they had for the next year! They weren’t worried about making enough money to get back, or buy food, or anything! It was amazing, and I gained a whole new appreciation for missionaries — AND the kind of churches that supported them.

I love the fact that we believe everybody is equal (soul competency) even if we stumble a bit putting our belief into practice.

I’m glad that the SBC is a big tent. Warren and I apparently have a similar background as far as IFB goes and I have found the SBC preachers and churches to be very welcoming to me.

As far as my church I have two blessings. First in the last two years I’ve had the priviledge of pastoring two of the best families I’ve ever known through tragedies and what I’ve seen exhibited is that a genuine faith in Christ makes all the difference in the world. I intended to minister to them but they always end up being a bigger blessing to me. The second blessing are three young Timothys in our church (aka preacher boys), watching them in their integrity and purity and the growth they are displaying in their preaching is more awesome than I can describe.

I love the SBC’s commitment to evangelism. I love the SBC’s diversity of doctrine and method within a big tent that creates appropriate limits. I love the SBC’s pursuit of the God of scripture. I love the opportunity that the SBC to harvest the fruit of the CR in our seminaries over the next generation. I love the CP and it’s ability to unite chruches of different sizes and capacities in pursuit of a common goal.

I am thankful these comments. While there are always things to be fixed, there is so much right in the SBC. God is still working in great ways. To Him be the glory.

I love Southern Baptists and the SBC for many reasons. Among them is the fact of: 1. Commitment to the Bible as the verally inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God (and I started voting for this view from the get go, because I had seen the Bible change my childhood home in Arkansas). 2. Compassion in helping others. Our church does a lot of this, and our son’s church went to the Gulf Coast after Katrina and down to Eastern North Carolina after Floyd. Many other churches had done similar things, and they have been doing so for many years. 3. The great evangelistic and missionary programs and efforts. I known, met and/or heard, followed, etc., many of the leading evangelists of the SBC across the past 54 years. And I can remember when Independents on the mission fields would get help from our FMB to get back to the USA, when their supporters let them down or when they got into trouble. The SBC not only sent missionaries, they started schools, hospitals, etc., supplying, in addition, personnel to get the institutions up and running. I even met at least one well-drilling missionary in Haiti 32 years ago and a senior citizen, a lady, who was there as a secretary in Santo Domingo of the Dominican Republic plus a missionary who was really a noted servant of the Lord who had transferred to the Dominican Republic from Central America. Our mission personnel, while admitting the fact that there are always some misfits, are, for the most part, tremendous people, dedicated to their calling, honoring God and Southern Baptists. 4. I like the fact that I found out how closely tied my family had been to Southern Baptists across two centuries or more. Usually they were just faithful members of some local church, seeking to do the Lord’s will. A few were ministers who left a good record of service to Christ, for which I am thankful. 5. I am thankful for a Black Historian who got me to start doing research. I chose Baptist History and did it intensely for 6 years, accumulating some 3000 5×8 notecards from which I wrote a Master Thesis in American Social and Intellectual History on the subject, “The Baptists & Ministerial Qualifications: 1750-1850.” I also wrote papers on various aspects of that research, e.g., one on James Petigru Boyce, another on Evangelism in the 18th Century. Later I wrote an article on The Climax of the Reformation, a play for a church, Mirror of Our Past, which the Baptist State Convention filmed, and gave an address as Chairman of the Historical Committee of the Baptist State Convention of NC on the subject, “The Genius of Orthodoxy: Eldresses,” in which I attempted to show the possible biblical justification that Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall might have used for having Eldresses in a day when they would have not dreamed of disobeying God’s word. I also served as a chairman of the Historical Committee of the Sandy Creek Baptist Association and preached one of the Annual Sermons of that worthy organization. I proposed a Doctoral Dissertation at Columbia University on the subject of the Baptists & Slavery in the Summer of ’71, which would have sought to establish how God produced some really wondeful believers among Black folks during the awful times of slavery (like the case of one white church which purchased a Black man’s freedom and made him the pastor where he served for about 10 years). In ’75-’76 I did my project for the Doctor of Ministry on “Christian Love and Race Relations.” I love the church where I was able to get it done without getting fired. There are many things I could say about many in Southern Baptists, Conservatives and Moderates, too, calvinists and non-calvinists, Pre-mills, A-mills and a few Post-mills (where I currently hold after being trained and raised under some of the great Pre-mills, e.g.,Dr. Ernest R. Campbell, Dr. Robert G. Lee, Hershell Ford, etc.). There are good men in all of these camps…as well as a few bad ones. My heart’s desire for Southern Baptists and the SBC is that we might really begin to get organized to pray for a Third Great Awakening. To that end I have been praying for (it will be this fall) 39 years. God grant tht we might have some one to lead us into making a study of Edwards’ HUmble Attempt which inspired William Carey, Andrew Fuller, and others to launch the Great Century of Missions and how it can apply today to a new mission advance, GCR (Great Commission Resurgence), and a Third Great Awakening which might win the whole earth in one generation and even continue for a 1000 generations. God grant that it might come to pass.

I’ve been attending Southern Baptist Churches since 1975, or 1976. My family left the Methodist Church, due to heresy and liberalism. We started going to a little Church in Memphis with a young, dynamic Pastor…Bellevue Baptist Church and Dr. Adrian Rogers.

I got saved in 1980. I’ve been going to Southern Baptist Churches every since then.

I like Southern Baptist Churches, because we stay closer to the Bible than any other. We believe in missions and evangelism. We have the Disaster Relief Ministry. We have a strong network of Churches and Pastors.

God has been doing some wonderful and great things in my Church. Our worship is great. Our fellowship is strong. And, we’ve had quite a few, young couples with small children to come into our church here lately. The Lord is blessing.

David

I’m thankful to the Lord for our spiritual heritage. I am thankful to the Lord that he has raised up in past days, as I believe he has in this day, men and women of God who believed and believe that Scripture is sufficient.

I like that the big concerns in the SBC are largely about important things like theology and the Great Commission.

I love the opportunities that my church makes to fulfill the GC like having an afternoon cookout for the residents of a poor neighborhood, distributing Bibles around town, and taking the gospel around the world. I think we’ve hit every continent now except for Antarctica, and we keep on going.

It’s exciting to see how very different missions my church has going on are being used together by God to accomplish His purposes. We may be tempted to despair over politics, but God is alive and well around the world and when the veil of darkness is lifted from difficult areas, I expect we will see what He has been doing all this time and how He’s given us a hand in it.

When I came to my first SBC church from an IFB background, I was thankful that the emphasis was on Evangelism, starting Baptist churches and building the SS all within the context of a cooperative ministry. I thank God for that.

Top three reasons I appreciate being in the SBC
1. A zeal for missions (IMB)
2. A zeal for church planting (NAMB)
3. Good seminaries, especially Souther Seminary 🙂

I know that all three things I mentioned are imperfect, yet God uses all of them for His glory and the spread of the gospel in our denomination.

I love the SBC because it has men like Dr. J. Can we get him an award for “most words per post?”