Back in the day, The Age of Blogs, there were a handful of sites that were SBC go-to blogs: SBC Today in its first or second iteration, SBC Outpost, SBC Voices, a few personal sites. If you read a dozen you probably had all the SBC news worth reading, and from different points of view.
Then came the SBC celebrity sites and Twitter with snippets, factoids, puffery, and excruciatingly tedious strings of Tweets. Blogs took a back seat. Not quite under the bus yet but definitely diminished.
I suppose Facebook figures in all this but I have my own scruples and FB doesn’t get a lot of attention from me, not even cute cat pictures.
Consider this an old dude, hacker and plodder blogger in the SBC hinterlands giving his non-techno, sub-social media savvy opinions.
So, I notice that my old Georgia colleague, guy with the best hair in the SBC, and pretty good blogger, the little “g” great “I am” Peter…Lumpkins is off the bench and back in action.
Peter and I agree on some things and disagree on some things. He’s a very smart guy and highly connected. I’m glad he is back to blogging and has a couple of items on those pesky discernment blogs. Check his table showing the various rankings including Mohler, himself, P & P, Capstone, Voices and others. (Easily found)
He concludes: “Get used to it. “Discernment blogs” are here to stay–at least for now.” No debate from me. SBC leadership, whatever their motives (and I assume they are proper) would love to have the field to themselves. That would be a disaster, unrestrained, unchecked, unaccountable denominational power. Better to have imperfect checks on that than an SBC world absent any platform for little guys to point fingers, ask questions, and bring to light misbehavior.
Why is this an article? It’s typically our policy not to draw attention to such sites.
Reality beckons, Mike.
No one here had anything to do with this but me. Peter makes folks mad but is fact-based, data driven most of the time.
Sure. But it’s been our policy not to push traffic to such sites. Why are we highlighting or even celebrating this?
No link provided. I agree with Lumpkins’ opinion on this. I also appreciated the table of rankings. Readers can decide for themselves.
Lumpkins spent all of his credibility by promoting one of the biggest frauds in modern SBC history, and by attacking anyone who told the truth about him. He showed he lacked any integrity and he has never apologized for lying to the SBC to protect a fraud.
So, frankly, I don’t pay any attention to anything Peter Lumpkins says.
100% agreed.
Honestly, I forgot what that was?
What did he promote?
With an article like this, I’ll be paying less attention to what William Thornton says.
William Thornton, thanks for bringing this issue up, as I feel it is needed. Personally I look for those who are different than I in opinions and viewpoints. I find it harder than it should be to find someone to have a reasonable conversation with that has an opposing view than I. Every blog , every article , I guess life is a discernment issue. There old political saying “people vote with their feet” was true of communism and it is true of internet blogs. I come to SBC Voices not for validation of my point of view but sometimes… Read more »
Rather harsh remark based on one article you don’t agree with.. I don’t particularly like Lumpkins either nor do I agree with the articles conclusion but I will still listen to William Thornton. He is allowed to be wrong occasionally without being listened to less.
Mr Plodder,
As a fellow Georgian, let me lend my moral support to my beleagured elder brother in Christ. Pay no attention to these nay-sayers. I am certainly not one who scours the internet for everything SBC, but Peter is connected, and any person pursuing points of view regarding the current milieu of all things SBC will certainly cross paths with Mr Lumpkins. If you happen to make it to Orlando, would love to visit with you. I think it may be an interesting convention!
Not planning to go this year. Thanks for the kind words.
I was hoping you and I could take a day and hit Disney together, William.
You buy, I’ll go. May hit fantasyland and see if we can find some Cals.
“You buy, I’ll go. May hit fantasyland and see if we can find some Cals.”
This solidified my continued readership/lurkership. Haha.
For the record, William is a contributor at Voices. He has the freedom to speak his mind. SBC Voices is about different viewpoints. William ran this post by me (us) before he posted it. I made one suggestion which he honored. But he says what he thinks. If you follow this site, William and I have sometimes posted articles in contradiction to posts the other has published. I would pretty much NEVER post an article referencing something Peter Lumpkins says because I believe his past lies in defense of Ergun Caner have disqualified him as a voice in the SBC.… Read more »
Oh, that deal. Yes I remember that.
William and Dave, I agree with your approach and respectfully disagree with the urge to not mention certain people so they don’t get notoriety. I believe the other approach is a mistake. You can always tell the blogs that do that. They have the feel of vested commercial interests. Guy 1 says something out of line. Let’s cancel him. This appeals a lot to younger people today both outside and inside the Christian Community. I’m not sure why. The de-platforming of people who step out of line has a very authoritarian feel to it. People recognize it. It affects perception… Read more »
The Age of Blogs was incredibly disillusioning to me. As a new-ish Baptist, I voraciously read Baptist publications and blogs. And so often it struck me as … petty. That is, (1) political, all sides getting in condescending digs at other Baptist factions; (2) opinion, speculation, suspicion and hasty reaction; (3) little fact-checking; and (4) almost no corrections, retractions or apologies for errors/misinformation. Fact-checking is so easy! People would post all kinds of stuff that 5 minutes of googling showed me was unfounded or flat wrong (e.g. whether a given Senator voted for or against a bill; whether so-and-so said… Read more »
We came to a decision in the middle of last year. We were given a bunch of “stories” which were incendiary and could have driven our numbers through the roof. One story would have ruined a well-known SBC leader. We realized: 1. We are not journalists and do not understand the ins and outs of fact-checking and such. We have tried to verify every story we’ve ever run but we just don’t understand the whole journalistic system. We are preachers, not investigative journalists. 2. We realized we did not want to be that blog – the ones who broke stories… Read more »
Most journalists these days don’t understand the ins and outs of fact checking. Wise decision
I love this approach. I’d much rather read reasoned responses than “breaking news” that has no real information and a lot of speculation.
Well said, Karen. I joined an SBC church at age 22 after baptism following a lifetime of attendance and involvement that began with cradle roll, and worked in Christian educational institutions related to the SBC or Southern Baptist churches until 2010. I guess I got used to all the verbal jousting, jockeying for position, influence peddling, badmouthing people whose doctrine didn’t line up straight with theirs and all that jabber that goes on endlessly in the SBC (and happened both before and after the resurgence). In 2010 I accepted a great opportunity as lead administrator of a Christian educational institution… Read more »
Yikes! I’m sorry that was your experience. Just to clarify, I was finding those issues from all sides and factions in the Baptist blogging spectrum — not at all exclusive to SBC. Unfortunately, I was a new believer, a new Baptist and new to Texas around 2000. Allll those waters were hot and stirred up. Suspicion was high. Frequent blogging fodder was how each faction thought the other was wrong, had done wrong, needed to apologize, would regret their actions, were driving people away from Christ and the church, and were headed to failure. Lots more were partisan opinions on… Read more »
Wanted to know what the hub-bub was all about on discernment blogs that I was seeing on Facebook so I came here to get informed. Thanks for remembering what was near and dear to my heart, SBCToday. Kind of sad it is gone, I think there is room for a SBCToday again with the focus us original guys had, but no way would I ever get back into that fray again.
I’ve said the same thing. Too bad sbct is defunct.
In spite of some of the criticism I’ve read on a few of those “discernment blogs,” this site’s authors, for the most part, address controversy without the vitriol that I’ve seen elsewhere. Personally, I think I Peter 3:15 and the passage on either side of it is a good context for the way opposition and controversy should be addressed. Those Christians to whom Peter was writing were being persecuted by things far worse than some of the attacks made on some of these blogs yet were instructed to respond based on the hope they had with gentleness and respect. For… Read more »