Today at NOBTS Jack Graham is scheduled to speak in chapel. A group of students has composed a letter to Graham, open for fellow students to sign. They were up last night printing 200 “I Love CP” t-shirts that will be available this morning beginning at 6am. Jack Graham as requested a Q&A time with NOBTS students. It should be a fascinating day and my goal is to keep you updated in the comments section of this post.
Because of the unique nature of this post and how I’ll be using the comments section, it will be closed for normal commentary. If you’re on the ground at NOBTS and have news to report please feel free to updates. Only my updates or updates from people on the ground at NOBTS will be allowed (others will be deleted) in order to keep the updates in a readable, informative format.
Update: some people have asked to subscribe to the comments of this post. In order to do that, leave a comment and check the box to subscribe. I’ll delete your comment but your email subscription will remain in place. Sorry it’s complicated but that seems to be the easiest way to work it.
Photo of the t-shirt table set up this morning in the student center.
https://www.facebook.com/iheartthecp/photos/a.1947984385423741.1073741827.1947980778757435/1948246452064201/?type=3&theater
Students plan to deliver their letter to Jack Graham this morning and will release the text after he receives it.
We’re about 1 hour away from the chapel service right now. NOBTS normally streams the services online. I’ve seen reports that today’s service won’t be streamed. The link is here if you want to try. 11am Central time. http://nobts.edu/chapel/default.html
Sales of the t-shirts have been taking place all morning but I don’t have any numbers to report yet, haven’t heard back from the guys involved with that.
Still no details on where or when the Q&A time with Jack Graham will take place. Will it be during the chapel service at the end? Will it be afterward as a separate event? Will it be like a White House press briefing where questions are asked and the press secretary just redirects and talks about what he wants to talk about or will there be some genuine interaction with the students?
We’re also still waiting on the text of the student letter to be released. So this update is mainly to let you know we’re still waiting for updates! Check back again.
Update: NOBTS twitter account seems to indicate chapel service will be live streamed. Link here, starts in about 20 minutes. http://nobts.edu/chapel/default.html
Source: https://twitter.com/NOBTS/status/839151351359754243
Chapel Live Steam available now here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDF57xVqCIg
They did a quick wide camera angle that showed the crowd, screenshot available here https://twitter.com/brent_hobbs/status/839161584048095234
11:30 CST: Jack Graham is preaching from Ephesians 3:14-21.
Dr. Kelley said a few minutes ago the Q&A session would take place at the end of the chapel service and would last for approximately 5 minutes [correction, the 5 minute reference was to the setup time]. The live stream is working and I assume it will stay live through the brief Q&A session.
That’s not what he said. He said it would take 5 minutes to set up the chairs for the Q/A. He didn’t comment on the length of the segment other than to say it couldn’t go on too long bc he had to have time to eat lunch and catch his plane back to TX.
I backed the stream up and you’re right, the 5 minute reference was to the setup time. Don’t know if that means they will stop the live stream for that section or not.
The live stream has stopped as of the end of the chapel service. We don’t know if it will come back on or not. If not, we’ll see if we can grab a feed from social media.
Facebook Live feed: https://www.facebook.com/… [link broken]
Q&A Session wrapped up. I believe you’ll be able to watch the video at the Facebook link immediately above.
The session was of a decent length. The format seemed to be open to pretty much anyone who wanted to ask questions. One person said they were there to support the stand Prestonwood was taking. The three or four other questions were from people who seemed to not approve of the situation.
I think I’ll wait until later to hash out what I thought of the content of Graham’s answers, so we don’t get bogged down here, I mainly want to keep this thread to giving updates on what’s happening. I think the main aspect left at this point is to get a copy of the letter the students handed Graham. I’ll pass that along when it becomes available.
Its been taken down.
According to the Facebook page – He didn’t hear Dr. Kelley say it was “off the record” so he recorded and posted it once someone contacted him and told him what Dr. Kelly said, he took it down.
Apparently, it’s top secret.
I went to the Facebook posting real time and heard snippets of Dr. Graham’s Q&A. I only heard probably 30% of the Q&A session in bits and spurts because of an Internet Bandwidth issue between New Orleans and me here in Okla City.
I DID NOT hear the part of the Q&A where Dr. Graham described what is the nexus of the problem with the ERLC. Dr. Graham did say that the problem was with the ERLC. The WSJ article was mentioned by one of the questioners.
Dr. Graham also said that the CP was not as strongly supported by “younger pastors” as other pastors.
That is sum total of the snippets of his comments that I was able to hear.
Roger OKC
So much for “transparency”
The full text of the open letter is available here https://sbcvoices.com/open-letter-to-jack-graham-from-nobts-students/ and here https://iheartcpblog.wordpress.com