The Pastor’s Conference is the largest and easiest target around. Make all SBCers happy? Sort of like making all of your church members happy. Not a snowflake’s chance in Gehenna of that.
Back when Adrian Rogers would always close the Pastor’s Conference it was a thrilling event indeed. Not so much now. Dave Miller and his gang had the last, best PC. It was innovative, focused on the ordinary SBC pastor rather than celebrities, an authentic grassroots enterprise. It was that PC, one should remember, that actually took money and gave it to a number of pastors who couldn’t afford to attend the convention. Contrast that to whatever the megacelebs will be paid, honorarium plus expenses, for coming to Orlando. This is routine and typical. I know how the system works.
But I understand that the PC is partly a platform for introducing (uh, promoting?) personalities for elective SBC offices and those who like to work behind the scenes to give “turns” to up and coming SBC personalities would be loath to see the demise of the PC. It’s also a pretty good time to merchandise stuff.
I skipped about a quarter century’s PCs until Dave Miller’s in 2017. Don’t know that I missed anything. (And it still rankles me that the PC takes sponsorship money from the shoebox ministry so they can promote their competitive alternative to Lottie Moon, and in our own venue. Disgraceful.)
If the pastors want to have a pastor’s conference in conjunction with the SBC Annual Meeting, let them find their own venue and make it a completely separate event.
This year’s PC is officially controversial at this early stage. Too bad. The last thing we need in the SBC is five months of online fulminations. Have you ever seen the announcement of speakers followed so quickly by negative reaction and the PC president having to address the concerns? Well, yes. Last year’s PC had a controversy. Sounds like a pattern. It’s a long time until June. It can’t be good to have this much rancor about it in February.
[I am not opposed to the speaker who seems to be the focus of the controversy. I know nothing of her. It’s Al Mohler who says that his personal opinion is that “pastor” is both office and function, function and office. Many agree with him on this and I’d guess that if he speaks to the PC matter we would be in for some greater difficulty. My view is that the BFM “office of pastor” is senior pastor, not all of the sub-pastors and staff. Many of us disagree with one another here on that. Is this cause for not cooperating? Not in my view.]
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Resolutions? I’m told that “the SBC” needs to speak to this or that and, thus, resolutions at the annual meeting are very important. I’m inclined to think that they do more harm than good, witness 2017 and last year. I expect this year to make it a trifecta. Even if we get it right it still a hot mess and we lose.
The system that crams the time for resolutions into a tiny window, late in the convention, then cuts off debate and pass resolutions en masse with little discussion is ridiculuous. This makes us feel like the actual Convention, those assembled thousands of messengers, are merely an inconvenience to the Resolutions Committee appointed by fiat by the SBC President. Seems like the presidents have been very careful in composing this committee. Still, it hasn’t worked out so well. We might declare that a resolution is merely an expression of opinion of the group assembled at that moment but that’s not what the world sees, nor what most Southern Baptists see. Now, we’ve got state conventions passing resolutions against the SBC’s resolutions. What a mess.
Maybe the moderates have this right. They don’t do resolutions at their annual meeting.
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After all these years, and my first convention was 1982, I’m not optimistic about substantial changes being made. We managed to shorten the convention up to a two-day meeting but don’t know if that has helped anything.
And, we were wondering what could possibly bump CRT/I off of the front burner, even for a short time. Looks like we found what could. Sex abuse and CaringWell? A distant memory.
We can do better.
