Dr. Johnny Hunt who is the most excellent and highly esteemed pastor of the First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Georgia was recently elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I was elated, refreshed, and relieved.  You would have do know what his election really meant in order to know why I was feeling the way I was feeling.  Let me explain.

The explanation requires that you journey with me back to 1985 and the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas Texas.  It was the beginning of the conservative resurgence.  The issue over which the battle among the Baptists was being fought was the issue of the inerrancy of the Bible.  Make no mistake about it:  the issue was real but the battle was fully politicized.  Two camps were at war with each other with so much to lose and so much to gain.  On the one side were the “moderates” or “liberals” most of whom were white-collar, highly educated, culturally elite, Baptists who desired a belief system and a congregation where belief in God and love for Jesus was expressed in an intellectually and socially acceptable context.  It meant, for example, that the Bible was read from the pulpit on Sunday morning but the texts were treated as truth so long as the truth squared with what was intellectually acceptable.  On the other side were the “conservatives” or “fundamentalists,” who believe in the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God.  These people came from mostly blue-collar industrial worker and agricultural backgrounds who simply and succinctly believed what the Bible said.  If the Bible says that an axe head floated, it floated; and no person intervening with a stick had to make it happen.  The issues were serious and sacred to both sides.  The battle was engaged and from the beginning the conservatives were winning.

Now you need to know what “winning” means.  What was at stake in this battle was the direction of the SBC in terms primarily of its seminaries.  In order to change the course of the convention, its schools and agencies had to be changed.  This required a change in the trustee numbers on the boards of the seminaries and agencies.  The President of the SBC has appointive powers for the committee that then appoints the trustees for the seminaries and agencies.  If the conservatives could win five straight elections or for ten years, they would as long as they were in power be able to reshape the entire structure of the SBC.  They succeeded.  But their success came with some systemic concerns. Let me show the concerns through an exchange that I had during those years.

Many of you know that during that battle I was not only a liberal but for several years was the leader of the liberals in Georgia.  We were known as “Concerned Georgia Baptists,” the state version of the SBC version of “Concerned Southern Baptists.”  This latter group held strategy meetings throughout the year, most of them on the campus of Mercer University, then and now one of the most liberal universities in the southeast from which one of the most liberal seminaries has been established, the McAfee School of Theology.  But I digress.  At one of those strategy meetings I sat beside Grady Cothen.  He was a long time leader in Baptist life serving very effectively as the president and CEO of the Sunday School Board (now known as Lifeway).  It was at a break during one of those meetings that he said something to me that I have never forgotten and is the reason that I am glad that Johnny Hunt is the president of the SBC.

Cothen said to me, “young man, I want you to know why I am here. It has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with polity.  I am no liberal. I am an inerrantist, but I am not a fundamentalist.  Fundamentalists are the kind of folk who love to fight and are always fighting.  If there is not an enemy, they will invent one.  If they win this battle for the Bible and the Convention and it looks as if they will, the fight will not be finished; they will begin to fight among themselves.  I am a conservative, but I am no fundamentalist because fundamentalists of every ilk are very narrow in their orientation opposed to anybody and everybody who disagrees with whatever their view might be.  And for true fundamentalists, their views will become increasingly more and more narrow so as to exclude even those who believe basically what they believe but do not see it or do it in the way they see it or do it.”  We have gotten there as a Convention.

The alternative to Hunt was deeply disconcerting because it represented a view of the convention that would even exclude inerrantists and exclusivists (those who believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation) whose theological orientation was not exactly the same as theirs.  Let me just give you one example.  This crowd has gotten so narrow that they are wanting to condemn wonderful men of God who for right reasons do not always give and inviation at the end of a worship service because they believe (although they would argue against me on this one) that coming to the front is the way to be saved.  And any church that does it any other way is apostate.  Listen to them preach and this is what you will hear.  I have heard it.  I even heard one of them blast Baptist churches who removed “Baptist” from their name calling it a falling away.  This is fundamentalism. It begins with the Bible as inerrant to be sure but develops a system of both being and doing church that becomes for them as inerrant as the Bible they call inerrant.  This is not good.  This is bordering on heresy.

Johnny Hunt is as conservative as they come.  God’s anointing is on this man.  When I hear him preach, I am stirred in my spirit.  He is used of God to feed me.  But he knows that humans are fallible and flawed.  He knows that no one theological system can be reduced to the level of inerrancy or infallibility.  And most of all he knows that what we need in our churches is not a battle over theological systems but a bountiful outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the men behind the sacred desks (or stool) so that we take the inerrant Bible and preach it with power line by line and precept upon precept and watch our great God do His great Work in the saving of souls and the sanctifying of lives to the glory of His Name to the spreading of His Kingdom across the globe.

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