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I love being a Southern Baptist. As the saying goes, I am Southern Baptist born and Southern Baptist bred, and when I die I’ll be Southern Baptist dead. But God got to me before the Baptists J. Jesus changed my life as a young man, and I have still never recovered. But I am yet a Southern Baptist by conviction.

I am a debtor. Southern Baptists showed me the gospel. They taught me the Word. I have been educated in SBC schools and married in an SBC church. I have served churches, a state convention, the Home Mission Board as a Home Missionary, and have taught at a state Baptist school and now at one of our seminaries.

I love the convention. I owe her much. I regularly stop to imagine what I get to do, and shake my head in disbelief. Who would have thought this skinny, country hick would be preparing the next generation of ministers? But while I love the SBC, I do not worship her. I worship the Most High God. We stand at an interesting time in our history as a convention, an ecotone in which the issues are not as simple as liberal or conservative, or robed choir versus praise team, or evangelism programs versus missional living, for that matter. Make no mistake: liberalism will always be an enemy as will legalism. The Conservative Resurgence mattered, and still matters. I am a lover not a fighter, but there are some things worth fighting over, and truth is one of those. But we now move from orthodoxy to orthopraxy in many discussions, and these are a little harder to sort out.

I am not attending the SBC this year. Southeastern is plenty well represented without me. I actually think the convention will go well without my presence, although I think I have met a few in my time who are not so convinced the convention will survive without them. I choose this year to see my daughter Hannah at youth camp instead. I was just in Europe with Josh for two weeks and am about to do two straight weeks of youth camps in Texas. I miss my wife and my daughter. I love the SBC, but they are my extended family, not my immediate family.

I will miss out on some things. I missed a great opportunity to attend the first young leaders meeting at Dr. Jimmy Draper’s invitation a few years back because it came on Fathers Day and I had already made plans to be with my wife and kids. Ah, opportunism! I suppose I have missed many opportunities to be more recognized in the SBC. Can’t say I have lost much sleep over that. I will take the influence God has given me with the family and students I love over anything else in ministry.

I believe in the SBC. I love our annual meetings. I love to see old friends, and particularly love to hear from students I taught—where they are serving, how God is using them. I truly hope to be there again next year. But the SBC is far bigger than an annual meeting.

We will always debate issues as we are this year. It is in our blood. Some of us will take the high road and deal with issues, while others will continue to operate like middle school children and call names and generally act like fools before a lost world. I suppose we will do so till Jesus comes. I continually ask one question as I look at the SBC. It is not who is the coolest. Nor is it who has the best blog, or in an earlier time the best independent newspaper, or radio program, or newsletter. The question I constantly ask about our convention is this: where are the men of God?

I am a student of the great awakenings, led by men of God who were not perfect, but who were in fact men of God. I sometimes read our rhetoric today and wonder if a young leader in his day like Whitefield or Edwards would carry on so? I would submit the historical record shows a more gracious, a more holiness-focused, a more godly attitude in such men from the past. From the Arminian Wesley to the Reformed Edwards, holiness formed their mantra, and a healthy fear of God rarely seen today tempered their rhetoric. Oh there were times when this was not so, and these men, in particular Wesley and Whitefield for a season, had a serious breach in their fellowship, but we remember them for their leadership in a movement of the Spirit, not for how they turned a phrase in their pamphlets..

So while I am constantly tempted, and sometimes fall to the temptation, to be the king of all wittiness, or to show how I can be a guru of some topic or another at the expense of another, or to be baited into a discussion akin to our generation’s version of how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, I will try not to yield to the temptation. Better to be a husband and a father and a teacher and an author and a preacher than to be my generation’s evangelical David Letterman, although sometimes the thoughts that go through my head are hard to squelch. Sometimes I must confess I am better at cleverness than at godliness. I battle the beast of opportunism daily, which says I must never miss a big meeting, a chance to meet a big name, a chance to capitalize on the flavor of the week topic to show my wisdom. Sometimes I loathe myself.

I passed through Westminster Abbey with my son and his senior class the other day. I saw the names of those buried therein, from the nondescript slab for Charles Darwin to the ornate tombs of kings. Some people are memorable, others are quickly forgotten. We will not soon forget Adrian Rogers, for example. We should not obsess ourselves with being memorable, as if our legacy mattered that much. But I think we should live our lives in such a way that we lay up treasures in heaven, which seems to be pretty memorable in my way of thinking. Who in our generation will be memorable for generations to come? We may be surprised. Will it be the most shrill? The most humorous? The best at working the system even as they complain about the system they have mastered? Or will it be men of God?

I love the SBC. I will serve her until Jesus calls me home. But I will constantly seek to do what I do for the glory of God and the sake of the gospel, not for an institution. Again I ask: where are the men of God for our generation?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 6:40 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.