Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia, has been disfellowshipped from the Southern Baptist Convention two years after it began accepting homosexuals as members. In the last issue of Friday Church News Notes, I used Towne View as an example of what is happening in Baptist churches in the South. That the church has been disfellowshipped from the SBC over this issue is irrelevant to the point I was making. Most of the SBC churches aren’t as far down the road of apostasy as Towne View, but a lot of former SBC churches are that far along, having joined the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Two decades ago, CBF coordinator Daniel Vestal said there are congregations that support the CBF who ordain homosexuals and that he does not want anyone to leave over this issue (“CBF ‘welcoming but not affirming’ of homosexuals,” Associated Baptist Press, Oct. 23, 2000). CBF council member Dixie Lee Petrey said, “I don’t think we should limit the Spirit of God in the way that it moves. Do we really want to sit here and say God’s Spirit cannot call a homosexual to follow God’s call?” That is complete apostasy, and there are a great number of Baptist churches in Georgia and across the country that are in that condition. Further, the large majority of the present SBC churches are terribly worldly, filled with unregenerate members (a great many of whom don’t even attend one service a week), having no spiritual power. Southern Baptist pastors and evangelists themselves have made this same observation, as we have documented. A long time ago I made the shocking realization that the average fundamental Baptist church is as worldly and lukewarm and powerless as the Southern Baptist church of my childhood. The point I was making last week (“Cobb County, Georgia, A Cast Study in the Priority of Churches over Politics”) is that as the churches go, so the politics go, and we need to put the priority where God tells us to put it, which is on the spiritual building up of churches. It is the Lord’s House that is the pillar and ground of the truth, not the White House (1 Timothy 3:15).
(Friday Church News Notes, March 5, 2021, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)