Cobb County, Georgia, demonstrates that religion and morality are fundamental to politics and proves the necessity of focusing on the spiritual condition of the churches rather than on politics. Cobb County was ground center for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It was Cobb County that threw the state to the Democrats in November and elected two Democrats to the Senate in January to guarantee Democratic control of Congress. Cobb County is Southern Baptist territory, and as the churches have, decade after decade, become more worldly and liberal, the politics has become more liberal, changing from limited-government Republican (“once the heart of Newt Gingrich’s GOP revolution of the 1990s”) to big-government Democrat, from pro-life to pro-abortion, from pro-traditional marriage to pro-homosexual rights, from pro-American to woke leftism and critical racism. It is in Cobb County that Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, a Southern Baptist congregation, accepted a homosexual couple as members in 2019. When contacted by the couple (John and John Reynolds) about the possibility of joining the church, Pastor Jim Conrad was affirmative. He “felt that God might be leading him in a different direction, consistent with his understanding of Scriptures and a gospel message that was not available to a select few, but to all” (“Georgia SBC church faces banishment,” Religion News Service, Feb. 19, 2021). This illustrates the change in the character of churches, which, in turn, has changed the political climate of the area. It is the church that is the pillar and ground of the truth, not politics. America is a nation of churches, and as the churches go so goes the nation. It is time for Bible-believing Baptists and fundamentalists to stop focusing on politics and secessionism and revolution, to let the peace of God rule in their hearts instead of carnal frustration and anger, and to focus on what God has told His people to focus on, which is building sound, life-changing New Testament churches. We can’t change the public education system, the universities, the bloated monstrosity of a government, the military, or the mainstream media, but we can, by God’s grace and as His co-laborers, build New Testament churches (1 Co. 3:5-12), and a New Testament church has more power than all of the teeth-gnashing mechanisms of conservative politics. Here is a description of a New Testament church from Philippians: “Do all things without murmurings and disputings: That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; Holding forth the word of life; that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain” (Php. 2:14-16).
(Friday Church News Notes, February 26, 2021, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)