Friday, June 8, 2007

The wrong direction

Seventh Day Baptists are inclined to believe that our problems are unique when, in fact, we track - on a much smaller scale - what is happening to Evangelicals generally. Internet Monk is a Southern Baptist - a vastly larger denomination - but I suspect many Seventh Day Baptists will find that many of our problems are similar to his description of theirs:
.... Thousands and thousands of our people are going to vanish into generic evangelical churches and thousands and thousands of our churches are going to become generic evangelical churches. Among those who remain in our churches, the level of specifically Baptist doctrinal knowledge and practice is minute and decreasing by the day. Anyone with a distinctive point of view, be they Calvinist or evangelical Catholic, can have a field day among Southern Baptists.

Our pastors are overwhelming becoming practitioners of an atheological, pragmatic, entrepreneurial model of ministry that’s entirely about church growth and church imitation, which in generic evangelicalism is primarily about fluff, fizz and putting on a good show. Preaching, once the showcase of the SBC’s commitment to its distinctives, now wallows in the quicksand of generic moralism, imitative devotional pabulum and stale fundamentalist carping.

Worship leadership has suffered twenty years of worship wars, and left every church looking for a twenty-five year old CCM artist-in-training willing to sing choruses and put together a band. Music schools in our seminaries have become dinosaurs and traditional worship is increasingly the domain of left-of-center SBC churches.

Our denominational leadership speaks of revival endlessly, yet the direction of our churches has never been less spiritual, more pragmatic, more imitative of secular marketing methods or less God-centered. ....
internetmonk.com: The Baptist Way: The Dire Situation of the Southern Baptist Convention as I See It

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