It’s Time to Stop the LIES!
by Paul Kenley
Pastor, Baptist Temple, Houston

At the BGCT annual meeting in Austin, messengers were once again bombarded with the same old party lies about Texas Baptists Committed and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship that fundamentalists have been spouting for years, and I have grown agitated enough about it to respond.

I am privileged to serve on the governing boards of both bodies, and can say without equivocation that charges of liberal theology and lax morals are not only inaccurate but are so unfounded that to be sustained they must be intentionally manufactured. Obviously the vast majority of messengers present in Austin did not buy into these prevarications, but the charges need to be refuted nonetheless, for the benefit of those still trying to sort out the true nature of all this.

As a member of the TBC Executive Committee, and as a member of the CBF Coordinating Council, and as a conservative, Bible-believing and preaching Texas Baptist pastor, I am personally incensed by such charges. I am referring not only to the implications from the convention floor that TBC and CBF leaders deny the deity of Christ and favor ordination of homosexuals, but especially to pre-convention articles which were published to sustain these lies.

Specifically, the article by Skeet Workman in Plumbline, the publication of Southern Baptists of Texas, contains deliberate misquotes and misrepresentations. David Currie’s remarks were so blatantly misrepresented that if we did not follow the biblical instruction against taking each other to court, she would be sued for slander.

Here is a group that denies soul-freedom, is actively working to destroy the separation between church and state, and now, it seems, has adopted a hyper-Calvinistic theology that completely guts the need for missions and evangelism, trying to dictate to local churches not only what they must believe, but also how they must conduct themselves— and still have the nerve to call themselves Baptists.

The bottom line is this— the position of TBC and CBF is that any matter like who is ordained and how and why, and what style a congregation uses in worship, and who it calls as pastor, whether man or woman is to be left to the local church. When the denomination dictates such things, then we have ceased to be Baptists, regardless of how vehemently we call ourselves Baptists. I have a good friend who used to often say, “Tell the truth and stay in the church.” This would be good advice for even the “neo- Baptists” of our day.

December 1997