Conflict Between Comfort and Change
By Charlie McLaughlin,
Associate Coordinator

Change is one of the most difficult and yet necessary ingredients for personal growth. The Christian life is about change. It begins with a change in our hearts when we receive Christ and continues in our lives as we follow Christ. Pastors and church leaders conceptualize their roles as being catalysts to initiate change in the lives of individuals. Yet when it comes to group change, such as a church or denomination, we tend to cling to the status quo.

Lyle E. Schaller wrote an article entitled, “Why Change?” He suggests one of the significant problems facing the church today is the difficulty of implementing needed change when so many are content with the status quo.

He said, “A more-threatening response (to the need for change) is that a refusal or inability to adapt to a changing world often means institutional decline and eventual demise.”

He continues: “From an institutional perspective, the leaders of transformed congregations invariably look back and marvel at how changes were central to that transformation. Perpetuating the status quo is not the road to a transformed life.

That generalization applies to both individual believers and to congregations… Most of us organize each chapter of our life, as we reflect on our personal and religious pilgrimage, around change, not around perpetuating the status quo.”

Change is not comfortable and most often requires a struggle. But on the other side of the struggle is a broadened view of life and more meaningful expression of life for an individual or a congregation. However, corporate change requires leadership.

This month a pastor called me to tell me about how his church was going to make a change. He was leading the church to take their missions giving seriously by studying how their church relates to denominational organizations and institutions.

He has come to realize how incongruent it is to believe in stewardship and keep supporting the growth of fundamentalism by sending the money of their church to fundamentalist controlled seminaries outside of Texas. He said, “Shame on us for sending our money as though nothing has changed.”

It is a strange phenomenon to me that more pastors and lay leaders have not sought to create change to prevent their money from being sent to institutions like Southeastern Seminary where Paige Patterson is president. Is your money and the money of your church going to Paige Patterson’s seminary?

Can you read about the Onesphorian scholarship and his statement about women on page 6, and feel proud that your money is going there?

Can you give confidently with the giving of your church going to the co-architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC with all of its terrible repercussions?

Are there not more worthy ways to have an impact on our world for Christ? I think of our Texas Baptist universities or Truett Seminary or Logsdon School of Theology, for example.

It does not surprise me that Patterson is a favorite of the fundamentalist hierarchy. However, I am baffled at how those who strongly disagree with what he stands for will continue to send their money to multiply the production of his views. Why did Texas Baptist churches send $564,392 to Southeastern Seminary in 1996?

It would be a mistake to focus on Paige Patterson as the sole problem. The pastor mentioned above is accurate in assessing the broader problem: We have sacrificed principle upon the altar of comfort. We have so desired the comfort of the status quo that even when we disagree with the ideology and direction of SBC’s leadership we continue to support them financially.

Where is that independent Texas Baptist spirit that follows the conviction to do what is right?

At least one place this can be found is in the Executive Board of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. During its meeting on May 20, the Executive Board denounced Southwestern Seminary’s “hiring practices that violate historic Baptist principles,” referring to the withdrawal of Steve Harmon’s faculty nomination.

The resolution stated Harmon was withdrawn “because he affirmed the historic Baptist principle of local-church autonomy in relation to women in ministry.” Status quo thinking would command silence while letting Baptist distinctives erode away.

I am grateful for the Executive Board reminding Texas Baptists of the significance of local-church autonomy, the value of open door decisions compared to the vague shroud of closed (or locked) doors and promoting the guidelines of the Baptist Faith and Message to protect a local body of believers “operating through democratic processes under the lordship of Christ.”

The actions of the Executive Board remind us of the differences in the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC’s direction is led by the likes of Paige Patterson. If that is not our direction, then when will our financial support be congruent with our spirit-led convictions? Isn’t it time for some change?

June 1997