A Glorious Exception
By Michael Clingenpeel

Editor’s Note: Reprinted from the Religious Herald

Oaks and pines are very different trees. Each possesses a different root system, grain, bark and leaf. What they hold in common is a thirst for water that drives their root systems deep into the soil.

The Baptist General Association of Virginia and Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia are as different as oaks and pines. Those who make up their memberships, however, share a thirst for God that sends them to sources of refreshment.

This common thirst explains why a couple thousand Baptists from both groups will gather next month in Roanoke to hear Henry Blackaby, the Southern Baptist guru of spiritual awakening, talk about how to find a fresh encounter with God.

Tempting Package

So episodic are our fitful efforts at discipleship that most of us welcome a renewed experience of God’s grace and power. Blackaby has successfully tapped this reservoir of need for personal revival by packaging the biblical principles for spiritual renewal in a way that speaks to Southern Baptist laity and clergy alike.

Thirst will bring adversaries to the same spigot. A desire to quench thirsty spirits has prompted officials at the Virginia Baptist Mission Board and SBCV to give money to support Blackaby’s appearance in Roanoke. Kudos to the Roanoke Valley Baptist Association for co-opting both groups in the service of growth in personal discipleship.

Since 150 churches left the BGAV over the past two years to join the SBCV, there have been few other instances of formal cooperation. Next month’s conference in Roanoke is a glorious exception. Is this a sign that the longing for personal and national revival is a more compelling motivation for cooperation than missions, the cause that kept Baptists in Virginia together for our first 173 years? Perhaps.

More likely it is an acknowledgment that both groups believe in renewal and recognize that Blackaby’s materials are hot sellers among their churches. Neither, after all, wants to give any ground to the other when it comes to revival.

Should Virginia Baptists be encouraged that a conference such as the one in Roanoke is evidence that the wounds in our Virginia Baptist fellowship are healing? No.

Conflict Cloaked

Next month’s expression of unity in Roanoke masks an intensifying conflict between supporters of the two groups in local churches across the state.

Since the SBCV constituted as a separate state convention in 1997, about 150 churches have joined their ranks. Many of these churches had already distanced themselves from the BGAV and were giving little or no money to the BGAV. Their decisions to separate from the BGAV created minimal strife within these congregations, and in some cases none at all.

To continue its growth, however, the SBCV must now start new churches or proselytize aggressively among BGAV churches. The latter strategy is easier, quicker and cheaper. This explains why so many BGAV churches are being pressured by SBCV-friendly pastors and a handful of vocal laity to shed their loyalty to the BGAV, often forged across more than a century, in favor of the SBCV.

Disinformation

The principal weapon in the SBCV’s campaign is disinformation. Like Joseph McCarthy smeared innocent American citizens in the 1950s with the Communist label, some SBCV supporters spread rumors that to be aligned with the BGAV is to believe that God favors abortion, that homosexuality is not a sin, that the deity of Christ and his virgin birth are unimportant, that Jesus’ sacrificial death is unnecessary, and that one’s church must support the CBF instead of the SBC.

These untruths, unfortunately, go unrefuted in many churches when the SBCVfriendly pastor or laity resist proposals to allow a representative from the BGAV to present its position to the congregation.

The trickle-down theory of economics applies to denominational systems. In a Baptist system which practices congregational polity, it takes years for some individual congregations to experience the same discord that splintered the national convention. In time, however, almost every congregation becomes a microcosm of the national denomination when the issues trickle down to affect John and Jane Baptist

.Blackaby is on to something, of course. A fresh encounter with the living God is what all of us need. When it finally happened to Paul, a nit-picker of the highest order, he was able to set aside his intricately fashioned theological system and legalistic righteousness in favor of an SBC-friendly, incalculable grace. “I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him,” wrote Paul.

Until that happens to some of our brethren, it would be nice if they opened their Bibles to the place where God says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” and “Thou shalt not steal.”

July 1999