Dishonesty in the SBC....
A follow up to my last post....
ATTENTION Russ Moore, Steve Lemke, Malcolm Yarnell, Gregory Tomlin, and the other folks at the Independent & Free Baptist Press.
Please take a moment from attacking the CBF and teaching your kids to be violent and follow these steps....
1. Visit the SBC.net website dedicated to searching for local Southern Baptist churches.
2. In the first box, type in "Waco, TX" without the quotations. Click Search.
3. Included in this LONG list of Waco-area Southern Baptist churches are...
7th & James Baptist Church (located on the campus of Baylor University) financially supports Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmon, George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, McAfee School of Theology at Mercery University, Associated Baptist Press, Baptist General Convention of Texas, Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Texas Baptist Committed, and the Baptist World Alliance.
Sound like a Southern Baptist church????????
Google "Calvary Baptist Church" and you will find that CBC describes itself as a "friendly moderate baptist church." The pastor of Calvary is JULIE Pennington-Russell. Three years ago, my family joined Calvary. Calvary in no way, shape or form is a Southern Baptist church.
Lakeshore affiliates with the Alliance of Baptists, CBF, and the BGCT.
According to the Dayspring website, DBC affiliates ONLY with the Baptist General Convention of Texas and with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Talk about dishonesty! I have contacted the Baptist Press for a comment. Perhaps a Southern Baptist out in the blogosphere could explain away this blatant fudging of numbers. Of the 40,000+ congregations that the SBC brags about - how many actually give a DIME to the Southern Baptist Convention??
Like I said before, Daniel Vestal is honest - how 'bout the SBC????
posted by Big Daddy Weave at 4:32 PM
9 Comments:
Hmm. I suspected such dishonesty before. Since you are at Calvary, BDW, please tell my old friend, Sharyn Dowd, that Michael Westmoreland-White says hello.
8:56 PM
Will do.
My dads office in the Religion Dept. is two doors down from hers, I do believe.
10:58 PM
The SBC website gets that contact information from the churches themselves. Unless a church takes the time to ask to be removed, the assumption is they are still SBC churches. Perhaps all the moderate churches in Waco should inform the webmaster at www.sbc.net that they are not longer in friendly cooperation with the SBC.
6:43 AM
Does the website get the info from the individual Churches or local Association? From what I've been told - it's the latter.
It's interesting to think that somehow Moderate CBF Churches are responsible for the content of the SBC website.
These Waco Churches stopped giving money to the SBC long before SBC.net Church Search was ever developed. One church is new and has never given a dime to the SBC. Why were they included in the first place?
Most Alliance and CBF Churches are listed on the Church-Search. I did find it interesting that the most liberal baptist congregations were not included (Oakhurst & Virginia-Highlands of Atlanta).
More importantly, how many of these congregations are included in the SBC's official church count?
11:17 AM
Well, Louisville, KY is bigger than Waco, TX so this took me awhile, but I have found this same kind of dishonesty in the SBC search engine here. Not all church listings which I suspect are bogus have websites, so I will have to call them. Here are the ones I KNOW to be bogus in alphabetical order.
1) Broadway Baptist Church (www.broadwaybaptist.org ) is affiliated with Long Run Association, Kentucky Baptist Fellowship, Kentucky Baptist Convention, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, but NOT SBC--not for over 10 years.
2) Canaan Christian Church. (New name of mega-church, Canaan Missionary Baptist Church.) This historic African-American church is associated with National Missionary Baptist Convention and the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
3)Crescent Hill Baptist Church: www.crescenthillbaptist.org This was once the faculty church of SBTS and has a long SBC history but broke with it in '95. Now affiliated with the American Baptist Churches, USA and with KBF/CBF.
4) Deer Park Baptist Church: www.deerparkbaptist.org Lists CBF and KBF
5) Highland Baptist Church: www.hbclouky.org I knew this was wrong since the pastor, Joe Phelps, is a good friend. They have just recently affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists and are still affiliated with the CBF, KBF, and the Kentucky Baptist Convention, but not the SBC for over 10 years.
6) Jeff Street Baptist Community at Liberty (no website, but our blog is www.jeffstreet.blogspot.org )This is a joke, right? This is my church. We were thrown out of Long Run Association as a mission in '90 for calling a woman pastor. We formerly withdrew from the SBC in '95 and from the CBF in 2000 (when CBF passed its anti-gay resolution). We are affiliated ONLY with the Alliance of Baptists. For crying out loud, our senior minister, Rev. Cindy Weber, is a woman, as is our Minister to the Homeless (Diane Moten), and Children's Minister (Peggy Foskett) and over half of our deacons. We are a Welcoming and Affirming congregation with several out gays and lesbians! The SBC wouldn't have us, but they are still counting us!
There are 6 others that are suspect and I have to check out.
Just how inflated are the SBC numbers?
6:57 AM
Churches listed on the SBC search engine, "Church Search," are there because they sign up for it. That is the procedure for being listed. Of the 44,000 or so Southern Baptist Churches, only 9,000-10,000 use the service as a tool informing potential church goers of their presence in the community. That means that, at one time, these churches -- my guess before they ditched the SBC -- had signed up. So they need to contact the SBC Webmaster, whoever that is, and have their names removed if they don't want it. And are you guys are assuming that the CBF information in the articles is incorrect just because someone in the SBC wrote it? Appears on the surface to be at least some truth to it, and Vestal's quotes are his own. If the CBF has 700,000 members, as Vestal claimed when he led the group to join the BWA, that would mean that each of its 1,800 churches claimed more than 370 members each. You'd be hard pressed to find that many moderate churches in the South with those kinds of numbers. An interesting post by one pastor confirming the CBF's practice of counting churches can be found at:
www.lespuryear.blogspot.com
He is a pastor in a strong "CBF state," North Carolina.
12:17 PM
'That means that, at one time, these churches -- my guess before they ditched the SBC -- had signed up.'
That cannot be true. BDW pointed to churches that were NEVER part of the SBC (created as Alliance or CBF churches) and I found at least one Progressive National Baptist (African-American) church that was never part of the SBC. So, they cannot have requested this and then failed to request removal.
In the case of several other churches in Louisville, including my own, we left at about the time the internet was becoming well-known ('94) and certainly long before the SBC had a website or a search engine. So, there was no webmaster for us to request to be added--and we left no doubts when we left that we were cutting all SBC ties. Supposedly, they were overjoyed that we left, but now they want to still count us.
2:17 PM
But why would the SBC choose your church to be one of 9,000 on its site? That doesn't make much sense. Was it just to anger Moderate congregations by listing them? Nor does it make much since for them to put a PNBC church on there. They (the SBC) wouldn't have done this without the information being sent to them, or perhaps it was related by the association the church is in. I'm just saying there may not be a boogie man in the closet here in this case. However, the CBF has some harder questions to answer. Okay, so there are no CBF seminary professors in the SBC-CBF articles. But if there were, do you think they would have said anything different than the Campbell guy in Texas? For years, and I've been around the CBF a lot, they've been pasting the SBC seminaries with all kinds of labels, including being "non-Baptist." As for the other information, I wouldn't necessarily confuse Tomlin's articles with his own opinions. I know of his past work on the CBF and have met him. It wasn't until he started covering their events that they at least got a fair shake. I think that's clear even from the CBF's statements that "attacks" against the group had ceased in recent years. I think in one of his articles this summer, he said he met many good people at the CBF doing good things.
2:32 PM
I can't answer for the CBF. My congregation is Alliance of Baptists only. I only attended one CBF meeting (2000). My church is progressive, maybe even radical, not Moderate (=lukewarm?).
I don't know who is sending in this info or how they are getting it. In our case, it cannot have been the Association. We were a mission (first established by a converted Riverboat Gambler in the 19th C., later part of the inner-city missions supervised by Clarence Jordan before the founding of Koinonia) until we called Rev. Cindy Weber as pastor in the late '80s. Then the Association tried to force us to change. We refused and they threw us out of the building in 1990. So, since our founding as an incorporated church, we have NEVER been part of the Long Run Association. So that explanation won't wash.
6:20 PM
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