With the Southern Baptist Convention approaching, many feminists are rallying to longhouse the Southern Baptist Convention by passing an amendment to their constitution that would deem churches with female pastors not in friendly cooperation with the SBC. This could lead to a purge of liberal churches in the SBC thus shifting the messenger pool to a more orthodox position. Todd Friel weighed in on the SBC, even offering his support for the Mike Law Amendment. However, Friel’s framing of the SBC downplays the doctrinal decline facing America’s largest and most influential Protestant denomination.
In a recent video, Todd Friel uses the topical sign stealing in football to articulate that liberals have a playbook for destroying denominations. Per Friel, it’s weaponized feminism. He’s correct. Much of his video focuses on the history of these tactics. However, when returning to the subject of Southern Baptists, Todd Friel turns yellow.
Todd Friel is under the impression that liberals are a fringe minority in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Here’s some good news about the SBC. It’s not a liberal convention at all really. It’s like there are some that are super conservative, mostly conservative, pretty conservative, but then you got these people over here. And they are the outliers, but they’re trying to have a great impact on the conservatives.
It’s true in a sense that liberals are a minority in the SBC. However, the majority of Southern Baptist messengers have voted for liberal presidents and resolutions over the last several years. They might not be theologically liberal, but they are functionally liberal because they are played as fools by them. The Mike Law Amendment was a rare wake-up call from this status. However, it was opposed in 2023 by the SBC Executive Committee. Jeff Iorg doubled down on this position. As of now, voting against the amendment is the official position of the Executive Committee as it has not officially changed.
Todd Friel’s advice emphasized voting for the most conservative candidate for president. In a display of cowardice, Friel does not name names. If he’s uninformed, he should not have made the video. If he’s holding out for an on-the-floor nomination that has not previously been announced, that would be an odd strategy, as such short-notice nominations are not reliable plans. The man Todd Friel should have named was Jared Moore. Simply put, three of the six candidates for president support female pastors remaining in the SBC: Bruce Frank, Mike Keahbone, and Dan Spencer. Clint Pressley is soft on the issue, but exceedingly woke in other areas. That leaves David Allen and Jared Moore. If Todd Freil recommended both of them as viable options, that would have been sufficient, but not naming names when half of the field is overtly liberal on the issue of defining your video is cowardice.
Conclusion
We say liberal drift to describe the trajectory of the Southern Baptist Convention. Todd Friel attributes this to aimlessness. But this is incorrect. The Southern Baptist Convention was steered in a liberal direction from the top down. If there is any hope to right the ship, it will need honest confrontation with the issue at hand. Failing to face the issue honestly has led to liberal victories year after year.
One Response
Na, what they need is a Kingship model of rule and they should choose me as their denomination king. And I’ll just start cleaning house and actually put theological conservatives in various positions. It would probably take me about 3 months of intense work then for the rest of my life, all I need is to maintain theological conservativism. They don’t need to pay me to be the king after the first 3 months.