Last month, Steve Lawson returned in the news for having been listed as a speaker for the upcoming Contending Conference. But upon discovery, the conference quickly course corrected and scrubbed Lawson from the website for their event. Now, Jeff Durbin, pastor of Apologia Church, is attacking Protestia, Justin Peters, and others for reporting on the story.
Durbin’s logic is simple, that Steve Lawson was dragged over something that turned out not to be true.
Jeff Durbin characterizes the reports as false, but that assertion itself is misleading. Protestia reported information directly from the conference website, which listed Lawson as one of the speakers along with a description of his presentation. It is also inaccurate to claim that Justin Peters learned about this story from Protestia. In fact, Peters posted about it several hours before Protestia did. He received the information through a tip, just like Protestia and Evangelical Dark Web. The tip was accurate as far as it went, and the subject matter was obviously newsworthy.
As EDW contributor Defiant Baptist pointed out:
The reason why Durbin is going on the attack against Protestia is because the outlet has reported on many of his controversies over years, including his secret recording of confessions of penitent sinners, which he saves to use as blackmail later. There is incontrovertible evidence of this!Â
Durbin appears to make some reference to this in the clip. And it should not be ignored that the beef between Durbin and Protestia over previous reporting is surfacing here. Protestia, in turn, finds Durbin’s hard-shepherding approach detestable (but that’s a subject for another day).
Nevertheless, it fails to take into account how people react to unwanted notoriety. The official narrative is that Lawson’s refusal was ambiguous enough not to deter the conference from listing him as a speaker anyway. This is wildly unprofessional and deserves journalistic scrutiny. Any discernment ministry worth an ounce would question the validity of this supposedly honest mistake, because conferences simply do not have a practice of listing speakers who have not confirmed, and pastors with no desire to return to the spotlight would not leave their declination ambiguous.
Steve Lawson was either dragged by some ghetto conference or played with fire and narrowly avoided getting burned. That is what the facts present. They do not present a case of unsubstantiated rumors, as Durbin wishes to be the case.
One Response
Trusted Christian Leadership should never be this messy. These clowns should be removed and replaced with someone more respectable, classy and, most importantly, more Christ like. What a dumpster fire.