What Is the SBC?

I guess I should add Baptist to my "Bs." If Paul was "a Hebrew of the Hebrews," (and he demonstrated to the Philippian church that he was), then I was a Southern Baptist of Southern Baptists. Before I was born, Grandma Roark was a member of the Fair Baptist Church in western Stephens county, Oklahoma. Ever since I became an adult, I’ve known that Grandma was "churched." They voted her out. My dad was about seventeen at the time, and when he heard about it, he went in the house, got someone’s pistol, and started down the road to the church. Walking. Uncle Charley saw his younger brother walking down the red clay road with a pistol in his hand. He caught up, and asked, "Harry, what are you going to do with that pistol?" Daddy’s instantaneous response was, "I’m going over to the church and shoot that preacher that kicked Mom out of the church." (At the time, this young man was a self-declared atheist, little knowing that within three years he would be at Oklahoma Baptist University, and pastor of a quarter-time church, the beginning of a ministry of more than fifty years.) Uncle Charley talked him out of killing the preacher. I was over sixty-years-old when I learned "the rest of the story." The pastor was carrying on a sexual affair, inappropriate to a minister, and Grandma was one of the first to learn of it. The pastor learned that Grandma was going to raise the issue at church business meeting, so he beat her to the punch and talked the church into voting her out. I never learned the nature of his case against Grandma, but he apparently was a persuasive speaker. A short time later, he was "called" to another church. I’ve told this story to indicate that my Baptist roots go back a ways. Daddy wound up, as I noted earlier, being a Baptist pastor from the mid-thirties until up into the eighties of the last century. He became a trustee of Oklahoma Baptist University. My younger brother has been in the Baptist ministry for more than fifty years. He and I both received our doctorates at what used to be the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Daddy earned a doctorate from the Central Baptist Theological Seminary. I was born on a farm, but was raised in a Baptist parsonage. I grew up in Baptist churches, and not only knew most of the hymns in the Broadman Hymnal, but knew the page number of those most often sung by Baptists. I got a major part of my education in the B.Y.P.U., later to become B.T.U., and then, simply, T.U. In those days it was alive and well, in very good health. Those programs are gone with the wind. I taught in two Baptist universities for a total of almost thirty-five years. The reason I spoke of "what used to be S.W.B.T.S., is that across the past three decades, a group who call themselves the leaders of a conservative resurgence among Baptists in the South, have taken over the SBC. In this post I’ll not go into the nature of this "takeover group," as they have been called. I just want to add my voice to the many who strongly affirm that these people are not actually Baptists, if you know Baptist history polity, and doctrine. I have written to announce the designation that I have given to the Southern Baptist Convention–the SBC. I’ve heard this from no one else but myself. Please understand that the language I am about to use is not intended the way it is used in foul speech, the way it is ordinarily used. Rather, I am using it in the primary dictionary definition. SBC no longer designated the Southern Baptist Convention. In recent decades, SBC has changed meaning. Now it denominates, as an accurate description, the Southern Bastard Convention. The new SBC is the child of illegitimate parentage: Southern Baptists and the whole sweep of right-wing Evangelicals. Some elements of Roman Catholicism have gotten in, making one wonder is there was another illicit affair involved. They have bulldozed the old SBC and replaced it with a misbegotten institution as a substitute. I repeat, I am not speaking pejoratively, rather, I speak descriptively when say: They are not Baptists; they are Bastards, pseudo-Baptists. They will go their way, and I, mine, but they are not part of my family, I am not part a part of theirs. I’m not kin to the SBC (except, perhaps, as second-cousins, thrice removed). Perhaps later, I will revisit, briefly, the reasons for this shift from the SBC to the SBC.