A group of Southern Baptists are nominating conservative leaders to address concerns about a growing woke culture in the denomination. They support Pastor Tom Ascol, president of Founders Ministries and the Institute for Public Theology, for president and Voddie Baucham, dean of theology at African Christian University in Zambia, for president of the pastors’ conference.
Baucham, who is black and grew up in the projects of South Central Los Angeles, is a well-known critic of critical race theory and wokeness, calling them godless ideologies, incompatible with the teachings of scripture. His book “Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe” became a bestseller, thanks in large part to Christians alarmed at seeing leftist ideas and terminology regarding race becoming popular in church circles.
“I would love to see a revival of great biblical preaching in the SBC,” he told “The Daily Wire.” “The pastors’ conference has the potential to play a significant part in that, especially if it is part of a larger movement that brings a man like Tom Ascol into the SBC presidency.”
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Ascol’s other backers, such as current SBC Vice President Lee Brand and former law and politics professor Carol Swain, both of whom also are black, share Baucham’s fears that a small group of leaders has steered SBC institutions closer to the current culture rather than to Christ. Among the issues they highlight: “radical feminism masked as soft complementarianism,” the “false gospel of critical theory and intersectionality” and “race Marxism that divides everyone by their most superficial features, in a never-ending cycle of recrimination and hate.”
Ascol believes SBC leaders have shown a lack of responsiveness to churches such as his, which are concerned that worldly ideas are infecting and distorting the denomination’s core doctrines. Some of the concerns he and churches like his have brought up in recent years include claims that SBC seminary faculty encouraged students to identify their white privilege and the 2019 SBC resolutions committee’s decision to classify critical race theory as an “analytical tool” that can “explain how race has and continues to function in society.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice