You are listening to the Patriot Pastors Podcast, where we talk about today's issues from a pastor's perspective, as well as calling America back to the faith of our fathers. Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under. Here's your host, Wade Lentz and Harold Smith. Welcome to the Patriot Pastors podcast. My name is Harold Smith, and I'm joined again with my regular co-host, good time friend, long time friend, and pastor of Barrow Baptist Church, Wade Lentz. Wade, we've spent sleepless nights worrying whether Southern Baptists would survive another convention. Would this be the year of the demise of the convention? Would liberalism sweep through the convention and take them out once and for all? Or would this be the turnaround, the reformation revival year, or would this just be blah? What do you think? Well, you know, this is our third year of doing like a SBC review after the convention. And the first year that we did this was 2021. And at the start of the episode, we played the taps, you know, like the, the military funerals. And we said, you know, that ship is speaking about the SBC has sailed then last year. where you play the song, turn out the lights, the party's over, how the convention went that particular year. This year is a little bit different because there were some lows, but there were also some highs. So depending on who you are, you might leave the convention if you're if you are an SBC pastor and think, hey, we're on the right road. We made some progress. But if you're again, depending on who you are, you might be thinking, ah, It's really same song, different verse type of a year. I guess what we could do is just briefly talk about some of the lows and then talk about some of the high points during the convention in New Orleans. And I guess probably the started out would be a low point would be, you know, Mike Stone was running against Bart Barber and you and I both felt like that that was going to be an uphill battle because Bart was an incumbent. And even in a political, secular world, incumbents are hard to beat. And it stood to be true even in the Southern Baptist world as well. He won, Barbara won by, I think it was 68% versus Mike Stone's 31%. And so it wasn't even close. Now, we both felt like Barber's going to win, but we felt it was going to be closer than than this. And so that was a little bit disheartening for me. And I know a lot for a lot of conservatives, don't you think? Yeah, I've, I've said it publicly several times. I don't think Southern Baptist could do any better than Mike stone for a president. The man is, I mean, I count him as a personal friend, so I'm a little biased, but he is a gifted, uh, communicator. He has an ability to get his point across in a very clear way. He's gifted in leadership. He served Southern Baptist and virtually. You know, he jokes everything but WMU leader. And I think when you have a real gifted leader, but also a a conservative candidate that's not going to go along with the the agenda that we've been seeing for the last really five, six years. I expected more people to say we need to change. Yeah. Reason I felt that way. is when Mike first ran in 21, that was in Nashville. There were over 15,000 messengers there. And he beat Al Mohler. He beat several well-known candidates. Yeah. And it came down to him and Ed Linton. And it was close. It was close. I mean, I want to say it was like 700 votes out of all those messengers one way or the other. Right. And so I thought, OK, you know, Southern Baptists have decided to go. They don't want to go in the conservative direction. But from that point on, what Southern Baptists have kind of turned a blind eye to, I'm talking about those in the up and up, is the convention's income is dropping. It's dropping like a rock. you know, cooperative program giving is down, missions offerings are down, and they're trying to cover this up in a number of ways, and that's really something for another podcast, but what's happening is the trajectory is going down, and that's what, you know, that was kind of the, if you like the trajectory that the Southern Baptist Convention is on, just vote for Bart Barber, but if you want to change that, vote for Mike Stone. So I thought people were, I didn't know if there'd be a majority of them, but I thought enough people were looking and going, man, everything we have is going down. People leaving churches are leaving. Pastors are leaving. Giving is going down. State giving is going down. You know, we we've got to write this ship and that was not what messengers to this year's convention wanted to do. And I think that is probably, I love Mike. I just didn't. It's like you said, it's an uphill battle, brother. I didn't think it was going to be 68 31 for an impeccable candidate. You know, that, that kind of shocked me. Yeah, it, it did me too. And I don't know, maybe it's the deal getting over that fact of all the mishandling of, of the lies and the, you know, all those things that came upon Mike stone ruined his reputation and how much of that was clarified from the platform. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, they, you know, this convention didn't do any favors to Mike when his name was smeared, all sorts of lies were spread about him. All of those things have since been proven untrue. Right. And. They just his church actually requested from the committee. I think it was the executive committee, some group that handles all the information and said, hey, we'd like to have the security tapes, the video files from the convention center where this lady claimed Mike Stone. You know, said something to her and her feelings and everything. It was a stage set up and he requested that and they refused to give it to him. Right. There was even a motion made this year at the convention to release those. And so, you know, we could clear Mike's name because people are still, you know, accused, even though this has been publicly, everyone's agreed, it was a setup and it was not true. The tapes exist. Let us see them. Yeah. And that motion got ruled out of order. Right. And they said, we don't have enough time to do that. I could pull my phone out and make a phone call and have that done in 30 minutes if I'm at the top of the platform. Yeah. Don't have enough time to do it. So the guy said, Hey, look, I wanted it done now, but if you get it to us in six months, I'll change my timeline. Now the time for that's over. You should have done that right the first time. And that right there is what we see every single year at the Southern Baptist Convention. You said it when you and I were talking earlier. They weaponize Robert's rules of order for loopholes, for technicalities to get out of answering simple, honest questions. And in my opinion, that was the reason why our church left the convention Uh, when I pastored it in 2008, I think is when we quit, uh, fellowshipping with the convention and it was over that right there. I'm like, they don't want to hear from us. They're just looking for excuses not to answer our question. Yeah. And I mean, Let's talk about this for a moment before we go to the positive. What do you think about Bart's moderating of the meeting? I personally thought he kept it light. He made a few jokes were needed. He was very he seemed to be very kind. He's a kind man. Sure. Even when he was having to tell people your motions out of order, he was doing it in as nice a way as he possibly could. And I thought he did a great job. What do you think, Wade? Yeah, I think that was one of the highs. Honestly, that was a breath of fresh air of what the convention had had in the past, especially with Greer. who was obnoxious, among the worst, just a little bit smart, like you could just tell in his tone. Barbara was nothing like that. He did a tremendous job moderating the convention, which is a very hard thing. I mean, you have this parliamentarian who is right there standing beside you telling you, you know, what's allowable, what's not allowable. Yeah, that was a breath of fresh air for sure. But going back to what you said about the Robert rules of order, man, that is just so weaponized against the messengers is no one there as a messenger knows that manual of of the parliament orders. It takes eight years of law school, I think, to understand Robert. Yeah. And to me, I have never I have never pastored a church where we operated under Robert's rules of order. Nobody knows them. Well, we operate in an orderly manner. You know, we run time, we make motions and second vote. But it's almost like we've got a group of people back here going, is there any way we can get out of this? Oh, here's a technicality. Yeah. Don't have to do that. And speaking of Lowe's, did you see the the Buck documentary, if you will, put out by Kuipers Belt? Yes. Last week before the convention started, I thought that was like a four part series. I saw it on YouTube, but I thought it was a very good job of demonstrating why the Bucks were upset, because all along I'm like, I thought this was stupid. I'm like you gave. a document of personal information to care and swallow prior. Yeah, that's dumb. Why did you know? Shame on you. This is what happened. Right. Dogs, you get fleas, you know. Yeah, this is. And I had a hard time feeling sorry for the bucks. And I admit that. Mm hmm. But when I saw the way they were treated and they were like, Hey, look, we just want to know who did this. Just tell us who did it. And they were, it was like fighting city hall. You know, you're just not going to win this. And you know, promises promises broken. Well, then somebody gets up and I think it was Michelle Leslie gets up and makes a, a motion to call for, um, the convention to. you know, ask Southeastern Seminary to reopen and let's have a third party investigation. Let's let somebody else come in and, you know, kind of a mediator, decide between these two groups what went wrong. Yeah, that motion was ruled out of order and they never said why, but it was just ruled out of order. Didn't have to say why. So a guy stands up the next day and says, hey, I think you guys did us wrong yesterday. You know, why was that out of order? What was wrong with that? And Bart said, you know, he gets the whisper in the ear and he says, I'm sorry, the time to do that was yesterday. That time's passed. We can't answer that now. And then the guy said, but we're talking about the, you know, care for an abuse victim. And they cut him off like mid-word. We don't care about that. We got to handle that. And that committee's not here today. It is every year. Wade, you just see multiple examples of people asking simple, honest questions. Yeah. Getting shot down. And I mean, in my opinion, that's the low every year. And I understand you got to have rules, but for crying out loud, I mean, it's the thing they don't want to touch. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the the bad side of of the of an SBC convention. It's there's always going to be that that platform that dictates how the meeting goes and the messengers really have no say so. And if they begin to say so, all you have to do is mute that mic and shut them up and say that you're out of order. Go to the next one. Yeah. Right. Right. You know, it's funny how they have the ability just to say, you're out of order, you're out of order. Yeah. But then you take former President James Merritt and he's going to make a motion. And so people are standing in line hoping to get to a microphone and then hoping that they call their microphone randomly, hoping that they have an opportunity during this window to make their motion. Mm hmm. But James Merritt's a former president. He goes to a microphone that's standing there empty. Nobody's waiting in line. He walks up there. All these past presidents walk up there with him. Uh, camera people walk up there. Journalist reporters walk up there. They all know what's happening at, at this certain microphone. When everybody's in place, the platform says microphone six B. Oh, it just happens to be, uh, what, five or six former presidents of the convention, all standing there with reporters ready to talk. I can't believe we randomly selected this. Right, right. They did this with Rick Warren last year. They didn't let him ramble on for 10 minutes. Yeah, that when you look at it, it's like, you don't, you know, if you graduated third grade, you can see this ain't fair, you know? And I mean, for me, I understand you got to have order in a business meeting, especially one with 12,000 people in it. But for crying out loud, it's like every year. People with sincere, honest questions get terminated for some little something, but you'll give the microphone to somebody you deem to be important and give them all the leeway in the world to say whatever they want. Yeah, I think another low would be the president of LifeWay, Ben Mandrell is his name. He was asked by a messenger as to why Lifeway continues to sell products or books that are written by known false teeth. And even Beth Moore would be an example that he used. And the president of LifeWay said this, he said, hey, LifeWay is a big tent, big tent. And we recognize that there are many various doctrines, doctrinal beliefs, but we want to be inclusive into all those beliefs. And so we enlarge our our tent here in Lifeway. And so, in other words, if it sells, we're gonna put it on our shelf. If it makes money, we're going to sell it. Hey, and guess what? That's, to me, a double standard. A double standard because you just voted to amend the Constitution to beef up the Baptist faith and message that only men can be a pastor. But yet you're selling books, women, preachers, women, preachers. So in principle, you ought to get rid of those books, but since they are profitable, you keep them. So let me say something while we're close. There's a reason people take Baptist out of their church name and it's because they don't want to be a Baptist. Yeah. And I'm going to say this and I'm going to use LifeWay to demonstrate it. LifeWay was started as the Baptist Sunday School Board. Then it was changed to Baptist Bookstore. Now it's LifeWord and it's not Baptist anything anymore. Even though it is an entity within and affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, if you were to walk in there, there would be no Baptist identity in it. And that was the whole purpose for taking a name like Lifeway instead of the Baptist bookstore. It was meant to be more appealing to a larger audience. Yes, we've got to be more accepting of other doctrines. And it's also the reason why I refuse to buy anything from them. Yeah, I would pay more and get it from some other group that I would from from them just because of that very thing right there. Sure. Sure. Any other lows? Yeah, the sermon preached today, this earlier today, by Todd Unzicker. I believe that's how you pronounce his name. Todd Unzicker, who is the executive director of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention. And the treasurer. And the treasurer. Writes his own checks, I guess. I don't know how that works. Yeah, I don't know how that works either. But my soul, what a divisive message. Really, I cannot call it for the most part a sermon or a message because he went on a rant against those who opposed the Southern Baptist Convention as far as the platform is concerned, the direction of the convention. He said things like this. Are we going to give weight to people in this convention who give nothing? Are we going to give weight to people who tweet more than tithe? Are we going to give weight to people who post more than they pray? In other words, he's saying that all those people who tweet and post things in opposition and share videos in opposition, they're not tithers and they're not even prayer warriors. They're just People who stir up trouble and you don't need to give them an ear. Yeah. Anybody that questions the king is not entitled to be heard. Right. How do you, how do you, what's their exchange rate for tweets to dollars, by the way, if we're going to tweet more than we tithe, where does like a dollar equal five tweets or is it, is it like on a peso scale? I mean, how does this work? Yeah. Tweets more than tithes. Man, I tell you, it was more than praise. I mean, I saw somebody had shared on Twitter today and, uh, they had a picture of Martin Luther Nella and the 95 thesis on the door of Wittenberg, Germany, the church there. And it says, are we going to yield to those who post more than they pray? And I thought, all right, was this revolutionary? I mean, I. Yeah, it's like you were saying, it's a guy that had a platform nationally to speak to everybody. And he decides to get up and rant against anybody that would question the leadership. And this whole, this is the whole problem in the convention. This is why people are leaving in droves. They've been told for years, trust your leaders. Well, we found out our leaders are not who we thought they were. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this guy here is probably vying for vowing for the next presidency of the SBC and, you know, 2025 or 24. But it was pitiful and it turned me off completely. And I know it did. If you were sitting there in those chairs listening to him speak. And, you know, in other words, and he said this verbatim, he said, all they're trying to do is stir up dissension and distrust within the SBC and discouragement. Don't listen to him. I'm like you. I think he was just being the voice of the SBC platform. And he was telling everybody, if you don't agree, just sit down and shut up. Yeah. Well, past president J.D. Greer shared his sermon on Twitter and said straight fire, you know, like this is a great message. And when you have an elitist mindset where everybody's beneath you, we're in control, do what we say, trust us, just give us your money and we'll spend it the way it should. We, you know, we think it should be spent and we'll tell you a little bit, some highlights of what we've done with your money and don't ask questions. This is the reason. that people are leaving the Southern Baptist Convention. And I think they know that because the numbers were greater in Nashville two years ago, and the conservative to opposition rate was much closer, and now you're seeing it get further and further apart. Yeah, that's because of the, I mean, I talked to a pastor, not 30 minutes before we went on today and I didn't even know, I know him just, you know, from a distance, we, we got each other's phone number. We've talked a few times through our conference, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure they were in the convention and he'd for me, yeah, they'd left last year, officially. That makes about 15 or 20 pastors or churches that I know of, just in my little circle of friends, that have left the convention in the last 16, 18 months, last year and a half. And there are other churches in the process as we speak that I know of. I mean, when it's all said and done, there's liable to be 20 or 30 Southern Baptist churches that I know of, 25 or 30, that'll be out of the convention in the next two years. Mm hmm. Yes. And they're out of the convention because they feel like they don't have a voice. And there's there was nothing in this convention that was like, we want to give it power back to the people. You know, we want to we want to give you a voice. We want to listen and hear what you have to say. Even though I thought Bart did a good job of moderating the whole platform, the whole agenda, the whole favoritism, all of that was still there. We're in control. Mm hmm. Sure. Sure. Before we get to some of the highs, let me just real quickly give a shout out to Alan Nelson, our good friend and pastor of Second Baptist Church in Perryville. He, unbeknownst to us, gave the what would be the nomination speech for the vice president. And he was nominating Dusty Devers, who's a pastor in Oklahoma. And Alan did a tremendous job. I mean, I guess you could say this is the biggest audience Alan has ever preached to, right? I mean, 9,000, I think, were there at the time. I mean, Dusty got 20% of the vote. Imagine what that would have been without Alan's endorsement. I'm telling you, that's right. Yeah, who followed Alan was Fred Luter, who was the former SBC president of 2012, 2013. I knew then, I thought, oh, the platform has a guy. And, uh, and, and certainly the platform, the platforms candidate one, uh, big, but, uh, Alan did a tremendous job. I was proud of him. I watched a video of it the next day. I thought he did a great job. Uh, Alan, he's, he's a passionate. creature and that was the subject he was passionate about. So good. All right, let's get to the highs. And I mean, this was not a doom and gloom convention. There was right here. And I know we put them at the end, but I think that's because we needed to get all the negatives off our chest before we go. Yeah, the highs would be there were three churches that the I believe this is the executive committee voted to disfellowship. And those three churches appealed the committee's decision to disfellowship. And so at this convention, they were allowed to get a vote from the messengers if they would be allowed to continue fellowship with the SBC. The first one was a church out of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, who is a is pastored by a woman. And she has been the pastor there for thirty three years within the SBC. Is there any big SBC entities in Louisville? I mean, any any prominent SBC people? I think there's one work in Louisville. Yeah, I think there's one, maybe a seminary. If you were in a Southern Baptist association there and you, would anybody even know for 33 years that some church right under the nose of the most prestigious, oldest prominent seminary in Southern Baptist life. I mean, she said by her own testimony, she said by her own testimony that they are a conservative Southern Baptist church. So maybe that gave them, you know, a 33 year, I know for a fact that the many professors that work at Southern Seminary, pastor churches, in the exact same association with a pastor that was been in the Southern Baptist Convention for 33 years, and nobody brought it up. Right, right, crazy. And that was in her, her appeal was, why now? Yeah, yeah, that's right. What happened after? Why is that a problem now? Yeah, that's like, uh, it's like a guy wanting to divorce his wife 33 years in and said that first meal you cooked, you know, you've never done it. That's right. Yeah. So that church and then freedom Baptist church, I forget where that was at. Um, and then their founder had resigned. Yeah. This wouldn't be about him and it would be, you know, he got out of the picture. Yeah. But go to the most prominent Saddleback Church. Never heard of her. I mean, never heard of Saddleback Church founder Rick Warren. And Rick spoke to his appeal and they cut him off this time. Instead of giving him like 10 minutes, they gave him three minutes and 10 seconds and then they muted his mic. So I was proud to see that. Cut him mid sentence. Cut him, cut him off. He didn't just speak at the convention. We actually had 40 days of Rick kind of like 40 days of purpose to Twitter about 40 days ago and began really promoting himself. And I mean, I think he did himself more damage than good. Uh, because I was, I wasn't even going to new Orleans and I was sick of Rick Warren already. Yeah. Yeah. Then he emailed every SBC pastor and how, how he got those emails. I'm not sure, but anyway, he emailed, he tried to build a, uh, You know, some type of a supportive base, but it did not work. He created his own website. I didn't know that. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It didn't work. He he lost his appeal by 88 percent. And so it was a. You know, while we're on the subject of highs and we're talking about this, Al Mohler, I think he's the best politician that the world has ever seen. I'm not a big fan of him. I mean, I think he's said and done some good things, but I think he's also been on the wrong side of history a few times. I have to tell it. But he gave two, he spoke two times appointed by the committee on this task to represent them. And he spoke after the woman and he spoke after Rick Warren. During his three minutes, he gave as decisive, and he was one of the drafters of the original Baptist Faith and Message 2000. That's right. He gave a decisive argument against women pastors, and he talked the first time about our faith and practice. And this is contrary to that. And then when Rick finished, he talked more about the meaning of the Baptist faith and message as one of the writers, he could say what was said in that room. Yes. Both times he just shredded the, the argument of these two, uh, people. Yeah. When Al Moller is on and he is man, he's on, you do not want to try to debate him for sure. He's a brilliant man. Brilliant. He's the best politician I've ever seen, but I say he's a politician because Al Moller weighs his decisions. Is this one I want to be wrong on? Is this one I want to do? Right. Right. He is very good at sticking his finger in the wind and knowing which way to go at what time. what time to swim upstream and what time to go with the flow. Yes. And in this instance, he did as good a job as anyone could ask for. Right. These two. Yeah. So seeing Saddleback and these other two churches lose their appeal, that was a win for sure. OK, that was a hopper. But yeah, yeah. And we say it's a win. Yeah. But it really should be just a given thing. It should not be even a debatable issue. This took two years, right? Five at this conclusion, which should have been a, a no back in 2021. And, uh, okay, we'll consider it. And then they came back in 22 and said, we really don't know what a pastor is, but we need to like, like dictionaries don't exist for a year. And so then, I mean, Southern Baptists were the brunt of how many jokes weighed. We don't know what a pastor is. We're still, I mean, uh, so anyways, they finally determined what a pastor was and they did the right thing. And it took two full years should have taken a year at most. Right. And there shouldn't have been any debate and Rick Warren shouldn't have got a 10 minute farewell speech last year. It arrived at the right place, but boy, you took a long way to get there. Sure. And here, here's another issue. There's still about 1100 SBC churches that have women pastors. What about them? Yeah. So the battle's not over yet. Okay. No, no, no, no. Go ahead. Yeah. And so, you know, they still have a lot of work to do. And I think we'll end on this maybe is the Mike law amendments where they're they're beefing up the Baptist faith and message. Thankfully, that passed. But it's not law yet. It's not law yet because it has to get voted in next year at the next convention before it is able to be added to the as an amendment to the Baptist faith and message. Yeah, so everybody has to show up in Indianapolis and vote for it there in order for it to actually become law. Yes. And that brings me to another thing before we wrap up on the on the Mike. Well, the Mike Law Amendment was just what you said. It was defining what a. who can and can't be a pastor in Southern Baptist Church. So right behind that comes what we talked about earlier, all the SBC presidents asking Bart Barber to form a committee, a task force, not a committee, a task force. And then to report to us in Indianapolis about what it means to be in close cooperation. Yeah. I'm of the opinion that that motion by merit is a way to back door and come up with another alternative to really ruling out these churches you mentioned. Right, right. Yeah. To me, it was a beware the wolves that are on the prowl type issue. And that's the way it I interpreted it and many others did. So it's almost like a fine and loophole of allowing these churches still to have fellowship with the SBC, even though they err on just one issue. When 90% of your, your messengers agree that the committee to remove these churches was right. And the platform, or when we say platform, we're talking about the powers that be the SBC power structure when they want to come in and try to backdoor and say, Hey, these people are trying to divide us. No, they're really not. 90% of the people agreed. Yes, but they won't accept that. Right. And I think that's why a lot of people are leaving New Orleans. Southern Baptists are like, yeah, I'm as excited as I've ever been. You know, we're not going liberal. Yeah. You people in the pulpits may not be, but the power brokers have changed and they don't share your views. Right. Right. And I lost so much respect for James Merritt over the fact that... You had respect for James Merritt? Well, at one time, yes, especially back in the 90s. Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going way back. Uh, he was a solid pastor, but man, especially the last few years, his son came out to be homosexual. I think he's even quote unquote, married a pastor of a church. And James Merritt said, my son preached a very soul stirring message or whatever. It was something to that effect. I'm like, dude, don't even go there. So I've lost a lot of respect for him. And. What we see at this SBC, what we see in every one of them is that the swamp is deep. And James Merritt is part of that swamp. He posted a picture on Twitter yesterday, I believe, and it was a picture of him and Danny Akin. And it said, we are best buds. I'm like, OK, I see. I see how this works. Well, we got about a minute left and, uh, I, I would, I would sum it up this way and I'll give you the last word, Wade, you can close the podcast, but I think there were some high points. It wasn't as bad as it could have been. But if you're leaving there thinking, boy, the SBC is back, no real change has been made. An obvious decision was affirmed by 90%. This should have been affirmed last year. Yeah. That being said, there's still lots and lots of reform to do if the SBC is going to come back. Yes. Yeah. I just want to thank everyone for listening to this special edition of the Patriot Pastors podcast, and we just pray the Lord's blessings upon you.