"As Anyone Can See"

It was a different time and a different context in which he wrote, but listen to Harry Emerson Fosdick, the leading light of the liberal assault on traditional Christianity in the early 20th century. He wrote the following critique of his own movement in "The Secret of Victorious Living" (1934). "...many of our modernist churches, as anyone can see, are spiritually dead and morally futile." Would it be too obvious to ask those in ABCUSA who reject the Bible's teaching to evaluate their churches in the light of HEF's observation? "As anyone can see," he said.

ABCUSA NOW A MUSEUM EXHIBIT

The American Baptist Churches in the USA is already there in the museum of unlive things right between the bones of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus. I'd say a denomination is a gathering of churches around the truth of the Bible, for the purposes of working together to make that truth known to all the world. That truth is Jesus, of course, and He brings into the lives of His followers what the early disciples and the writers of scripture called “the way.” For Christians and their denominations there is a way of belief and behavior, and those things are laid out plainly in the Word of God, the Bible. When a denomination like ABCUSA (claiming to be Christian, biblical, and evangelical) turns against specific teachings of the Bible, because to follow such teachings would be politically incorrect in an unbelieving world, it virtually assures itself an agonizing death and a skeletal reference in the museum. The General Secretary’s address at the Denver Biennial (2005) was the meteorite that whacked this dinosaur.

No Reformation Without Separation

When the 1,125 delegates of the American Baptist Churches Pacific South West (84% of voting delegates) directed their Board to withdraw from the American Baptist Churches in the USA, they did the only thing that might save the denomination from its downward spiral. They essentially said "By your position regarding God's revelation in God's Word, the Bible, you have separated yourself from us in spirit, so we now must separate organizationally from you." As difficult a decision as that may have been for some of the PSW churches, it was the best thing they could have done for us in ABCUSA. Hopefully, as a result of this major separation the denominational leaders will "come back to the Bible" and accept its teaching as our authority, and live it out organizationally in our life together. If they do not the future of ABCUSA is bleak. It may limp along as a dying bureaucracy for years, but it will be clear that it has lost the baptistic biblically evangelistic spirit that gives baptist denominations their life. Thank you PSW for doing what you had to do, and for opening the door to reformation, revival, and restoration in ABCUSA. There is no reformation without separation. I believe that ABCPSW will be wonderfully blessed by God in its ministry and outreach and its life together. May God bring reformation to the ABCUSA because of PSW's faithful step.