Stewardship of Our SBC Land

When I was a church planter in Evanston, Illinois, and Baptist Collegiate Ministry director at Northwestern, I was financially grateful for opportunities to teach as an adjunct in Chicagoland. Sometimes, the schools would tap me to cover courses I’d never offered, as did Elmhurst, a UCC school. In this instance, they suggested a textbook edited by a couple of tree huggers from Humboldt State, and I found myself teaching environmental ethics.

A Welcome Lesson From Environmental Ethics

I’d earned Boy Scout merit badges in Nature, Fish & Wildlife Management, and Soil & Water Conservation and had addressed the topic in previous ethics courses, but this was a deep dive. And I was a bit surprised at how hostile/indifferent most of the articles were to a Judeo-Christian perspective. Here and there, you’d find a Francis of Assisi or an Annie Dillard somewhere in the ballpark, but the collection was keener on the “Gaia” theory that the earth is one unified organism than on the Creation Mandate in Genesis 1. The Bible’s talk of man’s dominion over nature really triggered them.

Still, one of the hostile selections provided a helpful, four-part, typology for land-treatment: preservation, restoration, conservation, and invention—and I think it provides a useful, analogical tool for assessing Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) developments and prospects.

Preservation: This is the aim of National Parks, wildlife refuges and such as Yellowstone and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. In this category, we Southern Baptists would put our commitment to evangelism and believer’s baptism by immersion.

Restoration: While living in the Midwest, I learned of efforts to restore substantial portions of the tall-grass prairie, which once covered 170 million acres of central North America. Over this sea of bluestems (six feet high and upwards), “prairie schooners” made their way West. In this connection, I think of the “conservative resurgence” of the late twentieth century, which reestablished biblical inerrancy as the standard in our seminaries.

Conservation: Here we pursue wise stewardship of resources for the long run. Analogously, I think of the BF&M’s affirmation of “a free church in a free state,” meant to protect both nation and denomination from excessive, mutually-debilitating entanglement (and no, not utter separation, a matter I address elsewhere.^[1]

1. Mark Coppenger, “Who’s the Vandal? The Baphomet Figure Was an Affront to Our Nation’s Guiding Sentiments,” The American Spectator, January 2, 2024.

Invention: We humans can design and install some wonderful landscapes, including the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. As for the SBC, I think of the blessed terrain we fashioned through the Cooperative Program (1925) and Disaster Relief (1967).

In sum, I think all four of them have their place, and when they complement each other through godly wisdom, it’s a splendid manifestation of and tool for Kingdom advance. But just as nature is vulnerable to mistakes in human ingenuity, the SBC has suffered recently from ill-conceived agendas and initiatives which have depleted our strength. Of course, an assault can be malicious. I think of the Crimson Tide zealot who poisoned the live oaks at Auburn University’s Toomer’s Corner.^[2] But most human-created ecological disasters are innocent, even well-intentioned.

2. Mike Rodak, “Alabama Fan Harvey Updyke, Poisoner of Auburn Trees, Dead at 71,” AL.com, July 30, 2020.

That being said, there are low opportunists who follow an axiom promulgated by President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Be that as it may, we often blunder innocently into disasters, and it’s incumbent upon the responsible parties to admit fault and undertake restoration.

“Ecological Disasters” in the SBC

Here’s a sampler of analogies:

1. Agent Orange / The SBC Sex Abuse Crisis

In Vietnam, the jungle canopy provided great cover for our Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army foes. The dense foliage hid their resupply routes along the Laotian and Cambodian borders and their approaches to our outposts. So, we decided to disperse vast quantities of Agent Orange on the trees and other vegetation, covering an area of 12,000 square miles. But the toxic chemical did much more harm than good, with dreadful lasting effects. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans have suffered terribly, often mortally, from exposure through a range of cancers and birth defects, as well as heart ailments and Parkinson’s disease. And billions in compensation have been paid out to veterans.

Analogously, I think of the terrible toll the sex-abuse “crisis,” conjured up by the Houston Chronicle and Guidepost Solutions, has visited upon Southern Baptists.^[3] Of course, sex abuse is criminal and revolting, and, as I’ve suggested, some malefactors should be shot. But it’s quite another thing to shoot a denomination on account of the behavior of several hundred creeps when the universe of discourse is nearly thirty million souls over a twenty-year period.

3. Mark Coppenger, “The SBC in a Crowded Theater,” Christ Over All, March 22, 2024.

Manufactured (and some artfully appropriated) hysteria has robbed us of millions of dollars. Conflicts of interest abound. Trustees and messengers were panicked into unwise capitulations. Expensive, slipshod consultants were hired. And the slander of our denomination has not aged well. Nevertheless, we’re still reeling from the “toxic spray” that laid waste to so much of our reputation and so many of our assets.

And let me add a word of appreciation for Allen Jordan (the former CFO of Buckner Benevolences, a Baptist-affiliated charity based in Dallas). He’s been much maligned for his detailed critique of the case flung against us, but I think it’s fair to say he’s shifted the burden of proof onto those who want to nurture our self-flagellation.

2. The Dust Bowl / Resolution 9’s Critical Race Theory

During the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl ravaged the Great Plains. Deep plowing of the native grasses left the land open to the wind, and hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil were caught up into blinding and choking blizzards. Over two million residents headed to the Central Valley of California, including a lot of Southern Baptist “Okies.”

America has been ravaged by Marxist-inspired critical race theory. MLK’s color-blind dream (that his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”) was hijacked and supplanted by the color-obsessed conceits of Al Sharpton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Joy Reid; by the deployment of ‘racist’ as an all-purpose solvent; and by DEI. And those winds have blown into the SBC, generating the much-regretted Resolution 9 of 2019 (commending Critical Race Theory/Intersectionality as “analytical tools”).^[4] Zealots have labeled ante-bellum founders as “heretics” and lamented the “stain that remains” upon us all. Programmatic and professorial platforming and de-platforming have followed the contours of this movement.

4. Tom Ascol, “Resolution 9 and the Southern Baptist Convention 2019,” Founders, June 15, 2019.

3. Kudzu Invasion / SBC Ingratiationism

To combat erosion in mid-twentieth-century America, the US Soil Conservation Service thought it would be good to plant an Asian import, kudzu, and it became known as “the invasive vine that ate the South.”^[5] Growing at the rate of one foot per day and to a length of a hundred feet, the stems and tendrils could quickly blanket everything in the neighborhood, robbing trees and other desirable organisms of life-giving sunlight.

5. Bill Finch, “The True Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Never Truly Ate the South,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2015.

In this vein, I think of obsession with marketing in the SBC, a spirit I’ve called “ingratiationism,” as in “We’d better do (or not do) this because the world is watching”; “We’ll never reach them if we don’t change our style to be more fetching”; “Try a little pronoun courtesy”; “What could it hurt to show women that we esteem their contribution by calling them pastors?”; “Don’t make a divisive fuss over serial marriage or cohabitation without benefit of marriage”; “Let’s ditch the hymns and choir for a cooler worship time.” On and on it goes, foot by foot, as “experts” lead us to better pitch our charming brand. And the vine coverage helps to block out the harsh light of discomfiting Scripture. We seem to be saying, “Better to have Barnabas than Paul as our patron saint.”

4. Donuts in the Green / ERLC Leadership

In October, 2025, 17-year-old Keller Atkins used his truck to cut “donuts” in the second green of a New Smyrna Beach, Florida, golf course. The poor fellow was “bored,” so he decided to bring a little spark to his life by doing $160,000 worth of damage to the course.^[6] I submit that recent leadership of the ERLC took the entity on a joy ride at our expense, gratifying their political druthers without regard—indeed, at the expense of—the sentiments of the denominational center of mass.^[7] By so doing, they damaged our main engine for joint missions, the Cooperative Program. Apparently, Russell Moore misplaced his job description, which made him the representative voice of Southern Baptists. Instead, he apparently decided he was a prophet sent from God to correct us; that somehow he’d achieve the rank of leading adept or imam, guiding the faithful from on high. He’d forgotten, or was dismissive of, the point that he was our emissary, not our nanny. And he’s not alone among executives who presume to rank down the Law Amendment, despite the fact that the majority of messengers favor it.

And, so, they have thrown the Cooperative Program in disarray. Who wants to give to an agency which dishonors the majority of messengers?

5. Eliminate Sparrows Campaign / SBC Presbyterianism

In 1958, Mao Tse-tung inaugurated an “Eliminate Sparrows Campaign.”^[8] Facing famine under his sweeping Communist policies, the “Great Helmsman” designated four “pests” for elimination—rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The problem with sparrows was that they fed on grain in the fields. So, the nation mobilized to destroy these birds using every means necessary—glue traps, nets, slingshots, poison bait, long poles for dislodging nests, and gongs for denying them rest, causing them to drop from exhaustion. Hundreds of millions of these birds died. And then (“Uh, oh!”), they discovered that sparrows ate tons of locusts which also ate grain, and the insects went wild feasting on the crops. The human toll was dreadful, with millions of deaths.

I raise this example over two concerns— that we’ve put a governor on evangelism and opted for an increasingly authoritarian model of denominational and church governance. I lump these issues together under the heading, “Presbyterianism.” Please understand that I’m a committed five-point Calvinist. I arrived at that conviction from a range of influences, including a stunned, fresh reading of Romans 9 in seminary, and my calling as an SBTS trustee in the late 1980s, where we were commissioned to enforce the 1858 Abstract of Principles, which “rings three of five bells.” Still, I think that “Calvinism” has at times been misappropriated to “kill some pests” which served their important role.

8. Eyal G. Frank, Qinyun Wang, Shaoda Wang, Xuebin Wang, and Yang You, “Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China,” NBER Working Paper 34087 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2025).

I’m grateful that, in my early days of the pastorate, I was richly supplied with evangelistic tools and promptings, especially from the Home Missions Board (Continuing Witness Training and Crossover) and the International Missions Board (Partnership Missions). In all three, we’d find ourselves well-prepared for and immersed in door-to-door witnessing. Also, in our church, we held annual revivals, joined in community-wide crusades in the football stadium, and offered invitations at the conclusion of the sermons. I was (and am still) convinced that we conducted these activities in accord with biblical guidance. And I’m eternally grateful for the lasting fruit that sprang from them. But many consider them pests needing elimination.

Of course, some evangelists (keen on published results) brought this on themselves. I cringe when I think of times that we congregants were hustled by manipulative/endless altar calls, making those not walking the aisle seem spiritually lame. Yes, the herd effect can harvest a crowd of not-ready kids, and the products of hasty baptisms can wither in the light of day. Indeed, I know that our sovereign God decides when and where true revival happens. But I’m convinced by scriptural and historical accounts that there are honored places for the “techniques” we employed as fishers of men and women, the young and the old. And I’m afraid we’ve lost much of our evangelistic energy in our efforts to shun “pestilences.”

I’m reminded of a joke Presbyterian Steve Brown once told a gathering of evangelical seminary leaders, back in the 1990s:

An old drunk was sitting on curb in a tough neighborhood. The Salvation Army brought him to their mission for a meal, a cot, a shower, and a shave. A Baptist showed up and won him to the Lord. A Methodist gave him some devotional material. A Presbyterian came by to teach him some theology. An Episcopalian arrived to help him engage effectively with the broader culture. Then the Salvation Army once again lifted him off the curb.

Then, about a decade later, I moved to Evanston, Illinois, to plant a church and do student ministry at Northwestern. Known as “The People’s Republic of Evanston,” it’s been host to the World Council of Churches (1954). The American Baptist pastor there in our time was the chair of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, founded by a Swedenborgian and a Unitarian Universalist, with strong input from a Hindu swami (who made a splash at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893).

In Early-twenty-first-century Evanston, I found a “soul brother” in the Evangelical Free pastor, whose congregation had been excused from an early meeting place when the landlord discovered the church wasn’t on board with the gay agenda. We had a number of gratifying conversations through the years, but I’m especially struck by his initial word when he heard that Southern Baptists had come to town. He exclaimed how glad he was that we’d shown up because we were such evangelists.

Or we were. And I’m afraid we’re now a lesser people in this connection since we decided to bring down the sparrows of “decisionism.”

Shifting gears, let me note that elders are now a big thing. And yes, deacon boards were quasi elders in my early days. And yes, the Bible prescribed elders in the apostolic age. But I’m concerned we’ve lost a good measure of our “messy” baptistic polity, where the “priesthood of believers” is counted more a threat than a blessing, an important feature of body life. I see it in an increasing impatience, indifference, or hostility toward input from the little folks. Church business meetings are regarded as a nuisance. Budget details, including staff salaries and benefits, are really none of our business. I see it at the national level, particularly at the North American Mission Board, where the state convention and association “sparrows,” once regarded as autonomous partners in missions, are subsumed by the NAMB presbuteroi in Alpharetta, Georgia.

We’ve been sold big time on the “mark” of eldership, but I’m afraid esteem for robust congregational polity has gotten lost in the shuffle. We need someone to remind us why the ideal portrayed in Norman Rockwell’s painting of a town meeting is a treasured part of who we are.^[9] Perhaps they could spell out why we’re not beset with Presbyterian-envy when it comes to governance.

9. “‘Freedom of Speech,’ 1943.” Norman Rockwell Museum. November 2, 2016.

Conclusion

I hope these five cautionary analogies will give us pause. And may our leaders resolve, with the Boy Scouts, to at least leave the site as well-off as they found it. Or, as the Hippocratic Oath put it, “First, do no harm.”