Same thing only different

I wrote this post The Anti-Founder’s University about this Founders Ministries Blog: New name, same historical revisionism when I read about it back in January.

I encourage you to read Dr. Ascol’s post, not my own. You can actually LEARN something over there.

COD: Has God Called You?

A clear reply to the question ‘Has God called you?‘

Realistically I think we do a lousy job in the SBC with these young men who have ’surrendered’ to preach. They say they feel called to preach but then we make them ’surrender’ and then load them down with everything else but that. (Which is, I guess, what we do with pastors anyway.) They say they are called to preach and we tell them to take whatever comes along and just serve. But they’re not called to do that, they’re called to preach! That should be the focus of what we ask them to do. They should be put under the discipleship of the pastor and given opportunities to ‘fan to flame’ the gifts they have been given.

I’m not saying that young men can’t learn valuable lessons driving the church van, being a ‘youth minister’ or whatever other chores the church has for them. But I think we need to evaluate our priorities.

It’s like a bad hangover…

…it just doesn’t know when to go away.

I wrote most of this comment over at Centuri0n’s blog and it sounded more like a position piece so I deleted most of it. But I thought I’d post it up here because, hey, why waste the bits? If you’re one of my non-SBC readers allow me to apologize in advance while I air this bit of dirty laundry.

What I don’t understand is that if alcohol is inherently evil, which is the ground that the prohibitionists seem to be standing on, why isn’t the Bible more clear about the issue? Jesus has no problem talking about lying or cheating on your spouse or anything like that. Why isn’t in the top ten? “Thou shalt not drink” isn’t even anywhere in the Bible. It says bad things about alcohol ABUSE but frankly both sides have got to dig to even say anything about alcohol from a biblical perspective.

I’ve asked a question in the meta over there twice and haven’t yet received an answer so I’ll ask it here for your perusal and here’s the reason: this applies to anything we do. Whatever our cause, this applies to it. Here’s the question with a little bit of commentary and some editing. It’s not an exact quote, in other words.

I’ve read Dagg’s biography and he does lean toward the moralistic prohibition side of things. But his position, I think, was due to the fact that his brother or his son–don’t know off hand–drank himself to death. Is it right, then, to change our position from biblical to ‘activist’ just because of the ’someone we know died’ argument? Kinda takes the focus off the gospel doesn’t it?”

How about E.Y. Mullins? To me, his rewrite our our confession of faith was what pushed us down this whole moral agenda road to begin with. His son died thereabouts, I believe. Did that drive him away from ‘election’ as it was written in his source material? Looks like it from here. So again, let me ask you, can you stand on that sort of authority with regard to setting limits on Christian freedom? Does experience trump scriptural authority?

The problem I have with all of these arguments about alcohol is something that bugs me about a lot of SBC things. We take our idea we want to drive whether it’s Lottie Moon or boycotting Disney and we say “OK this is what we want to support. NOW lets go to the Bible and find a verse for the promotional literature. The Bible should drive what we do. Period. This whole alcohol resolution thing is on shaky ground from that perspective.

I think most of our troubles in the SBC come from a source very close to this issue. Stay tuned.