It was a gift from God that we had that moment was sacred. We hugged and wept. He was trusting Christ. It just dawned on me he had a hard life. He was the son of a Muslim immigrant, and his dad was murdered when he was 11 years old. He sat there right by him. His dad was shot dead, and he was treated like a slave working in a field for years. It’s amazing he didn’t kill somebody or kill himself. I see God’s grace in his life.
And I remember praying during a time of struggling with my call to ministry. “God, if you’re going to make me a pastor, I don’t want to be just a regular old pastor. I want to understand and do things the way they should be done.” A lot of that was self-righteous too because my judgment on pastors was so prideful. But I take the Bible seriously and the whole regenerate church membership thing. The Bible’s clear on that. We’re Baptists, and you know, my dad had no business being a church member, much less a deacon and a Sunday school teacher. That created a lot of angst. Not just in me, but in the community.
So, yeah, those things I’m sure made me far more receptive to hear what the Word says about the nature of the gospel, the nature of salvation sin, righteousness, grace, and I look back and praise God for it. I have a lot of regrets. I wish I’d been different, but I thank the Lord for what he did.
One thing you’ve done in Southern Baptist life is writing a resolution on regenerate membership.
I don’t know when the idea first hit me, but I thought we ought to have a resolution on this. At least we can have a vote about it. So, I wrote a resolution and submitted it. It didn’t make it out of committee. I was disappointed in that. I submitted it again, and it got rejected again. I submitted it the third year with Bart Barber and Malcolm Yarnell, and that got accepted. Either the first or second year I learned that if you want to appeal the decision of the Resolutions Committee to not bring it out, you can do that. There’s a process, and it’s actually pretty cool because you get to a microphone and you say, “I would like to appeal this.”
Then, if they recognize you, you get to read the resolution. So, you read the resolution and then the convention votes whether or not to agree with the chair of the Resolutions Committee or you and bring it out. So, one year or maybe even two years, I got to read the resolution out loud for everybody which means probably more people heard my resolution than the ones printed. After the second year I remember contacting different entity heads, all the seminary presidents and others saying, “Hey, this is in the Baptist Faith and Message. This is right.” And one of them said to me, “Your resolution’s going to pass because it’s right.” And I said, “Would you guys just sign on it? Maybe then it’ll come out of committee.” They agreed to, but then they pulled back and didn’t do it.
Malcolm Yarnell and Bart Barber submitted one to the Texas convention that year that passed. It was good, but I wanted some language in there about how we need to repent over this. We came up with a resolution that we all agreed to submit and the resolutions committee brought it out. But they brought it out without the baptism statement and the statement on repentance. Malcolm, Bart and I met before the day of the report and decided we would make these two recommendations.
We were going to meet at a microphone at a set time but Malcolm didn’t show up. So, Bart and I were there and the next thing I know Malcolm’s being recognized on another microphone, and he’s getting his thing on baptism added to it. I’m pushing the button and finally, they recognized me and they adopted mine, too. That taught me a little bit about the power of the platform.
Talk a little about the importance of regenerate church membership and how it has impacted Founders Ministries.
Well, I mean, we are Baptist. Our forefathers paid a high price for our convictions, and we say we believe the church is to be made up only of those who give credible profession or are regenerate. We’re not experts on people’s hearts and we don’t pretend to be, but there needs to be a credible profession that accompanies true regeneration—and I’ll avoid the Presbyterian debates about that, but I think they’re way off. Baptists have long held to this. I mean the general Baptist, particular Baptist, everybody has held to this and the idea that the church ought to be a pure church doesn’t mean there’s no sin, no false believers, but the false believers are the exception. They jump over the fence. We don’t open the door to them say, “Come on in because you have prayed a prayer, walked an aisle or raised a hand.”
And we just lost that. If you use just the bare minimum metrics of church attendance, which doesn’t prove you’re a Christian, but if you just use the bare minimum metric of church attendance and look at the attendance in many of our churches, we’ll have a membership that’s two or three times what the regular average attendance is. It shouldn’t be that way if our membership is made up primarily of born-again people.
Billy Graham said that he was convinced that most of the people he preached to in churches were unconverted. Paige Patterson said that 50 percent of the people were unconverted. I think W. A. Criswell said something similar to that. So, it’s not a secret, you know. I think Fred Wolfe is the first one I heard say that the FBI can’t find half of the SBC members. It’s not a secret, but it’s like it’s become a joke.
Well, do we believe it (regenerate membership)? Or do we not? What are we saying about the power of the Gospel? If we say you can believe this Gospel that we claim transforms a person’s life, unites him to Jesus Christ, reconcile him to God, and then you just go on living like pagans?
What are we saying when the people who say they believe in this life-changing Gospel don’t even care enough to show up which is the bare minimum and when you look at our statistics? I mean, we know that attendance is not just members. We’ve got a bunch of kids here, and we’ve got visitors here. So if we only have half of the attendance number for our membership number, then it’s probably way less than half that are showing any bare minimum sign of when new birth, which first John says, are signs of the new birth. You know, if you’re born in the Spirit, you’re going to do things. You’re not going to do things. I think it’s vitally important as a testimony to the Gospel we preach.
I was speaking to a pastor’s group in Montgomery, Alabama years ago about regenerate church membership.
