So there are those that we’ll talk about same-sex attraction or there are those who talk about pronoun hospitality and other things that they think, I think, again, an evangelistic impulse drives it, but the sub-soil of the Baptist Faith and Message is Genesis 1:1 and this really is God’s world. He created it. And He’s the One that rules it and tells us what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s true and what’s false. And because the Baptist Faith and Message doesn’t specifically articulate that, you’ve got people endorsing Revoice, which you know, is for homosexual Christians to make them feel welcome saying, “But, I’ve signed the Baptist Faith and Message.” I think that’s a problem.
You know, I think there’s something else operating that we just need to kind of pull back the cover and say let’s look at the subsoil here. You can’t have a house without a foundation, and we’ve assumed the foundation and the foundation’s being eroded. So that’s kind of my take on all that.
How are people discipled at Grace?
Well, we don’t have a youth program. We don’t have, you know, people ask, you know, do you have a youth ministry, or do you have children’s church? We say, yeah, we have children’s church every Sunday. It’s right where the adults meet. We don’t have a set youth ministry, but we have very active young people. We really emphasize family. And so we want families to take the lead in what goes on in their homes. So we want dads to be the main disciplers in their home. If there’s not a dad, we want the moms to be that. We want to try to come along with them to help. And 1 Corinthians 7 says a lot about what single adults can do. So we really want to encourage single adults to serve in capacities that they can, because they don’t have spouses.
And then we, we want people to, to recognize they need to be discipled. And if they walked with Christ any length of the time, they have some opportunity to disciple. It’s organic. I spent years banging my head up against the wall about how do you get people in the discipling process and read books and try stuff? And I just couldn’t ever keep it going. I’d get it started. I couldn’t keep going. And I don’t know when it was probably 10 years ago, 15 years ago—and I’m sure it wasn’t original with me—but somehow the thought came into my head about “what are we talking about?” Well, we’re just talking about life on life and sharing life together and checking up on each other—helping each other grow in grace.
RELATED: Ed Litton Stresses ‘Removing Stains’ of the SBC in Executive Committee Address
So we wrote it down on like a 3×5 card. Here’s how you can start a disciple group: get a book from our resource center or somewhere else—if you want the pastors to vet, we’ll vet for you—or a book of the Bible and ask two or three people, if they want to read it with you and agree to meet for a month or six months or every other week, or once a month, and read and pray and ask each other how you’re doing and try to encourage one another and do that, and then do it again, and then do it again. And if somebody invites you to do that, well, then you go with them and then turn around and invite somebody else to do it with you. And so, I couldn’t tell you how many, but I know we’ve had as many as 80 or 90 of these groups going on and on. I’ll usually find out about them after the fact because they don’t need permission to start them, and it’s not anything we record, but it’s an organic deal.
We have age-graded Sunday Schools. We’ve had a real headache getting back from COVID with getting all of our classes up and running and we just run into another little difficulty with the quarter system and how we’re doing that. We think by the middle of the summer, we’ll be back in sync again, firing on all cylinders. But yeah, we have age-graded classes on Sunday morning, and I think we have high school and junior high on Sunday or Wednesday nights, they do worldview-type stuff then.
You average about 350-400 on Sunday mornings. On the website, you don’t list very many staff. A lot of Southern Baptist churches would have a lot more staff for 350-400 people on Sunday mornings. How do you do that with such a limited staff?
That’s a good question. I don’t know. Our folks they’re not dependent on me. They’ve lived with me a long time. They’ve been very patient and kind to me to let me stay as long as I’m staying, but we got great leadership. I mean, our elders are just stellar. We have five elders including me—two staff elders and three lay elders. The lay elders are very, very capable men. One’s a retired educator and one’s a CFO of a large company here locally. And one’s a business owner immigrant from Cuba. And they’re just all quality guys, you know, they just, they take seriously they’re calling.
What is the role of women in leadership at Grace Baptist Church?
Some of our godliest people are women. We have women that lead Bible studies, and some of our most urgent prayer warriors are women. There’s a list of five people I would call to pray for me, and probably two of them are women. Ladies lead women’s studies, and we have women’s retreats periodically. Someone will come in and speak, not just women, but we’ve had women come and speak and husbands and wives sometimes have come in and spoken.
We’ve had women teach high school and junior high classes. It’s a husband-and-wife team that’s teaching. We don’t have any women here that aspire to be pastors or aspire to preach to men and women mixed. We read what the Bible and Paul meant when he said that a woman’s not to teach or exercise authority over men, and we don’t do that.
What’s your view on women in leadership in convention roles?
It gets into some gray areas there because we’re talking about a parachurch organization as a denomination. I mean, it’s not a local church, but the idea of male and female distinctions doesn’t end at the local church or the family either. God made men and women differently.
And again, this is part of that subsoil. I think’s just been eroded in our egalitarian age. It’s almost like if you dare suggest that somebody has a higher authority than anybody else, you’re just an abuser. You’re oppressive, and you’re trying to hold people down. I mean, God made hierarchies in the world, and He did it in the inanimate world. He’s done it in His image-bearing world as well. I recognize that, I think that is right and proper. I think the spirit of our age has tried to flatten out those distinctions to horrible effects, such that now, we’ve drafted women to go fight our battles. And I think that’s horrible that we’ve done that.
If you’re elected, would you appoint women for committee appointments?
I don’t think I would be asking any women to be a chair [of a committee.]
But they could serve as members of committees and boards?
Yeah, again, there might be a situation I could envision—it’s a conversation I’m willing to have that I wouldn’t be willing to have in the church because we’ve nailed our colors to the mast. But whenever you get into something that’s not the church, I’m willing to have the discussion about the army, but it’s going to be a short discussion from my standpoint. I just don’t think women should be in combat but they can serve in some utilitarian ways and be helpful maybe.
RELATED: Willie McLaurin Named SBC Executive Committee Interim President/CEO
But see, I don’t think it’s just military. I think that’s a part of a continuum of what God has done in establishing hierarchy in the world. And it’s no slam on women. My goodness. You know, if men, if husbands had to give birth every other time, nobody would have more than two kids, you know? I mean, it’s just, we wouldn’t do it, we couldn’t do it. So God’s made us different.
