Home Christian News Baptist Press Interviews SBC Presidential Nominee Tom Ascol

Baptist Press Interviews SBC Presidential Nominee Tom Ascol

You mentioned transgenderism and the gender debates. Do you see Southern Baptists shifting on that issue?

No, I don’t see it, but what I see is this is just an extension of all these other things that are operating. And that’s why my friends who say, and it has been told to me multiple times, we have got to somehow separate the sex and gender issue from the race issue. Well, good luck.

You’re not going to do it if you buy into the presuppositions because the presuppositions demand the same for any issue you take up. Just go back and look at the original BLM website. I mean, they’re after the nuclear family, they’re actor after heteronormativity, all that, it’s the same ideology. It’s the same thing. That’s what I don’t think a lot of people realize.

It’s the same root system, and if you don’t take it out at the root you can trim the branches over here a little bit, but it’s still living, it’s going to come out and get you.

So, what I would much rather do is go back to Genesis 1:1 and say, “Can we just start there again and all agree God’s world God’s rules. What He says is right and good, both in creation and in His Word?”

Paul reasons from creation. Even creation teaches you and so when creation tells us that, yeah, what God Genesis one and two says, it’s true. God created the male and female. Boom, that’s it, that’s it.

So, you know, political, I’m not afraid of that, but I think that’s been a very easy way to dismiss at least the concerns I’m trying to articulate. I might not be articulating them very well, but those, they go way deeper than that.

Is racial reconciliation something that should still be pursued by the SBC? If so, what should that look like?

Yes, absolutely, but it should be pursued on the basis of what the Word says. You don’t make two different standards or two different entry ways or various entry ways for different races or ethnicities.

Our first effort to start a Hispanic mission or ministry here in our church was probably 25 to 30 years ago. We got a call from the local association and they said, “Hey, would you be willing to have a Spanish ministry?” We said, sure.

So, we gave a key to a Latin American pastor and they came and had services and Bible studies. And I was naïve and stupid and didn’t ask a lot of questions, but after like six or seven months they’re gone.

So, I go to the association and they were a little embarrassed and didn’t want to talk about it, but finally, we were able to get a conversation going, and the guy had run off with a bunch of money that they had been collecting through the weeks.

I asked, “How did this happen?” So, we talked about it, and I sat down right then and started studying Spanish-speaking ministries here in South Florida. I had some connections back in Texas where I’m from.

It was interesting to me back then, that NAMB had a program that would support you for three years on a diminishing returns basis. I don’t know if they still do or not, but almost every one of the Spanish-speaking missions and ministries of churches years are gone. They’re gone. And so I’m thinking, “Why is this?”

One of the things we discovered is that we’ve got a lot of first-generation immigrants coming over here. Spanish is their heart language, but their kids grow up with English becoming their heart language. And when their kids get older everything they’re doing is in English except church, and it’s irrelevant to them. We want to avoid that.

So, we got a call from the state convention. This is probably two or three years after our first start that failed. And they said, “Hey, are you interested in trying this again.?” I said, yeah, but here’s the way we’ll do it. So, I faxed them our six-or-seven-page document of here’s how we will do Spanish-speaking ministry at Grace Baptist Church.

They were fascinated. They said we want to come down. So they sent five or six executives here and they had four or five Hispanic guys as well. They met with some of our leaders. I think there were 19 guys in the room.

We sat there and listened to the presentation and then we said, “Well, here’s what we’re going to do. We will do it. We are going to do it this way and be the same confession of faith, same church covenant, same membership requirement.”

One of the guys said this is unrealistic. He said you will never reach Hispanic people if you don’t use a little salsa. He said you can’t expect them to believe like you believe and to act like you act. I looked at him and I said, “That’s the most bigoted statement I’ve heard in a long time.”

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Well, he got offended and they got up and left. So, we’re sitting there, and said, “Well, that didn’t go very well.” But so we’re talking and after about 30 minutes, we hear there’s little faint knock, and we go look, well, it’s the Hispanic guys. They came back and said would you mind talking to us more about this? We haven’t heard this before.

So we talked to them, and we started the ministry with those guys that grew into hundreds of people and a church exists now from that.

But, we didn’t say “Hey, okay, we need to reconcile our races. And so that means we need to get out and wash your feet and go back and replay everything’s that happened in history.”

America’s got a horrible past in so many ways when it comes to race. There’s no doubt chattel slavery was wicked. Jim Crow was wicked. Redlining was wicked. I mean, all of that stuff. There’s no doubt about it, but you don’t repair that by assuming the Gospel. You bring the Gospel front and center.

My buddy, Voddie Baucham, says he knew that he began to be treated as an equal whenever white people were willing to fire him and cancel him because otherwise, it’s paternalistic.

Racial reconciliation is significant, but not the way that it’s typically done today and certainly not in the anti-racist movement of Kindi. It’s poison. Critical Race Theory mitigates against Gospel-effected reconciliation, not just with races, but all people.

How would you change the direction in the SBC?

Well, you know, I don’t have a 17-point agenda, but I do think there’s some spiritual reformation and structural renovation. I think we need both and the first is far more important.

At the top of the list of that spiritual reformation is we need to rekindle a fear of God. I just really believe we don’t have much fear of God among us today. And you see it’s all through the Bible, 150 times plus that language is used and then multiple times where the idea is taught. I just think God is treated kind of lightly by us today to the degree that sometimes when I listen to the way some professing Christians talk and what they’re advocating, I’m wondering if we are even practicing the same religion.

So, maybe, I’m all screwed up, and I’m willing to entertain that if somebody will help me from the Scriptures to see it, you know, not from some sociological ideology. I think there’s not one problem the Southern Baptist Convention has that would not be served and solved by a return to a sincere fear of God. So I think we desperately need it.