A bad year for Baptists

SBC Voices reviews 2018 in the life of the Southern Baptist Convention — and there was a lot of bad news.

The Paige Patterson mess: retired, then fired.

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Twilight of the Trads. Concurrent with the Patterson mess came the sudden and complete meltdown of the SBC Traditionalist organization. The whole thing was Wagnerian, brethren, with gods and demigods, warriors (none females, though), monsters, and gnarled sycophants.

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Frank Page, and others, resign for immorality.

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JDG appoints sex abuse group, and that partly in response to the events surrounding Patterson and the #metoo and #metoochurch stuff.

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Housing allowance is on appeal. Last year the cash clergy housing allowance was declared unconstitutional by a federal district judge.

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Paul Pressler news. None good.

Sex abuser exposed, SBC leaders fail to report. There was too much news concerning the SBC that involves clergy abusing underage church members. This one involved both the IMB and the South Carolina Baptist Convention. It is a disgrace that we ever just fire an abuser and send them along to another SBC church or entity position.

It isn’t mentioned in this review, but membership and attendance were down, once again.

Paige Patterson’s squalid conduct has been whispered for years, as has Paul Pressler’s. The privileged tax status of churches has been contested for years, and will doubtless end as growing numbers of Americans realize they’re subsidizing Jack-and-the-Beanstalk nonsense. The practice of sending pedophiles away, to rape some other church’s children, is an indecency that critics have howled about for decades. The growth of grim and humorless Calvinist nonsense has been contentious within the SBC for decades.

All we’re really talking about here, I suspect, is the end of attempting to paper-over real problems with hearty fellowship-smiles — the end of Denial.

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