The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) has invited a woke, Critical-Race-Theory-loving (CRT) advocate to teach a week-long class on ‘Black Church Ministry in the Community,’ leading many to wonder to what degree his left-wing biases will impact his lectures, and what this says about a Sothern Baptist Convention (SBC) Presidential Candidate who leads the seminary and insists that CRT would never seep into the hallowed halls under his watch, despite evidence to the contrary.
Dr. Tyshawn Gardner is the Pastor of Plum Grove Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, AL. He is a recent SBTS graduate where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in Christian Preaching and Practical Theology, as well as is President of the Tuscaloosa Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
He also tweets, preaches, and shares some very progressive things.
Last summer he preached a sermon on Psalms 126, declaring that we live in a completely racialized society, and as a result, reparations must be paid to black people by white people. Gardner explains that even for black folk who did well in school, got a nice job, have never been called the n-bomb, and who claim they haven’t experienced racism before, that they actually did, and that they need to get paid as a result.
Those things don’t mean that you have not experienced racism. It does not mean that you have received everything that belongs to you.
Let me say it this way; just because you never had it, doesn’t mean it’s not yours…the fact of the matter is what’s yours was taken from us centuries before we were born.
The fact of the matter is, in a racialized society, even those who have succeeded and succeeded well, have been affected by racism, and we need the Lord to intervene to keep the scales balanced. We need the law to intervene so that everything that was taken and everything was stolen doesn’t happen again.
His social media feed is hardly better, retweeting pro-choice Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock, and messages lauding Nikole Hannah-Jones’ supremely racist The 1619 Project.
He also takes several shots at critics of Critical Race Theory, saying that its purpose is to demolish “white supremacy” and that those who fight against it are protecting racists.
And a few more freebies, showing you where Gardner’s mind is.
Sadly, more and more and more at SBTS, these sorts of beliefs are not bugs, but features. This guy is who they want teaching a class on Black Church Ministry in the Community? Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
‘Enemies Within the Church‘ who recently rereleased their documentary on the scandalous shenanigans that went down in 2019 at a now-prominent Southern Baptist Church (SBC) megachurch, where a failed pastoral search led to scurrilous accusations of racism and sin against dissenting members, has released a teaser/ promo of sorts documenting wokeness and a capitulation to Critical Race Theory within the Southern Baptist Convention.
Judd Saul, Director of EWTC, explains:
After conducting 3 years of interviews and research for our upcoming film Enemies Within The Church, we decided to put together a compilation and excerpts from interviews and footage that we have acquired during our research. We feel that this content was too important to sit on given the current climate within the Southern Baptist Convention.
This is a must-watch for anyone wanting any sense of the direction the SBC is heading, and features many of the characters we frequently rag on here at Protestia, showing the depths of their deception.
A prominent Southern Baptist pastor is doubling down on his threats to leave the Southern Baptist Convention if Resolution 9 is rescinded, promising that he will jump ship and join other personalities like Charlie Dates, John Onwuchekwa, Beth Moore, and Russell Moore as people that have publicly parted ways with the embattled denomination.
At odds is the utility of CRT and intersectionality within the life of SBC congregants. At the last convention Resolution 9 snuck in unawares and was adopted before people knew much about it. Of particular concern was this troublesome section:
WHEREAS, Critical Race Theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify, which result from sin, yet these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences, and
Super gross.
Conservatives are hankering to take it out, but the progressives want to keep it in. It was the very presence of this threat of removal that saw Dwight McKissic, who by the way is a race-baiting Cultural Marxist who routinely terrorizes the SBC annual meeting with resolutions forcing messengers to vote for his policies or suffer looking politically incorrect in the press, drew a red line in the sand by saying 5 months ago:
Lest we think he stuttered, he reiterated it today in an op-ed in the ne’er-do-well SBC Voices, writing:
It takes great audacity, given the SBC’s history, to take such a bold step, to denounce the entirety of CRT—particularly with the National African American Fellowship of the SBC unanimously opposed to denouncing CRT in its entirety.
I am often asked how many Black churches may leave the SBC if Resolution 9 is rescinded. I honestly have no idea, and no desire to influence any to leave, which is one major reason why I am not going to attend the Nashville meeting. I do not want to be accused of leading churches away from the SBC.
But what I do know is—as for me and my house—if the major thesis and thrust of Resolution 9, passed by a majority in Birmingham 2019, is gutted or rescinded—we will exclusively align with the National Baptist Convention and the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
This, of course, would be a blessing. We pray these are not empty threats, but rather promises.
At this point, we have no reason to suppose that the SBC can pull itself out of this liberal pit without a mass exodus of all the unsavory types, but certainly having McKissic leaving out to help a little.
He is a pus-filled boil that should have lanced and drained from the armpit of the Southern Baptist Convention a long time ago. Instead, he was left to fester for years and years, infecting and spreading his particularly potent leaven. With him gone, the SBC has a chance, but we’re not holding our breath.
Continuing our series in the ways that World Vision has gone woke, we bring you Session Eight of their May We Be One social justice curriculum, which is taught to tens of thousands of people and pastors and moderated by Dr. Soong-Chan Rah and Rev. Sandra Maria Van Opstal.
In this segment, Dr. Efrem Smith, the Co-lead Pastor of Bayside Church Midtown in Sacramento, lauds Liberation Theology as being highly transformation in his own life. This is no surprise, as last year he tweeted out that this damnable heresy is a gift to the entire church.
For those who have been doing discernment and polemic work for a long time, you may also remember Dr. Efrem Smith attacking Voddie Baucham, saying that he was a racist and that his internalized racism is black-on-black violence when he addressed the Ferguson riots in 2014.
During his World Vision segment, he shares how Black Liberation Theology is a great tool for having a proper understanding of justice and gospel evangelism:
That’s why I’m so glad that today we are exploring the Latinx, the Hispanic, the brown story and experience. As an African American Christian who grew up in the black church, and who also in seminary was invaded in a transformative way by Black Liberation Theology, I soon learned that the liberation theology, the reconciliation and justice theology within the black church, has intersections with the church of Latin America. Slave ships didn’t just hit what we know as the United States.
And so there is a deep historic connection between the black story and the brown story. And so I learned from the liberation theology of Central and South America, more about the biblical journey, that the gospel is encompassing of evangelism, discipleship, of course, and justice. Empowerment to the most vulnerable among us. Resisting, not just sin housed in the soul, but systemic sin. And so I’m so blessed as a black Christian male to have the insights, the theology, the liberation of my brown brothers and sisters impacting me, even to this day.
Another one of the panelists is Kat Armas, who has taught extensively on “the brown church” through her podcast and books. She writes for progressive publications like Sojourners and Relevant Magazine and tells the audience that the colonizers, which is the dominant culture in America today, still continue to perpetuate the myth that persons of color are colonized and are viewed as chaotic, irrational, and evil.
So why do we even need an ‘Abuelita (affectionate name for grandmother) theology?’ What gifts does it offer the Latina church? Well, the dominating culture has othered many of our Abuelitas because of the language or the dialect they speak, their accent, the pigmentation of their skin, their cultural customs, their lack of Western education, as I mentioned, their socio-economic status and/ or their gender, right?
And so while the self, the colonizer is ordered and rational and masculine and good, the other, the colonized is chaotic and irrational and feminine and evil. And we see this in how indigenous and native folks were regarded as “savage” or inherently evil and carnal compared to the white European colonizers when they first arrived to the so-called New World.
And the current dominating culture may not say this with its words or it may not be, you know, “the intention,” but what is presented as normal or common in our current culture oftentimes perpetuates this myth.
You know, for example, we see that theology done by black and brown or Asian or indigenous folks is often relegated to a lecture in a theology course, right? Contextual theology in many ways. But throughout history, the colonizer has been the one to know or theorize while the colonized can only be known or theorized about.
Therefore, when we talk about a decolonizing or decolonial or post-colonial look, we are advocating thinking with the marginalized, a thinking with our Abuelitas, rather than a thinking about them.
Bonus. Another of the panelists for this session, Robert Chao Romero, founded an organization that teaches “Jesus died not only for our personal sins, but also for the structural and systemic sins of our society which perpetuate poverty, racism, sexism, classism, and injustice of every kind (Romans 13: 8-10).”
(Capstone Report) NAMB VP Dhati Lewis recommends book that denies penal substitutionary atonement. Book argues that justice is not always impartial. Book argues God demands preference for Oppressed classes.
What is biblical justice? It isn’t remotely close to what a book promoted by the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board church plant leader claims. In fact, a book recommended by NAMB VP Dhati Lewis argues that to do justice often requires injustice and to be fair sometimes requires acting in unfair ways. The Little Book of Biblical Justice was recommended by Dhati Lewis in an email exchange with Kyle Whitt. (Emails available here.)
In the NAMB VP recommended Little Book of Biblical Justice the writer argues:
“In some circumstances justice requires a disinterested impartiality, a repudiation of all favoritism. In other circumstances it demands an unequivocal partiality, a definite bias towards the interests of certain parties over those of others. Justice is both impartial and partial, biased and unbiased, equal and unequal, depending on the issues at stake” (p. 38).
The partiality, of course, is only shown to certain favored classes.
Adam Edgerly, a pastor, consultant, and member of Biola University’s board of trustees, hosted a lecture during the school’s 2021 Student Congress on Racial Reconciliation (SCORR) where he proudly declared that he spoke out against the Christian University putting out a statement condemning Critical Race Theory (CRT) like the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) did. Instead, he argued it was the wrong path and that CRT is a marvelous and untapped tool for understanding the scriptures.
Specifically, he “revealed” that Paul appealed to his Intersectionality, and that Mary the mother of Jesus checked all sorts of intersectional boxes which if we acknowledge, will help us understand her better. He said:
Let me give you an example of that: intersectionality. Look at the Apostle Paul from an intersectional point of view. He would declare boldly, ‘I am a Jew, of the tribe of Benjamin, raised in Tarsus, studied under Gamaliel, in the city of Jerusalem, Pharisee of Pharisees, etc., right?
He is using in what a modern-day sense is called an intersectional approach to describing his own identity.
He embraces his Jewish heritage, he embraces his tribal heritage. He embraces his family line. He embraces his hometown of Tarsus. He embraces the university that he went to in Jerusalem and the professor that he studied under, Gamaliel. And he recognizes that all those things have shaped his thinking.
He also embraced the fact that he was an artisan, a business, a tentmaker, and that he was single. And so those things, he described himself that way. But if you think that way when you read his writing, you will see those characteristics of his identity showing up in the way he encounters God. And it gives him a unique perspective that he shares with us in scripture.
[Editor’s note: Although it is true that Paul did describe himself that way, if you read the passage in context, Paul’s point is anything but intersectional.] He continues:
You do the same thing with Mary. Now you’ve got a single girl, from a poor family, who is now a single mom, with all that that means. She is a colonized person living under Roman oppression. Now read the Magnificat, her poem to God, and her declaration of God overturning unjust people and sending the rich away while he blesses the poor, and you got a deeper understanding of who Mary is and why she thinks and talks the way she does.
That’s an example of this tool of thought coming out of Critical Race Theory called intersectionality informing even the way we understand scripture.
Mary's intersectionality: "A single girl from a poor family who is now a single mom…a colonized person living under Roman oppression. Now read the Magnificat…her declaration of God overturning unjust people…and you've got a deeper understanding of who Mary is." pic.twitter.com/FURWgOnniB
— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) May 26, 2021
Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, Professor, North Park Theological Seminary, is leading the way in demonstrating the extent that Critical Race Theory is spreading throughout World Vision. Parks is the moderator and one of the leaders of the May We Be One: Pastors pursuing Racial Justice course, whose stated goals are to have church leaders “be prepared to lead conversations about racism in America,” and to “engage with one another to dismantle racism and change the landscape of the church.”
From remarks he made at a Black & Asian Christians United Against Racism conference on April 5th 2021 at the Apostolic Faith Church, and also reiterated in Session 9 of the course, Soong-Chan Rah explains that by default and intrinsically, white people view black people and Asians as either “pets” or “threats” and view Asian women as invisible or sexual jezebels.
For African-American communities, I’ve often described how the spiritual demonic power of white supremacy, the gaze of the dominant culture defines the black community, so that the rest of us have to play along.
So that when the white male looks at the black male, the black male is either a pet or a threat.The black male is a pet because the white community wants you to entertain them, wants you to be their comedians that make them laugh, the musicians that make them dance, and the sports athletes that make them jump up and clap.
But they also see you, if you’re not the pet, you become the threat. You are the unidentified black male that commits every crime in our city. You are the individual that is seen as the unsafe person in our society. And even worse, if you are the pet that becomes the threat.
Hypothetically, it could be an athlete who takes a knee. That pet has become a threat. Hypothetically, it could be pastors who decide we’re not going to play the game anymore – we’re going to stand against injustice. You’ve gone from a pet to a threat.
And it is the same scenario that Asian-Americans often find ourselves in. The gaze of the white dominant culture looks at the Asian male and says: you are a pet or a threat.
…They are the Chinese virus. They are the Kung flu. And how easily and quickly it became for that pet to become a threat. And we’ve seen this on the gendered side, as well. Bell Hooks says that when the white male gazes upon the black female, he categorizes the black female in two ways: the Jezebel or the Mammy.
The Jezebel, that is, the sexualized fantasy of the dominant culture, and the mammy that takes care of you and gives you what you need. You see that same paradigm now play itself out in the Asian community, as well.
…because you are seeing the Asian women as disposable and invisible. The ones that pick up the towels after you. The ones that feed you. The ones that take care of you. That’s what you’ve seen, the Asian women. You have sexualized or you have made invisible the Asian-American woman. This is the reality of white supremacy.
This is what world vision is teaching thousands of pastors and tens of thousands of people each week. It is not an unknown program.
To give one example, Willow Creek, the multi-campus 20,000 member church founded by Bill Hybels, announced months ago that they were participating in World Vision’s May We Be One year-long conference “in an effort to help equip all our staff to better engage justice and racism from a biblical perspective.”
Sadly, we have only scratched the surface of how deep this all goes.
Continuing our series in the ways that World Vision has gone woke, we bring you Session Nine of their May We Be One curriculum. Moderated by Dr. Soong-Chan Rah and Rev. Sandra Maria Van Opstal on May 20, 2021, it featured Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes speaking on the Asian American Pacific Islander Experience and why Jesus was “code-switching.”
In this session, Van Opstal introduces her guest by explaining that she can teach us all the ways “in which we have participated and or not known how our country has participated in the pain of the Asian American community and in being complicit…with the things that have happened to them.”
This is after Dr. Soong-Chan Rah explained that white folk use their “white gaze” to view Asian people as either “threats” or “pets” and gave us the helpful diagram below:
She then introduces us to guest Dr. Michelle Reyes. She’s a speaker, author, activist, and the Vice President of the Asian American Christian Collaborative who has written for TGC and the ERLC. She’s all in on Critical Race Theory, writing in a blog post on her website:
White privilege relies on racialization, a system of values that says one group of people is superior to all others because of the color of their skin. This system has been weaponized to justify the cruel treatment of and discrimination toward non-white people throughout American history
….White privilege is both a cause and legacy of racism. It is a conscious act rooted in historic inequities, and it continues to reinforce systemic racism today. When it comes to racial trauma, displacement, the cruel treatment and discrimination of people of color, or the country’s history of slavery, we have to acknowledge the role of white privilege.
….But if we aren’t willing to sit with the weight of guilt when it comes to the sins of racism, we will never understand that we are the problem. Unless we acknowledge the existence of white privilege, we can’t understand our own complicity in it.
Each of us needs to do the hard work of examining our own biases and actions. We cannot separate the past from our present. They are interconnected. Repenting for the sins of historic slavery and its current iterations in our society is a necessary step in beginning to work toward a more equitable and just future, both inside and outside the church.
It is on this note that she tells thousands of pastors and tens of thousands of laymen listening in all about “code-switching,” explaining that Jesus and Paul did their own version of this in the first century.
All of us code-switch in different ways at different times. Sometimes it’s just about putting our best foot forward, like that the first time we go on a date with somebody, or we have a job interview or something like that. We’re trying to present ourselves in the best possible light. So the other person will like us, want to hang out with us, hire us, fill in the blank.
When it comes to minorities, when we talk about code-switching, this is that thought that pops into our brain, like ‘you’ve got this, just act white.’ It’s this way of saying, ‘I’m going to hide my own ethnicity, or my ethnic heritage, my cultural expressions. I’m gonna hide the way that I perhaps act at home so I can fit in within this majority of whitespace.’
And usually it’s not just about fitting in, it’s about trying to survive. It’s trying to not be made fun of, to not be shamed, to not be bullied verbally or physically. So there’s a lot of fear, and trauma that goes into code-switching, as well.
And so, as a caveat, and what I argue in that chapter of my book is that it’s important for historically disempowered minorities to understand that the Bible is not calling us to hide who we are, to be ashamed of who we are, to code-switch merely as a means for survival, and to sort of give in to the status quo.
She concludes by explaining that Jesus would code-switch in order to ensure that he doesn’t come across as “offensive” or so that people will be able to fully hear and receive his message.
But rather, I think we see in the life of Jesus, we see in the life of Paul, that they are able to code-switch. And by that, as I mentioned, they know that they are studiers of people.
They understand how people think, how people tick, theological difference, world differences, a worldview, even just sort of social norms, what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate. When they step into a room or they step into a new town, they have those ideas at their forefront and say, ‘Okay, if I’m going to connect with this person, I need to shift in this way, or I need to adapt myself in this way so I don’t come across as offensive or that my message will be heard.‘
If you thought the initial 2020 SBC Pastor’s Conference lineup was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. Jacob Johnson had the best succint take on it, and he put it this way:
This is worse than the initial 2020 SBC Pastor’s Conference Lineup; this is intentional deception and absurdly obvious in that this isn’t an intended solution, this is a backhand display of mocking conservative BF&M affirming Southern Baptist’s and a spiteful response from SBC Liberals/Elites to the EC’s action and position taken last year. This is a directly intended message.
Instead of a “pastor’s” conference, they change it a “SEND” conference; hosting (non-SBC) heretics, feminists, social justice warriors, and destructive forces against the biblical family / Godly ordered homes. A send conference presented by North American Mission Board (NAMB) / IMB — Kevin Ezell / Paul Chitwood.
SBC Executive Committee previously stated, regarding the 2020 Pastors Conference, that they rejected the conference and argued its participants and alignments to be: “sufficiently beyond the parameters of the faith and practice of Southern Baptists in accordance with The Baptist Faith and Message.”
Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cancellation of the 2020 SBC Annual Meeting, the 2020 Pastors’ Conference had drawn criticism and concern because not all speakers were Southern Baptists and scheduled performer Hosanna Wong, a spoken word artist, is also a teaching pastor at her non-Southern Baptist church. The SBC Executive Committee voted Feb. 18 to give the SBC pastors’ conference officers until Feb. 24 to make “amendments to its proposed program”
Following “prayerfully considered options” and “counsel” among SBC elites … it was decided for 2021, there would instead be a “Send” Conference— “NAMB president Kevin Ezell said NAMB would be “honored to produce a SEND event for the 2021 Pastors’ Conference in Nashville and to work with our friends at IMB to present it.”
This is worse than the 2020 Pastors Conf. Conflict and it’s more rebellious against the Gospel and a willful rejection of the BF&M 2000 than previously in 2020. This is a message SBC Elites/Progressives/Liberals are making [“SEND”(ing)] loud and clear.
If that isn’t messed up enough, the SBC’s International Mission Board (IMB)’s official Facebook page joined nine other people in ‘liking’ that status update, though given that this was a direct shot across the bow at them, their ‘like’ was nothing more than a grim, sardonic mockery.
Their purposeful ‘like is an affirmation that they saw the post, and they don’t care. Johnson believes it’s backhanded, and that “they will claim it was a slip-up and believed it to be promotion for the event— as someone familiar with how they operate, the social media (publishing) power they have… it was intentional. They are all PR Masters. (The “KY Boy Club” at work). They’re mocking us, conservative/confessional Baptists.”
We could not agree more. The fox that is Russell Moore may be out of the hen house, but there are more than enough predators left behind to frolic, feast, and cause some bedlam within the body.
In fact, he’s usually so bad and distinctive in his wrongness, that we created a Tweet Generator about him.
In his latest theological gaffe, Keller spoke with The Gospel Coalition’s As In Heaven host, Jim Davis, explaining that the population is becoming “de-churched” and the church is shrinking on account of white people who are nominal Christians leaving the faith. This, he says, is the result of the church failing to handle sexuality, race, justice, and science (Keller is a theistic evolutionist) in a way that people can “connect with.”
Thankfully, whereas white folk are increasingly becoming more and more fallow soil, Keller explains that persons of color (POC) are the future, suggesting that that “non-white people” are “a lot less secular and a lot less individualistic than white people” and they are the fertile soil that will bring revival.
JIM DAVIS: Pre-COVID, 49 percent of our city was churched, 8 percent was never churched, and 43 percent is de-churched, so we consider this problem so significant that we’re going to devote the entire third season of our podcast on the de-church phenomenon. And as we have been studying what’s going on with the 43 percent who are currently de-churched, one of the common refrains that we’ve been hearing has been: evangelicals struggle to properly name racism as a problem and make steps towards justice and human flourishing. So here’s the two-part question: first, what role do discussions of race and justice play in de-churching, and second, how can churches shape people better in this conversation moving forward? So, Dr. Keller, I’ll start with you.
TIMOTHY KELLER: Well, there’s three issues that are we’re gonna have to be able to face and speak to well, because a lot of people are walking away for three reasons. One is how the church talks about sexuality, how it talks about justice and race, and how it talks about science. And all three of those, unless you give people cogent answers that are both, that they connect with their concerns and their rightful objections to the way the church has operated in every one of those areas, at the same time draws on our confessional orthodoxy, we are not going to make much progress. So all three of those things.
The way you say, what role is the justice, race thing, one of three, okay. And going forward, it means we have to change the way in which we do our own catechesis and our own doctrinal way of training people, because we actually do not tend to connect with biblical doctrines with cultural narratives, and so our people get co-opted by the cultural narratives. And that’s a long story.
Let me just say something encouraging kind of quick, is I believe that the de-churching thing will will bottom out in about 20 or 30 years, because, number one, immigration means that non-white people are a lot less secular, a lot less individualistic than white people and, therefore, they’re much more .
Secondly, you’ve got two kinds of religious people in the country. You’ve got nominal people and true believers, converted people. And what’s happening, of course, is the nominal people, they’re the ones that are leaving very quickly and shrinking, whereas the true believers retain their children better and they evangelize.
And so what’s going to happen is, as you might say, as a congress, as our culture becomes more multi-ethnic and as the nominal believers leave and we get down to the converted, you’re going to find that the church starting to grow back in many, many ways. So I would actually say that the secularization, the deconversion, is going to last for another couple of decades, but it’s going to bottom out. I say that by way of trying to encourage some people.
TIM KELLER: "Let me say something encouraging. I believe the de-churching thing will will bottom out in about 20-30 years, bc #1, immigration means non-white people are a lot less secular, a lot less individualistic than white people + therefore, they're much more [inaudible]." pic.twitter.com/d9tBe6cHji
— Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) May 23, 2021
It doesn’t take long to see why this is problematic: First off, people aren’t leaving the church because it has an uncouth or non-winsome way of voicing their opposition to perverse sexual proclivities, but because they are unregenerate and have believed a false gospel. If they were genuinely concerned, they never would leave.
As far as the other part, all you have to do is reverse the skin color. @wokepreachertv, who provided the video and transcript, explains it thusly:
h/t to @wokepreachertv for the clip and the transcript. Everyone should follow him on Twitter, Gab, and YouTube.
[Editor’s note: Also, maybe the reason people are leaving the Keller camp is that they are tired of the woke, agenda-driven, anti-science garbage that Tim Keller spouts. Dude, if some one can write a tweet maker for you that makes it too difficult to tell if you actually wrote it, then you have become entirely readable and predictable. Tim, you have “jumped the shark.”]
