As we continue to catalog the mission drift and downgrade of the SBC, along with the questionable players looking to toss a little leaven about, reformed Pastor Michael Clary shared a training manual for the North American Mission Board’s 2019 Send Philly event showing what sort of ideology that NAMB through their SEND network is funding, permeating through this missional mindset. This thread is adapted from his feed:
Some say the SBC isn’t woke & there’s nothing to be alarmed about. Don’t be so sure.
Paul said “a little leaven leavens the lump.”
The broader SBC may not be full-blown woke, but some places are.
A friend recently shared notes from a SEND Philly training.
See for yourself🧵
My friend attended a training who’s purpose was “to assist planters, pastors, ministry leaders and lay persons with a heart to serve those within the urban context.”
The “urban context” is defined according to progressive priorities using leftist buzzwords.
Page 8 describes “marginalized” people as “the other.” They are subject to: * Systemic racism * System disparity * Modern day slavery and * Environmental oppression
Jesus’ ministry is presented as a social justice crusade to empower “the least of these.”
This is a misuse of that text. The “least of these” in Mt25 refers to Christians who are socially ostracized because of their faithfulness to Jesus. It doesn’t teach social activism.
The biblical justification they provide is simply to accept the social justice framing as valid and then quote texts where Jesus ministers to people who fit those categories.
The North American Mission Board (NAMB) terminated the employment of Michael Crawford, the Vice President of Strategies and Development for the Send Network, after it was revealed that he engaged in “moral failures” that disqualified him from the ministry.
At the same time, he resigned from his role as the Executive Director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware, a position he held for less than a year, with MCM/D leaders citing “marital indiscretions” with an emphasis on the plurality of that word.
The SBC’s North American Mission Board (NSAMB) is using mission dollars paid by the cooperative program to host their weeklong annual meeting of state Baptist convention directors at the opulent Ritz-Carleton Hotel in New Orleans, a 4-star luxury hotel in the French Quarters, according to a report by NAMB Whistleblower.
At the Ritz, rooms usually go for between $400-500 dollars a night but can be had for as “little” as $305 a night if booked six months in advance. Space for meeting rooms is negotiated based on location and services provided, such as group size, catering options and group rates with hotel packages. Still, given their room rates, prices would be at a premium.
Is this a good use of #AnnieArmstorng mission dollars? An NAMB conference, paid for by NAMB, at the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans (including 4 night stay for attendees)? The “Old NAMB” was criticized heavily for it’s lavish spending. Will the same people hold NAMB accountable now? https://t.co/mRgrp3IZZcpic.twitter.com/A5k0TSSO8j
Their choice to stay at the lavish Ritz-Carleton is a slap in the face of faithful Baptists who have been giving for years, only to have it squandered away without concern for the sacrifices that went into producing that dollar and then giving it. Even if they managed to negotiate steep discounts, the optics alone are astonishingly bad.
NAMB has historically been a secretive and non-transparent organization that has grown fond of spending other people’s money without accountability. Without fiscal restraint or control, we have come to expect nothing less of them.
(Capstone Report) A federal court handed Will McRaney’s legal team yet another victory in McRaney’s lawsuit against the North American Mission Board (NAMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). NAMB will be forced to produce copies of at least four nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements to McRaney, according to a federal court ruling handed down Thursday, December 22, 2022.
NAMB did not want to produce separation agreements (what many call Nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements) and related documents signed by potential witnesses in the case of McRaney v. NAMB. According to NAMB’s claim there are documents that apply to at least four employees who would be or could be witnesses in the case. NAMB claimed the agreements were privileged legal work.
The court rejected NAMB’s efforts to shield the documents from discovery. According to the ruling, “To the extent NAMB believes the identities of the current and former employees who signed these agreements constitute work-product, the court disagrees.”
Here is what NAMB tried to avoid providing: “Any agreement(s) You have entered into with any individual or organization that you believe limits or constrains, in any way, the ability or authority of any such individual or organization to speak, write or comment about Plaintiff, about NAMB, or about this case (including but not limited to any severance agreements, non-disclosure agreements, nondisparagement agreements, or “cooperation agreements”).”
NDAs. For those who pay attention to the Southern Baptist Convention, NDAs are a serious problem used… to continue reading, click here.
Editor’s Note. This article was written and published at the Capstone Report
(Capstone Report) New court filings reveal a glimpse into the evidence that the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board (NAMB) attempted to discipline a state convention by cutting funding and then immediately restored the funding when the state convention caved to Kevin Ezell’s demands. Also, new filings show how Ezell and NAMB engaged in ‘egregious misconduct’ by failure to correct Russell Moore’s lies.
The North American Mission Board decided it should discipline a state Baptist convention, according to new court filings in the Will McRaney v. NAMB case. The new filing comes in an amended complaint and teases evidence revealing that NAMB discussed a “Maryland/Delaware disciplinal process.”
According to new court filings, “NAMB referred to its now-rescinded threat that it would sever relations with BCMD if it did not get its way as the ‘Maryland/Delaware disciplinal process.’”
Disciplinal?
What does that even mean? Did NAMB mean disciplinary? And how comfortable are state convention executives with the idea that NAMB might attempt to discipline you or your churches?
And there are other juicy tidbits in this new filing that advances our understanding of what is going on in the discovery process now underway in the McRaney v. NAMB case.
As soon as Maryland/Delaware caved and forced out McRaney, NAMB restored money it took away as punishment, according to the new filings. These moves show what appears to be coordination between Kevin Ezell’s NAMB and…to continue reading, click here.
Editor’s Note. This article was written and published at the Capstone Report
Every week, faithful church members dutifully write checks to support the Lord’s work at their local Baptist church, and thousands of these churches turn over a percentage of this giving to the para-church cooperation known as the Southern Baptist Convention. The bulk of this funding goes to support international evangelism/church planting through the International Mission Board (IMB) and church planting in the United States through the North American Mission Board (NAMB), cementing the SBC’s reputation as a decidedly evangelistic organization.
It was under this missional umbrella that NAMB made a recent decision to partner with the neo-christ, ecumenical marketing campaign known as He Gets Us (HGU), a project of the 501c3 donor-advised fundServant Foundation that promotes what they call the “real Jesus” – a “Jesus” who “accepts everyone.” While the group claims to not be “left” or “right,” a cursory examination of their website paints a radically different picture.
Rather than a Jesus who came to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10) whose ambassadors implore the lost to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20) and who “go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15), the “Jesus” that gets us is relevant and relatable, offering teaching and examples that “just might help you with your job, family, or relationship challenges, as well as issues like rejection, anxiety, depression and more.”
This devil’s bargain came to the attention of SBC pew-sitters when NAMB recently encouraged churches to join them for a webinar to learn how to join the HGU “movement,” and be included on a list of churches the campaign would refer “seekers” to upon being contacted via the campaign’s website. NAMB described the movement as “the biggest campaign to change hearts and minds about Jesus,” in the event listing for the webinar hosted by president Kevin Ezell and Wheaton College Dean and expert-on-everything-by-way-of-internet-scrubbing institutional mainstay Ed Stetzer – whose fingerprints are all over the HGU effort.
Almost immediately, conservative Christians and SBC pastors on social media began exposing that the campaign was promoting a woke, heretical Jesus that bore little if any resemblance to the true Christ. Ezell was forced to immediately backtrack from the campaign, which he called “too broad” to “directly connect with” in a hastily-penned mea culpa, adding that NAMB “will pray that the conversations begun by this campaign will lead to gospel-centered conservations (sic) and cause many to seek to learn more about Jesus.”
If you're still in the SBC, this NAMB/He Gets Us thing means that you are now joined to and financially supporting a denomination that's evangelizing lost people with heresy (and that's not hyperbole). ANOTHER GOSPEL (Gal1:6-9).
The 'He Gets Us' campaign is moralistic therapeutic deism without the deism. Any "gospel" that focuses on 'sharing Jesus’ radical love and acceptance – of everyone' (according to the HGU website), but that doesn't call people to repent of their sin, is not the biblical gospel.
Just a few months prior, Ed Stetzer – not one to break his streak of being on the wrong side of every issue (Wuhan lab leak, COVID-persecuted churches, fake Heaven tourism books at Lifeway), began shilling for Woke Jesus in April via his column at Churchleaders.com, in which he first destroys a strawman of what he considers most evangelicals’ brand of “sharing faith” before advocating for the focus-group-tested, HGU strategy that “break[s] the mold of what most Christians think of when they think of evangelism.”
Note: Since Stetzer has a habit of scrubbing columns and social media posts once he’s proven wrong, here’s the archived link to the above-linked column.
Stetzer reminds his readers that, rather than simply and straightforwardly proclaiming the Gospel and imploring the lost to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20), we would do well to adjust our approach in light of the negative opinions, subjective feelings, and false impressions of the lost. He claims that a straightforward offer and proclamation of God’s Truth stands in opposition to love, writing (emphasis mine), “when communicating the components of a message becomes more important than how we share, we’ve lost sight of the good news of Jesus’ life, and ultimate death, for all humanity.” This “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it” framework stands in stark contrast to Jesus’ evangelistic commissioning to the disciples, where He instructed them simply: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:15-16). As Darrell Harrison aptly pointed out while discussing the HGU campaign, “The main thing Jesus ‘gets’ about all of us is that we’re sinners.”
Creating the kind of absurd, blind irony that only Ed Stetzer could pull off, he claims that a lost person may very well feel commoditized if a believer insists on “getting out [the] full presentation” of the Gospel – apparently preferring an approach that deliberately withholds parts of Jesus in order to craft a message palatable to the lost person. Stetzer misses the likelihood that the Gen-Z target (with their notable desire for authenticity) will sniff out the inauthenticity of a Christian offering a version of Jesus personally marketed to them. Then of course there’s the inconvenient fact that to maintain the lost person’s interest in “Jesus” one must avoid completing the Christological picture with inconvenient truths like repentance or the call to pick up one’s cross.
This tried-and-true sales strategy is the core of the $100 million campaign, which (consistent with its shameless salesmanship) guarantees its partner churches “success” – that is, success in generating wide gate-scale YouTube views, website visits, and placements of ad spots on Monday Night Football right next to ads for gambling, beer, and every other branded vice that might appeal to the unregenerate heart.
Yet rather than a call to repentance and trust in Christ for delivery from sin, TV viewers are comforted by the claim that Jesus was (and apparently is) just another conflicted, anxious, and troubled social justice-concerned beardbro. Whatever a lost Gen-Z heart might desire, wonder, love, or oppose – Jesus gets it. He validates it, unlike those hypocrites in the church. Neo-Christ gets you, unlike those judgy Christians who keep insisting you are a lost sinner in peril.
Stetzer is careful not to entirely dismiss the “strategy” of simply proclaiming the Gospel to the lost world (like those early church pre-literates who didn’t even have research or focus groups!), but insists that the He Gets Us strategy of moving the Jesus goalposts is simply an evangelism upgrade. Yet there stubbornly remains no biblical precedent for the soft-sell of “starting conversations” or even “sharing our faith,” only proclamation of the unadulterated Gospel call to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” – at any stage of personal familiarity.
The SBC has been wedded to the Church Growth, seeker-sensitive strategy of evangelism for decades – a strategy that replaces the Holy God standing in righteous judgment with Buddy Christ, and Buddy Christ would never judge a fly. Rather, he desperately wants you to be his friend. To quote pre-woke Matt Chandler, Jesus’ motivation in saving is “not so that you and him (sic) can be boys.” Buddy Christ bears little resemblance to the Holy Judge who calls on his children to “preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power” (1 Cor. 1:17).
Yet the North American Mission Board revealed the level to which the SBC downgrade has progressed in its thankfully short-lived partnership with the de-vangelistic HGU campaign. Beyond the simple continuation of its promotion of self-help guru Buddy Christ, NAMB was caught actively promoting partnership with a pro-gay, inclusivist, heretical false gospel campaign – a campaign whose falseness has been known for months. If not for an (honestly quite cursory) examination of the HGU campaign by discerning believers, Ezell and NAMB would still be encouraging SBC churches to hop aboard the inclusivist Jesus train with the United Methodists (also an active partner of the HGU campaign).
Note: As of this publishing, He Gets Us has removed the denominational logos and names seen in this article’s featured image above.
Even more troubling, Kevin Ezell apparently did at least some diligence on HGU and still yoked NAMB to the campaign, telling Stetzer in the recent webinar that he found the HGU ads to be “beautiful” and that people looking to evangelize (“share their faith” in modern lingo) are “going to love this.”
The president of the largest church planting network in the United States finding nothing objectionable about the heretical HGU campaign is yet another nail in the coffin of the once-conservative SBC.
Just when you thought the SBC was as wayward and corrupt as it could get, enter Kevin Ezell.
In response to massive pushback from the pews, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mision Board (NAMB) issued an “apology” letter for lending the rapidly-waning credibility of the nation’s largest church planting network to the He Gets Us campaign – a deep-funded advertising campaign promoting a false gospel and an unbiblical, woke Jesus.
He Gets Us is a radically affirming campaign promoting a Jesus that is a social justice warrior completely disinterested in sin, repentance, or the exclusivity of the Gospel of the actual Jesus. The campaign and its church connection chat will gladly point “seekers” to a gay-affirming church:
Showing his worldly pragmatism has no bounds, Kevin Ezell wrote that it’s apparently totally okay to get on board with the woke Jesus train if it might lead people to “connect more people to our churches” because “these ads will be seen by millions of people.”
With no concept of the gravity of his error nor apparently any plans for truly apologizing, Ezell described the campaign as “too broad,” which is apparently the evangelical newspeak way to redefine false gospel. He finishes off his face plant by stating that they will pray that “the conversations begun by this campaign will lead to gospel-centered conservations (sic) and cause many to seek to learn more about Jesus.”
That’s right – the president of NAMB is praying that the false Jesus-promoting He Gets Us campaign will teach about Jesus. Apparently, Ezell is unconcerned with which Jesus they’re going to get. God help us.
(Evangelical Dark Web) In early March, the North American Mission Board released their 2022 Ministry Report, outlining their FY 2021 performance. NAMB has been the SBC arm for planting churches domestically and is helmed by Kevin Ezell, who we label as the Phantom Menace within Big Eva. Based on their financial reports, this label, along with the description that Ezell is a part of the Baptist Biumvirate is entirely vindicated. Unfortunately, too many faithful Southern Baptist donate to the various SBC wings or the Annie Armstrong offering without a clear picture of what happens to the money.
NAMB’s Opening Statement
To begin their report, NAMB offers its spin on the financials by detailing at length the activities they are involved in, which can be categorized by church planting, evangelism, relief efforts, and leadership development. In short, they are burying their financial report underneath their lengthy outline of their organizational activities.
Of all the numbers they release, the church planting data is not updated to reflect 2021. Their fiscal year ends in September, and in releasing their report on March 4th, one has to wonder why the church plant numbers for 2021 are not featured in this report. Instead, they feature their 2020 data, which is verbatim from their 2021 Ministry Report.
Southern Baptists planted 588 new churches, 143 new churches affiliated with the SBC and 126 church campuses were launched. To better understand and assess the status of churches in the SBC, new church campuses began to be tabulated in 2019. Altogether, Southern Baptists added 857 new congregations in 2020. (Pg 4)
Out of the 588 churches they planted, only 143 (24%) are actually SBC churches. NAMB has been caught funding woke, egalitarian and outright apostate churches in the past. These include…
(Capstone Report) And Willy Rice never said a word to refute the lie. Will he now?
Willy Rice wants to be President of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). If he expects Southern Baptists to entrust him with that responsibility, he should be willing to answer some questions about how the organization he oversees—the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention—lied to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Does Willy Rice think a state convention is a Southern Baptist entity?
Does Willy Rice believe Tommy Green works for a Southern Baptist entity?
Does Willy Rice believe any state Baptist convention is an entity of the SBC?
If not, does he stand by the NAMB submission to the US Supreme Court as a NAMB trustee? Because NAMB through its attorney’s claimed just such a falsehood.
According to a NAMB filing seeking cert, the organization claimed, “Reverend McRaney attempts to avoid certiorari by emphasizing that, though he was employed by one Southern Baptist entity, he was never employed by the particular Southern Baptist entity that he sued, namely the SBC Mission Board.”
State Conventions are not SBC entities. According to the SBC website here are the entities: the SBC Executive Committee, the ERLC, Guidestone Financial Resources, the International Mission Board, Lifeway Christian Resources, The North American Mission Board, Gateway Seminary, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The Women’s Missionary Union (WMU) is an auxiliary of the SBC.
NAMB and McRaney enter stipulation agreement that advances discovery. New trial date set.
(Capstone Report) Discovery moves closer in Will McRaney’s defamation and torturous interference lawsuit against the North American Mission Board (NAMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). NAMB’s attorneys agreed to not withhold discovery based on some of its remaining claims. The agreement was set out in a Joint Stipulation filed February 9, 2022, with the federal court in Mississippi.
According to the agreement, “Pursuant to the Opinion and Judgment by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit filed July 16, 2020 (mandate issued December 3, 2020) [Dkt. No. 68], and this Court’s Order Denying Defendant’s Motion for Partial Summary Judgment as Premature and Directing the Completion of Discovery [Dkt. No. 93], NAMB agrees it will not withhold any discovery responses on the basis of its First Amendment defenses or objections, including in response to discovery requests served by Plaintiff prior to the date of this Stipulation.”
