Open theism is a false teaching that attempts to explain God’s foreknowledge in relation to man’s free will. Open theism essentially teaches that God can’t actually know everything, for if He did, then man couldn’t truly be free.
Open theism denies the essential attributes of God, namely his omniscience, but also denies his sovereignty and Lordship over all Creation. It denies the power of God by implying that God could create a world and deny Himself the ability to know the final outcome of His creation, particularly as it comes to those who He would save. One cannot read the Word of God and come away with such a conclusion, though, and open theism is nothing more than an attempt to get around God’s sovereignty over salvation.
The crux of the false teaching here is the denial of God’s attributes clearly taught in the Scriptures, and this is why it has been rejected as such by the Church.
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.
Juggling the heads of sheep to entertain the goats, FL, an 8000- member Southern Baptist megachurch, Church by the Glades, continues its celebration of all things fleshly. Known for their extravagant attempts to keep their members entertained, in the past few months alone they’ve played a cover of Run D.M.C’s sleazy and sexual song Walk this Way in church, a Kasey Musgraves cover which saw aerial silkists flying above the crowd, and a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s N95, only cleaned up and sanitized for church audiences, removing the curse words and racial epitaphs for a sermon illustration.
In The Power of Small series, we learn that Pastor David Hughes “continues his teaching on Proverbs 3, showing us how to mimic the behavior of the locusts by banding together with like-minded people.”
In a strong case for the Regulative Principle of Worship, the worship band plays Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Fly Away’ as the main singer swings over the crowd, with the only explanation given for the inclusion is that the church likes to “have fun’ and ‘be sensational.’
In the last week, two more churches have voted to leave the SBC. The first is Pueblo West Baptist Church in Pueblo West, CO. They’ve been affiliated with the SBC since 1973, where for decades they’ve faithfully supported the Cooperative Program (11%), and their local association (3%.)
No longer.
Citing the SBC’s enchantment with “pragmatism” as the cause of leaving, they lament that “many in the Convention have consistently confirmed only lip service to the Scriptures being the “perfect treasure of divine instruction, the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried.”
One example of the unholy fruit grown from the deep roots of pragmatism in the SBC is the recent happenings with Rick Warren at the 2022 Annual Convention, writing:
“The applause of thousands of messengers in Anaheim heaped upon SBC Pastor Rick Warren just after he rebuked the SBC for bickering about secondary issues. The bickering? The church Warren founded, and where he was senior pastor until just recently, was rightfully being considered for being disfellowshipped for defying Scripture, having recently ordained three women as pastors.
This was one more reflection of the many in the SBC who boast in minimal allegiance to Scripture for the sake of numbers and approval of man. Warren has for 40 years been the godfather of Scripture-twisting pragmatism. At a time when he should have been publicly rebuked, Warren was welcomed by Convention leaders from the platform to speak, and his defiance lauded by thousands of Southern Baptists.”
They also cite retaining the sodomy-celebrating Guidepost Solutions to instruct Christ’s church about sexual sins, concluding:
“Therefore, members at Pueblo West Baptist voted August 7, 2022, to immediately cease all giving to SBC entities and to terminate our affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention at the national, state, and local levels. Taking no pleasure in making this decision, we hereby inform you of it. The members of Pueblo West Baptist Church.”
The second is First Southern Baptist Church of Waterford, CA. Senior Pastor Greg Perkins says that they voted Sunday evening to leave the SBC as well, citing its “drift away from solid biblical values and convictions” as the cause of their departure.
The United States Department of Justice has formally initiated an investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention’s handling of clergy sexual abuse, with the government likely setting the stage for a prolonged and expansive probe into the inner workings of the denomination.
The general counsel for the Executive Committee has confirmed that they’ve already received subpoenas from the government, but no specific person has been called to testify yet. In response to the news, entity heads have released a statement, saying they will fully comply with any investigations, writing in part:
Individually and collectively each SBC entity is resolved to fully and completely cooperate with the investigation. While we continue to grieve and lament past mistakes related to sexual abuse, current leaders across the SBC have demonstrated a firm conviction to address those issues of the past and are implementing measures to ensure they are never repeated in the future. The fact that the SBC Executive Committee recently completed a fully transparent investigation is evidence of this commitment.
Commenting on the news in a series of Tweets, reporter Megan Basham suggested that the SBC brought this upon itself, despite the fact that the DOJ should have no interest in these matters:
What did SBC think would happen? If you give authoritarian administration opening to insert itself into largest Protestant denomination, home to voters who consistently vote for conservative policies, they’re going to take it.
And let’s be clear, there is NOTHING here that should interest DOJ. The “secret” list was all already public. This is purely admin taking advantage of the opening all the SBC leadership’s hyperbolic virtue signaling offered.
Oh, and don’t forget there is now no attorney-client privilege in place! 🤦♀️ So anything the DOJ wants to make an inflate or twist, they’re going to be able to. What a dumpster fire.
“Women pastors and women preachers are the most obvious rebellion against the word of God.” John MacArthur
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary president Adam Greenway caused a stir on social media after posting Lifeway’s Study Guide on the definition of a pastor, suggesting that while the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 seems to relegate the position of Senior Pastor to men only, perhaps there is some wiggle room for women to take on certain pastoral roles.
This revelation comes a month after the SBC’s annual meeting, where the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Credentials Committee revealed they were not going to remove Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church from their roles after he famously and unapologetically started to ordain women pastors.
The Credentials Committee suggested that the title and function of pastor can be separated, and while it’s true that only men can hold the “office of pastor,” perhaps women can have the “title of pastor” without having a church that is rife with pastrixes to be being disqualified or found not to be in cooperation with the Baptist Faith and Message. They noted that “(we found)…little information evidencing the Convention’s beliefs regarding the use of the title of ‘pastor’ for staff positions with different responsibility and authority than that of the lead pastor.”
Instead, the Credentials Committee said they were “unable to form an opinion regarding the relationship of Saddleback Church to the Southern Baptist Convention until clarity is provided regarding the use of the title “pastor” for staff positions with different responsibility and authority than that of the lead pastor.” They promised to study the issue and get back to the convention next in 2023.
In response to the initial controversy, SBTS President, one of the BFAM2000’s original authors, repudiated the notion that women would ever be biblically qualified to be ordained or that their doctrinal statements allow for it by posting a statement made by other originalist crafters.
And yet they say there is no liberal drift within the Southern Baptist Convention.
The team at Apologia Studios have put together an exposé detailing the hypocrisy of the Southern Baptist Convention and their leaders surrounding the events of May 12, 2022, when Louisiana lawmakers advanced a historic bill that would not only criminalize abortion but classify it as a homicide, the Pro-Life Machine stepped in and drafted a letter signed by 70 of their organizations, including the ERLC, to kill the bill and declare they do not support it.
This was the first actual abolition bill to pass committee in any state in the nation so far, and the politicians were getting pressure all week from pro-life groups. Still, the bill’s fate was sealed when earlier in the day, over 70 ‘pro-life groups’ like National Right to Life and their state subsidiaries, along with the ERLC, released an open letter opposing the bill, disparaging it for going too far in its efforts to abolish abortion.
The ERLC was ideologically joined with far-left women’s rights groups and Planned Parenthood, the apex predator of the baby-killing world. This lobbying arm of the SBC opposed the bill and declared unequivocally that they could not support it. Planned Parenthood was pressuring its supporters to defeat the bill, and The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission was doing the exact same thing, both pushing from different sides to attain the same goal, despite the SBC passing a resolution at last year’s convention to seek to abolish abortion. But politicians who previously championed the bill were now voting against it.
Why?
This video explains why, and how it all came together.
As the Southern Baptist Convention downgrade proceeds at a roaring pace, institutionalist SBC elites continue to play defense, in response to allegations that certain prominently featured sex abuse accounts in the commissioned guidepost sex abuse report were never properly corroborated. Protestia previously reported on the story of Jennifer Lyell, who allegedly received $1.5 million for incidents surrounding her alleged sexual abuse. Baptist Press originally characterized the incident as a 12-year-long morally inappropriate relationship with a seminary professor that began when Lyell was 26, during which Lyell moved multiple times. After leftist advocates pressured the convention with the threat of bad press, Baptist Press issued a retraction and apologized for characterizing the incident as an adulterous affair. The incident revealed a shift in the SBC from a scriptural view of sexual abuse to what could best be described as Critical Sex Abuse Theory. Consensual adultery plus power plus the regret of a subordinate party in the affair now equals sex abuse, even in cases where the regret is 12 years after the fact, and all parties are consenting adults.
In the wake of the 2022 SBC Convention, the Daily Wire’s Megan Basham released an investigative report that shed light on the questionable actions of SBC leadership in its treatment of the Jennifer Lyell incident. The report has been met with much ire from the institutionalists within the SBC, as it revealed that Lyell’s account of abuse was never corroborated by any real first-hand accounts, but rather “believed” by those to whom it was confessed in a manner reminiscent of the way that leftists demanded that the public “believe all women” during height of the #metoo movement. While Lyell was believed by SBC denominational leaders and characterized as a victim in part due to her status as a student at Southern Seminary, Basham noted that Lyell at times held power over Sills, as her position at Lifeway gave her power over negotiating Sill’s book deals.
That incident, she says, began a pattern of abuse that lasted 12 years until she was 38, continuing even as she moved to Chicago in 2006 and, later, Nashville, to further her career in publishing. During the time that Lyell was a publishing executive, she often worked with Sills, contracting with him for books, and, arguably, holding more power over his career than he did over hers.
Megan examined Guidepost’s account of the Lyell incident critically, attempting to corroborate Jennifer Lyell’s story by contacting those who claim to be SBC first-responders to the incident. Al Mohler, who as President of Southern Seminary received Lyell’s account of the incident in 2018, claims that the contact information she used to reach him is no something he frequently checks.
The specific questions that Basham, a former World Magazine film and television editor asked Mohler, the current World Magazine Opinions Editor, reflect a desire to accurately report on a story that has been purposely distorted and misreported by Baptist Press in a pravdaesque manner. The fact that Jennifer Lyell claimed in a recorded interview that David Sills threatened Al Mohler with a gun is an issue that should be investigated. Either the statement is false, which puts Lyell’s character into question, or a serious crime that involved a weapon should have been reported to the police, in consideration of the safety of the students and faculty of Southern Seminary.
Mohler’s refusal to field questions from Basham is reminiscent of the way that SBC elites like Russell Moore respond to difficult questions, that if answered truthfully, yield inconvenient answers. Mohler doesn’t like to be called on the carpet for refusing to confront what is clearly unscriptural, as he revealed in his agitated response to Phil Johnson’s question about Social Justice in conservative reformed circles, at the 2019 Shepherds conference. Under pressure from Basham’s statement, Mohler issued a short carefully crafted statement that answered none of the questions posed by Basham. Mohler refused to clarify the exact nature of the abuse and whether he was threatened by David Sills as alleged by Jennifer Lyell.
Other more forthcoming parties to Basham’s investigation, like Dr. Bill Cook, reveal that the basis for belief in Lyell’s account was a second-hand judgement that “found her allegations credible”.
The same unbiblical standard of proof for determining that Lyell was innocent of adultery and deserving of $1.5 million as an abuse victim is the same standard of proof that Guidepost and the institutionalist SBC elites want to establish for putting an individual on a ministry sex abuse black list, a mark that would last for life. Leftists and institutionalists who railed against conservative executive committee members for refusing to waive attorney-client privilege are now demanding strict privacy for alleged sex abuse victims and believe that common church members in the SBC don’t deserve to know the details of why $1.5 million of their cooperative fund giving is being handed out to someone in a settlement, instead of being allocated to missions.
In response to the kerfuffle, pastor Jared Cornutt stated that those who believe Megan’s investigative reporting over the vague answers of seminary Presidents who received Lyell’s accusation should leave the SBC.
Cornutt’s argument was quickly husked as a logical fallacy, as Twitter followers recognized that Cornutt and others who criticized Basham only criticized her because she questioned the institutionalist narrative. Cornutt points to former SBC presidents as if they are paragons of virtue and honesty, and yet the guidepost report calls out former SBC presidents Steve Gaines, Johnny Hunt, Jack Graham, and Paige Patterson as being abusers or complicit in abuse. Plus Ed Litton just resigned after a scandal, so their title alone doe snot have the shine he supposes it does.
The standard for credible witness amongst institutionalists has shifted from a Biblical position that questioned whether there were any firsthand witnesses with actual knowledge of the incident in question, to a highly politicized fallacy-driven process that says believe all women (except for conservatives that work for the Daily Wire) and believe all seminary presidents and seemingly credible power brokers in the denomination (except for those who hold inconvenient conservative viewpoints).
While the waters surrounding the Jennifer Lyell case have been substantially muddied, the Biblical principles in God’s law for establishing whether such a case is sex abuse or adultery are present in scripture. As .AD Robles explains, these principles can be seen in the general equity of Genesis 22:23-27.
If the leadership of the Southern Baptist is so antinomian and worldly that they can no longer discern right from wrong and ignore the plumbline of scripture in a case such as this, how can they be expected to properly discern other matters of law or Gospel from scripture?
Sadly, the axe appears to be laid at the root of the Southern Baptist Convention.
What in the world did we just see? Major systemic problems with the Southern Baptist Convention are going to force faithful churches to check their fortitude. David does a post-mortem and shares all the good, bad, and ugly of the convention, and trust us, there was a LOT of ugly.
