(The Dissenter) Former SBC president, JD Greear, has been under fire on social media in recent days after a video surfaced of him advocating for his church’s diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) program. But what exactly is the result of that program? Apparently, this.
You may remember during the COVID/BLM scandal a few years ago, Greear’s Summit Church was involved in an anti-police march in North Carolina alongside militant Black Lives Matter groups. The march was led by one of Greear’s co-pastors, the worship pastor, Michael Georges Jr.
Georges, who refers to himself as the “Black King,” has been an advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement — which is heavily involved in anti-American terrorism — and even wears the organization’s official gear. While chanting their… to continue reading and watch the video, click here.
This article was written and published at The Dissenter
Summit Church pastor and former SBC President J.D. Greear is under fire for a tongue-lashing he gave his congregants during a recent church service, chastising them for coming in late, not making personal connections with guests, treating church like a religious show and production, and ironically enough, streaming the service from home rather than coming to in-person services. He told his members:
Wouldn’t that be a way of demonstrating the gospel, (spending time before and after the service getting to know new guests) saying ‘here, you matter and you are important. You’re not invisible in here.’
Do you know what kind of place this would become if we did just that? Honestly, it’s one of the things that irritates me about you guys that cruise in 10 minutes late or leave five minutes before we dismiss. It’s not that I’m mad that you’re missing part of the service, it’s that you treat church like it’s a religious show instead of a welcoming family that you’re a part of.
When people say that the church is unfriendly and it feels like a big production, you’re the problem. And don’t even get me started on you guys that are still sitting at home in your pajamas streaming online when health-wise, you can and should be back in church, okay? If you got health issues, I get it, that’s fine. If you’re traveling, I understand. But some of you are still sitting at home right now on your couch because you’ve reduced church to a program you watch and that is not church at all.
A longer, fuller clip of JD. Greear explaining why he's upset and dissapointed with his congregants who come late or leave early. pic.twitter.com/XF1xay5EKU
Second, there’s the time he twerked and danced to Whitney Houston, which is not something one would do if they were concerned about the church service being viewed as a show.
J.D. Greear can chastise his congregants all he wants for staying home and not coming to in-person services, but he’s calling out what he specifically enabled and encouraged.
Let’s not forget that Greear closed his church doors to in-person services for OVER A YEAR. In fact, while hundreds of other faithful churches were fighting to stay open, Greear announced in August 2020 that they were closing down until at least 2021, only doing virtual services, which he likened to having thousands of little church services.
Even as late as October 2021, congregants were required to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test to attend services at specific locations, which would discourage many people from attending and instead leading them to stay home.
In fact, he routinely cancels church services around Christmastime, so please, spare us the false indignation.
Responding to the clip, which he since took down, Greear wrote:
Former SBC President J.D Greear’s Florida church plant, Summit Church Naples, has fired one of their main pastors and ‘Directing Elders’ after he admitted to stealing from the offering plate.
Former Pastor Jim Hines was busted stealing from the bustling megachurch during the Christmas Eve service, and he also admitted to taking money back in 2018, according to the Roys Report, who revealed:
“According to Summit’s statement, Hines was first accused of taking cash during an offering count in 2018. “That charge was taken seriously and Jim was put on leave,” the church said. “At that time, he denied the accusation and ultimately it could not be confirmed.”
However, the statement adds that Hines “was seen violating one of our protective policies” on Christmas Eve. This led to Hines “being caught stealing $1,000 from an offering. He also has admitted to stealing when he was initially accused in 2018.”
We have reached out to Summit Church for clarification on whether or not he was being put under church discipline as a member who would remain with the church, and will update this post accordingly.
(Evangelical Dark Web) There are many weaknesses of the multi-campus church model. In addition to convincing people of the merits and normalcy of watching a pastor on a screen, you also have to deal with multiple land and building usage issues.
At the Downtown Durham location masks are required for all and the unvaccinated are subject to presenting a negative COVID test in order to worship. It’s worth noting that this burden is unscientific and implemented only to inconvenience those who are not vaccinated with the failing COVID-19 vaccine. It’s not about safety, and it never was.
A newly released side-by-side video shows Ed Litton’s co-pastor likewise plagiarizing his sermons from JD Greear; leading one to wonder if it’s time that Redemption Church fires the pastors and becomes a satellite campus of Summit Church; cutting a few salaries and piping in the preaching directly from the source.
Reformation Charlotte, a sister site to Protestia who has been leading the way and doing the yeoman’s work in breaking this whole Litton thing wide open, shows the sermon preached by Taylor Anderson, the former Student Pastor who just last year stepped into the role as their West Campus Pastor. In the video showing a sermon from Romans 12, Anderson lifts stories, illustrations, anecdotes, and the sermon structure itself directly from Greear.
Jeff Maples, the video collator, points out that unlike Litton, Anderson wasn’t so nakedly brash in this thievery
“Interestingly, however, this young pastor did a better job of rearranging Greear’s points to make it less blatant, and, as well, he did add a few extra points to give it some substance. Nonetheless, the parts he plagiarized are clear.”
Editor’s Note. This article was written by Pastor Ed Litton and published at Protestia.com
Megachurch pastor Church Bryan Loritts twists the scripture in order to advance the goals of Critical Race theory, preaching from Hosea 3 that Gomer was sex-trafficked and then drawing a direct connection to the failure of the church to practice ethnic diversity.
Loritts, who is a controversial pastor at Southern Baptist President J.D. Greear’s Summit Church, explained at a CCCU conference in 2019 that if a church isn’t willing to give all they have to the cause, and won’t pay their black speakers like him enough money to coach and teach them about the sins of whiteness, then they aren’t loving.
In modern parlance, Gomer is being sex trafficked. She’s incarcerated. Hang in there with me, I promise you I’m coming to your neighborhood. She’s sex trafficked. She’s on the auction block. The going rate to emancipate a woman in Gomer’s predicament was 30 shekels of silver. But verse 2, he doesn’t say “I bought her for 30 shekels of silver. I bought her,” watch the detail, “for 15 shekels and a homer and a lethek of barley.”
Commentators say the devil is in the details. The great hermeneutical question is: why doesn’t he say, “I bought her for 30 shekels”? Why does he say, “I bought it for 15 and a homer and a lethek of barley”? Answer: he didn’t have 30 shekels. I could see him now, rummaging through his home, looking under his bed, digging between the cushions of his sofa, trying to come up with all he can. Going to the bank account, all he can come up with is 15 shekels, and he takes it to the auctioneer, and the auctioneer says, “No no, I got to have 30 shekels,” and then he, “What if I add a homer and the lethek of barley to that?” He goes, “Let me check out my supervisor first, okay? We’ll take that.”
Watch it now. To emancipate the one who cheated on him cost him everything he had, and I think that’s the point, friends. If you ain’t paying a cost, you ain’t loving. Now, my flight leaves at 2 o’clock. I go here in love. If you say you’re serious about diversity but your institution is not making costly moves that do violence to the cultural norms, you ain’t loving. If I gotta beg you to put people of color on your syllabus, you ain’t loving. If I gotta beg you to hire people of color, you ain’t loving. Love hurts. There’s a cost.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve coached institutions and churches and all this other stuff and give me a nice little check. I get on a plane, come back home, my wife checks on me: “How did it go?” I’m like, “Well, you know, they ain’t gonna change, coz they don’t have the courage to pay the cost.”
But this isn’t a one-way street. People of color, we’ve got to pay the cost and, in some sense, it’s us just showing up to work. It’s paying a cost, us having to endure questions about our hair, us having to beg you, “let’s have some different worship on a day other than MLK Day.” So the frustrating thing you need to understand is when, on your campus, you have one group paying a cost.
Naturally, those in the combox know exactly what’s up.
h/t to @wokepreachertv for the video and transcript
President of the Southern Baptist convention J.D. Greear publicly boasted during a 2019 speech at the Just Gospel conference that he was practicing affirmative action in his SBC committee appointments, explaining that nearly 70% of the people he appoints are either women or persons of color, in order so they can “shape the institutions and providing leadership and accountability.”
Furthermore, he says the SBC needs the specific wisdom that being black or brown brings, as predominantly white wisdom will not do.
At the Summit Church, we have explored, for example, what are ways that she can lead in the church that do not carry pastoral authority or violate the spirit of 1st Timothy 2. We have gone literally through our entire staff directory, through a couple of hundred different positions on staff, and just asked, “Where have we just traditionally assigned this to a man when it really could be done in a way that a woman could lead it, where somebody who’s not an elder could lead that?”
It’s led to a redefinition of dozens of jobs in our church, where we know that women that are very capable as leaders and capable as administrators and capable of vast ministry vision and wisdom can lead in those areas in ways that don’t necessarily carry elder-like authority…By the way, I know not everybody here is Southern Baptist, but that’s a question that those of you that are Southern Baptists, we’ve got to ask in the convention at large. …
So in the role that I have as president of the SBC, another one of my main tasks is...to appoint people on committees who will then appoint trustees who end up shaping the institutions and providing leadership and accountability. I’ll just tell you, of all the appointments that I’ve made, two-thirds of them are either women or they are people of color. I really do that for two reasons: one, that really is the future. …
Through an unbelievable act of generosity, already, right now, today, 20% of Southern Baptist membership is people of color, which is something, honestly, knowing our history, I do not understand. It is an act of extraordinary generosity. But already even with things the way they are, the membership is already 20% people of color. Sixty-three percent of all the churches that Southern Baptists planted last year were led by people of color. So it is the present, it is the very quickly coming future. That’s the first reason.
Secondly, we need their wisdom. It’s not like this act of grace of, “Oh, from up here, I just want to graciously share the stage because it’s,” no, I NEED the wisdom in a changing culture. There are things that God has put in this part of the body that I would be a much poorer Christian, a much poorer leader. And there are blind spots I will never see until God has filled his church with a variety of people and the kinds of people that make up the diversity of the church.
(The Houston Chronicle) The church pastored by Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear announced Wednesday that an outside firm will review the recent hiring of a pastor accused of mishandling sex abuses a decade ago.
The review of Bryan Loritts comes six months after he was hired at Greaar’s Summit Church in Raleigh, N.C., and after months of criticism from sexual abuse survivors.
Among the critics were those with whom Greear and other Summit leaders have worked closely as the SBC continues to confront sexual abuses detailed in a 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News investigation, Abuse of Faith.
In 2010, the worship director at Loritts’ Memphis, Tenn., church was accused of recording at least one person as they used the restroom. The man, Rick Trotter, was at the time Loritts’ brother-in-law and the announcer for the NBA team Memphis Grizzlies. Trotter was terminated from that position soon after, but moved to another nearby church.
After he was charged with multiple counts of voyeurism in 2016, the churches released a joint statement in which they said they “openly discussed Trotter’s prior sexual misconduct and the counseling he attended for sexual addiction,” according to media reports.
Loritts has since said he regrets some of his actions, but that he only spoke to two victims…
You would think that the top leader of the Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination in America that calls itself “conservative” — would hold his own church accountable to the Scriptures on issues that shouldn’t even be debatable — like women teaching in churches and holding to theological positions that are opposed to the revealed will of God.
No. Instead, JD Greear props up a Jezebel named Rebecca Shrader who continues to defy God while representing his church.
Rebecca Shrader refers to herself as a “pro-life feminist, pro-choice Christian” who authored a “statement of lament” for white people to sign denouncing their skin color. Shrader is a small group Bible teacher at Greear’s Summit Church in North Carolina, and proudly boasts it.
Shrader is a very confused person who believes that she is “pro-life” because she chose not to kill her own children. However, Shrader is continually and adamantly clear that she believes every woman should have the “choice” whether or not to end their own children’s lives. She defends Planned Parenthood and does not believe that life begins at conception.
She has also stated that she would join hands with the pro-choice escorts at abortion clinics to protect them from hearing the gospel from pro-life groups.
And she, a “bible teacher,” is apparently clueless as to why Christians believe murder is wrong and should be illegal.
So it should come as no surprise that Shrader, a teacher and member in good standing at the Southern Baptist Convention president’s church, praises one of the most anti-Christ, pro-abortion, pro-sodomy Supreme Court Justices ever to walk the face of this earth, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
People, if you want to know what’s wrong with the Evangelical Church today, look no further than Rebecca Shrader, and particularly, her pastor, JD Greear.
