The “Me Too Movement” Goes to Church

Dear SBC Pastor,

Baptists misdiagnose the problem.

The “Me Too Movement” visited the Southern Baptist Conventions accusing ministers of dishonoring women and their failure to manage sexual sins against women. See article here

Jason K. Allen, author of the Resolution,  blames the SBC clergy for LACKING sensitivity toward women who have been victims of sinfulness within the family and church.

“Many women have experienced horrific abuses within the power structures of our Christian world,” Beth Moore, an evangelical teacher, wrote in a letter

Because Allen’s perspective is feministic, he misdiagnoses the problem.

Why did he use “sinfulness” instead of crime?

He sights the failure as a deficient view of women.

This is a false premise!

I was an SBC minister and I never met a Baptist minister who failed to honor women or treat them as children of God. Never! If anything, the Baptists have released the moorings on women from Biblical constraints within God’s law-order out of fear of a feminist revolt in the church.

Because the majority of ministers are antinomian, they tend to see abuses against women as a sin to be forgiven, rather than a crime to be reported.

Likewise, they tend to see abuses by women against men as tolerable rather than as a violation of God’s law order. Men do not have a monopoly on sin! Women are not always victims. Too often, they are predators who by their mouthiness provoke indignant acts of their  husbands.

Seeking to avoid scandals in the church, ministers are prone to turn a blind eye to physical abuse or sweep sexual transgressions  under the church carpet. Out of sight, out of mind . . . and out of the newspapers eager to capitalize on sins within the church community.

Some acts are criminal in nature and not peccadillos that offend the emotion of this “touchy-feely” generation.

Southern Baptist along with other Evangelical churches have an inadequate view of the place of God’s law in the church; that is, they have lilliputian respect for the Biblical law.

Baptists tend to see New Testament commands as suggestions and options rather than law, obligations, and duties.  The failure to treat New Testament commands as  law and criminal in nature is the  product of more than a little evil.

Rather than seeing  the criminality of certain negative behaviors that needs to be reported to the police, and a matter of church discipline, SBC pastors interpret crimes as sins that the victim needs to forgive.

When is the last time you have ever heard of an SBC church disciplining one of its members, male or female, for violating God’s law (1 Corinthians 5)? SBC churches are all about additions, not subtractions; all about being politically correct, rather than Biblically correct; and, all about being “cool,” rather than holy.

Forgiveness is not the first issue that needs to be dealt with. Some people need to go to jail for violating common law and injuring people.

Loving your neighbor means doing your neighbor no harm. Harming a neighbor is a criminal matter that needs to be punished by civil courts as well as a sinful matter that needs to be disciplined by the church’s ecclesiastical court.

To be fair, the number one theological issue in Evangelical circles is the failure to develop an adequate theology of law and its place in the church —  a failure that stems back to the Reformation. The practice of law is the practical application of Theology. Pastors are notoriously inadequate in the studies of law; and, therefore, lack perspective on right and wrong.

The issue is not a lack of honor for women, but a lack of honor for God’s law-order as good for Baptists, all men, and all of man’s institutions.