Dave’s article has many applications. There is a clown locally who came in to a local Baptist church claiming to be a fundamentalist. The church is a member of a non-fundamentalist fellowship. He claims he plans to take them out of the fellowship, in the meantime has “grown by subtraction” (his words) but is still in the fellowship.

Some local fundies will fellowship with him because he waves the right Bible flag, but his ethics stink.

The further you push changes, the more who would oppose them drift away, and the easier it becomes to “win votes.” It’s funny, I don’t see “winning votes” ever advocated in the Scripture as something we should be trying to do.

I don’t always agree with Dave Doran, but I always appreciate him, and that was a great article. Reminds me of something I was taught in seminary — if you are going to change on something important to your congregation, the only ethical thing you can do is resign, even if a lot of your congregation would support you. Anything else is a betrayal of those who wouldn’t support the change and who thought you were in agreement with them when you came.