{"id":1138,"date":"2009-02-16T23:46:44","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T07:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/?p=1138"},"modified":"2009-02-17T08:24:11","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T16:24:11","slug":"to-write-or-not-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2009\/02\/16\/to-write-or-not-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"to write or not to write, that is the question"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent meeting of the Minnesota Baptist Association’s men’s fellowship<\/a>, a question was raised by the panel discussion moderator, Kevin Bauder. The question and answer is highlighted in a post<\/a> by Ben Wright, claiming that fundamentalist churches have nothing to fear from the ministry of conservative evangelicals, especially the ministry of his hero, Mark Dever.<\/p>\n

The question was something like this: should Bauder have availed himself of the opportunity to contribute an article to the 9Marks e-Journal or not? The answer of older pastors essentially was, “No.” Ben explains the rationale this way:<\/p>\n

Then the conversation turned to Bauder seeking advice from these pastors as to how he should respond to a request from Mark Dever to write something for one of his publications. (He later identifies this request, which he declined, as an article in the 9Marks E-Journal on what fundamentalists look for in seminary education.<\/p>\n

The responses were mixed. The first was a definite no, and the rest were more ambiguous. I was fascinated by what their answers revealed about their rationale, their motivations, and their fears. Their basic argument was that Bauder writing for Dever could function as an endorsement of Dever’s ideas as well as other conservative evangelicals. The chief threats to them seem to be losing members of their churches to Bethlehem Baptist Church (pastored by John Piper) and younger generations of fundamentalists identifying more with conservative evangelicals than their roots.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bauder comments on Ben’s post, saying that he didn’t write the article due to the press of time more than anything else, and encouraging all to listen to the response of the younger pastors. So I did, and their answer was essentially, “Yes,” with my understanding of the main rationale being, “you ought to take advantage of opportunities to influence young evangelicals towards a more fundamentalist position.” (You can listen to the recording yourself to see if I have gotten it right concerning the answers.)<\/p>\n

A comment later in the thread by someone named Dave says this:<\/p>\n

The automatic response to avoid assimilation or discussion of conservative evangelicals teaching does not serve most ministries well, these discussions are going on among the “young” fundamentalists and unless you engage in the discussion biblically and with knowledge of the teaching in question (not just what you have heard about the teacher in your camp) you are pretty much ineffective in steering them away from what might be legitimate concerns regarding some of these ministries and teachers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But let’s be accurate here. I think Dave is reacting to what Ben thought he heard, but that isn’t exactly what the older pastors in the panel discussion were saying!<\/p>\n

They weren’t giving a “sit-down and shut-up” answer to some young “whippersnapper”, they were instead offering counsel to Bauder himself, a man who knows all the background that factors into their advice.<\/p>\n

When it comes to answering the questions of the proto-fundamentalist, ((What are proto-fundamentalists? They are fundamentalists in the making, maybe. Perhaps ’embryonic-fundamentalists’ or ‘latent-fundamentalists’ would be better.)) Dave suggests that pastors need better answers than building walls and shutting down discussion. That is true.<\/p>\n

But!<\/p>\n

But who should be giving those answers? I assume (always dangerous) that the men in the discussion are pastors of small churches. That means they have a host of responsibilities every week – preparing at least three messages, usually four or more, meeting individually with men in the congregation for discipleship (i.e., formal Bible study or informal coffee sessions, helping out with projects, etc.), possible counseling sessions with couples\/families, providing fellowship and activities for any teenagers one might have in his church, administering Sunday school programs (small though they may be), administering and leading visitation programs of various kinds, planning and preparing outreach efforts weeks or months in advance, and administering the physical facilities of the church, such as they are (cutting grass, arranging maintenance – or doing it himself, hiring trades, and on and on). It is no small task to be the pastor of a small church.<\/p>\n

To top all this off, Dave is telling us that unless we are current with the latest literature and trends of our day, we can’t give good answers to the one or two<\/em> young preacher boys we may develop every decade or so. He seems to suggest that we can’t simply give out information we have gleaned “in house”, at one of our fellowship meetings or some such gathering, or an in house publication of some kind. No, we all need to be thoroughly current in order to give good counsel to the proto-fundies.<\/p>\n

Well, I suppose that’s true, to some extent. I try to keep as current as I can myself, I try to provide my current crop of preacher boys (my sons) with good answers to these questions.<\/p>\n

But there is a limit to what a single pastor of a small church can do.<\/p>\n

And this is where we depend on the Bible colleges and Seminaries to specialize in areas where we are deficient due to a lack of time or training – or both.<\/p>\n

And this is where we worry that our seminaries are failing us.<\/p>\n

The younger pastors at the Minnesota meeting answered Bauder’s question with a view to using contacts with Conservative Evangelicals for influencing, perhaps, some young ‘proto-conservative evangelicals’ our way. Perhaps they are right, such efforts might actually produce the desired result.<\/p>\n

But influence works both ways. What about the possibility of such efforts (shall we call them ‘compromises’?) to influence proto-fundamentalists towards the conservative evangelical side of the equation? Is that also not a possibility?<\/p>\n

What is the responsibility of fundamentalist seminaries, after all? Is it to gain credence and respect in the scholarly world? Is it to gain the kudoes of Conservative Evangelicals? Or is it to provide pastors for fundamentalist churches?<\/p>\n

Which is it?<\/p>\n

Kevin Bauder has articulated in various places that there is still a difference between Conservative Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. They have implied that the difference is significant, so significant that it ought to be maintained. If it is a difference that is significant, and it ought to be maintained, then ought there not be a clear distance maintained with clear articulation to our young proto-fundies why we maintain the difference and the distance?<\/p>\n

Really, we who are pastors of small churches are relying heavily on fundamentalist seminaries to perpetuate our philosophy and rationale for ministry.<\/p>\n

If our seminaries and seminary leaders fail to do that, will our years dedicated to the fundamentalist philosophy simply evaporate in one generation? Will our churches cease to be fundamentalist because no fundamentalist pastors can be found?<\/p>\n

That is what veteran fundamentalist pastors of small churches fear. That is why they answer questions like this the way they do.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen, but I wonder if our fundamentalist seminaries are actually perpetuating a fundamentalist philosophy any more.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Update:<\/span><\/strong> My apologies! I have been informed that I misidentified the commenter on Ben’s thread as Dave Doran. I should have checked more carefully. Although Dave D usually only\u00a0 signs his blogs with just “Dave”, it is true that there are more than one Dave in the world. I will have to be more careful in the future. I apologize in sackcloth and ashes. Please forgive my error!<\/p>\n

My point, however, still stands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent meeting of the Minnesota Baptist Association’s men’s fellowship, a question was raised by the panel discussion moderator, Kevin Bauder. The question and answer is highlighted in a post by Ben Wright, claiming that fundamentalist churches have nothing to fear from the ministry of conservative evangelicals, especially the ministry of his hero, Mark […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[37,71,41,68],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-im","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1138"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1144,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions\/1144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}