by Understand the Times with Roger Oakland
LTRP Note: The emerging church movement has been making significant inroads into the Southern Baptist Convention. Even to this day, SBC is one of the partners of Leadership Network, a catalyst and mover for the emerging church movement.1
Bob Allen
Associated Baptist News
WINFIELD, Mo. (ABP) — Thirty years after the Southern Baptist Convention began ridding itself of theological moderates and liberals, a prominent Missouri Baptist layman is warning that the nation’s largest non-Catholic faith group now faces a different kind of liberalism from within.
Roger Moran, research director of the Missouri Baptist Laymen’s Association, is printing pamphlets to distribute at the upcoming SBC annual meeting warning messengers about what he views as dangers in a church-planting movement known as the “emerging” or “emergent” church.
Moran says the movement, which aims to create churches that are culturally relevant to what proponents call a “postmodern” society, is making inroads in Southern Baptist life, particularly in seminaries and the SBC’s publishing arm, LifeWay Christian Resources.
Moran’s 47-page document lays out in detail how controversy over the trend wreaked havoc among Baptist leadership in his own state and warns that unless it is addressed, similar strife may lie ahead for the SBC.
“In the name of missions, ministry and evangelism, the SBC is now in danger of embracing a new liberalism — ‘cultural liberalism’ that claims to be theologically conservative,'” the pamphlet warns.
Unlike in the “battle for the Bible” that united conservatives against the predominantly moderate-to-progressive SBC bureaucracy of the 1980s, Moran says, the emergent-church crowd affirms the inerrancy of Scripture. As such, he says, many conservative Southern Baptists view it as nothing more than an innovative way to win people to Christ. Click here to read this entire news article.
Related Article from Paul Proctor from April 2007
THE EMERGING CIVIL WAR
By Paul Proctor
NewsWithViews.com
In a rather unsettling new article entitled, Influential Baptist Layman Challenges Emerging Church, Christian Post reporter, Audrey Barrick, greets readers with this stunning little announcement:
An influential Baptist in Missouri believes the Emerging Church movement is one of the most dangerous and deceptive movements infiltrating Southern life and he’s out to stop it. Roger Moran, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, is a conservative layman at First Baptist Church in Troy, Mo. But he’s also considered the most powerful Baptist in the state, St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper reported Monday.
In the article, Barrick goes on to say:
Moran’s driving concern is the rise of the emerging church and its threat to the future of the Baptist church in Missouri and across the nation.
“Not since the stealth tactics of the CBF (Cooperative Baptist Fellowship – a group of more moderate Baptists which left the SBC) have we seen a movement operate so successfully below the radar of rank and file Southern Baptists,” said Moran at an SBC Executive Committee meeting earlier this year.
She continues with a warning from Moran:
“In my home state, the Missouri Baptist Convention is on the brink of a near civil war – and at the heart of our struggle has been the blatant dishonesty of those who are determined that Missouri Baptists will embrace this new postmodern approach to ministry…”
Now, I don’t know what all troubles brother Moran about the Emerging Church – and though I am extremely pleased to finally see someone’s objections to the EC make it to the pages of a widely read publication like The Christian Post, I am troubled that the more unchristian aspects of the movement were curiously overlooked by the reporter. Though I share Moran’s stated objections, which were clearly cited in the piece, one would think, after reading it, that the practice of speaking in tongues, playing R-rated movies and serving alcohol during services, were the only concerns. Click here to read this entire article.
