The following is an excerpt from the latest Texas Baptists Committed newsletter. This might give a glimpse of what is happening.
Street held up a cassette tape of a message by Frank Pollard, retired pastor of First Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., and current president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention. Pollard preached during chapel at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary last year.
“It looks as though,” said Pollard in that message, “that we are trying in our de-nomination to meet year by year and issue that every Mormon must read to understand the Bible. “I fear,” said Pollard, “that we are getting to the place where we might have a Book of Baptist and we must read the Book of Baptist before we read the Holy Scripture.”
“We need courageous Baptist statesmen who tell it like it is,” Street said. He added he read a letter from a pastor to his congregation in which he called fundamentalism “a dangerous, anti-Gospel ideology.” Although the words are strong, they are true, said Street. “Somebody had found his voice and spoken the truth.”
The cause, he declared, is not fighting fundamentalism, but flying the flag of freedom and ministry to others with the love of Christ. “I don’t expect every freedom-loving Southern Baptist to fly the CBF flag, but at least fly the flag of freedom—Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom, and religious freedom.”
Street told of a personal experience in which he told a counselor he felt like a man who had grown up on a tree, but had been pushed out on a limb being sawed off by fundamentalist Baptists. “I had no desire to climb back on the branch, but I was fearful of the fall.” After a long silence, the counselor told Street, “When you fall, you may find you have fallen into your true community of faith.”
Steve Street
