On our trip last week, we would up staying overnight in Pensacola. As we were having breakfast at the hotel, I saw a old-school Smyrna Baptist Church across the street. As I remember, the sign had out front had this 2-by-3 grid of distinctives.
Fundamental Evangelical
Independent Missionary
KJV 1611 Traditional
Thanks for the last one, Sherlock; I wasn't sure if I might find a happening praise band in a King-James-only self-defined fundamentalist church ;-).
The Gospel is getting preached there, if their Web site is any indication. However, it doesn't exactly seem seeker-friendly, where people who don't come from a old-school independent Baptist background would be drawn to them.
The adjective "pre-modern" comes to mind for where Smyrna is at; their theology is flash-frozen at about 1930, where the majority of people in town were theological conservatives, modernity was seen as a corrupting influence, and new translations of the Bible were seen as corrupting and watering-down the Gospel, thus leaning them back to the un-watered-down King James as their linchpin. When most people bought into a old-school take on things, you can get by in your spiritual rhetoric to hearken back to Biblical basic without having to do a lot of convincing.
One of the problems I see with a lot of Southern Baptist rhetoric is that they often come at things in such a pre-modern mind-set; "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." That's well and good, but such rhetoric will often leave a modern listener unmoved. The post-modern, who doesn't get the concept of the capital-T Truth that can be found in the Bible, has tuned you out five minutes ago. The modern listener, who goes by more of a scientific, hypothesis-testing framework, wants you to reason with them rather than get dictated to.
For instance, rhetoric on creation can leave people cold if they aren't being reasoned with; for a modern listener, discussion of intelligent design, where you can point out the ain't-gonna-happen odds of life developing on its own without some outside guidance, is going to work far better than pounding them over the head with Genesis. However, folks who learned their rhetoric in a pre-modern framework will tend to just state their chapters-and-verses a notch louder rather than try to reason with the modern listener.
That type of reasoning can be done within a orthodox Gospel-preaching context. One good book on that line is Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, that looks to rationally walk through the Bible and supporting documents of the era to make the case for the Gospel. For instance, you can back up the Resurrection by pointing out that if Jesus' body didn't go bye-bye, somebody's got the corpse. If the Romans or the Jewish authorities had the body, they could squash the new Christian faith in the bud by producing the corpse of Jesus. If the early church folks hid the body, they died martyr's deaths for a bold-faced lie, which seems unlikely. That leaves the historic version of a risen Christ the past of least resistance, since any other option would have people acting very strangely if they were in possession of the corpse.
Moderns want to be reasoned with. Post moderns want to experience God, not just hear about him; for the post-modern, you're going to witness best with your life, letting the observers "taste and see that the Lord is good" through how you walk the walk.
Bloggers are used to debate and fact-checking; old-school Baptists sometimes aren't. That's probably why a lot of Baptist pastors and officials are uncomfortable with blogs, since they have to use lines of reasoning and presentation that they're not used to having to deal with. They're often used to dictating to people and have to adjust when folks don't say "How high?" when they say "Jump."
We're in a world where most folks have to be persuaded into jumping into the River of Life; drill sergeant preaching doesn't cut it anymore.
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