We have brothers and sisters who worship in churches with different labels above the door. They might differ from our church in how they think about baptism, church government, or worship. They might have different emphases to how we go about things. This is also good for us to reflect on. The way our local church does it is not the only way it can be done. God is working in many different types of churches.

For most of us, being part of a local church is the key place we experience the Christian community. As it should be! It is with the people that we see regularly and we know well that we live out what it means to be a follower of Jesus. We learn to bear with one another, to forgive one another, to use our gifts to build one another up, and to share our lives in lots of different ways. All believers should be a part of a local church.
Yet it is also important to know that our local church is part of something bigger. Jesus did not only die for the people in your local church. He died to make a people for himself from every tribe, people and language. It is very helpful for us to understand that we have brothers and sisters all around the world that also love Jesus.
This can take a range of forms, of course. Perhaps your church is part of a denomination. In recent weeks, I have had the privilege of speaking at a sister church in my city as part of a scheduled pulpit swap. I also spoke at a sister church in another state as an invited guest, being privileged to open God’s word and get to know brothers and sisters I had never met before. These experiences drove home to me that God is doing good things in other places. God’s work is far more extensive than anything I can see in my own local church.
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This downgrade involves compromise on theological levels such as complementarianism (roles of men and women in the church), ecclesiology (the office and function of elder), and most important of all is the gospel (the social justice movement has replaced theology with victimology—resulting in the rise of a new religion). For that reason, our church which is 180 years old and predates the SBC by three years, has determined by a 100% congregational vote led by the elders who voted in a 100% eldership vote to lead the church away from the SBC due to such compromise. The SBC has failed. The leaders have compromised. 

One of the great joys of my life has been serving as the pastor of three different churches that have been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. I currently serve the church where my wife and I grew up as children on the west side of Atlanta—Pray’s Mill Baptist Church. Although our church is 180 years old and predates the SBC, our congregation has maintained a longtime affiliation within the SBC. However, in recent days we came to the conclusion that there was no profitable path forward for us within the SBC and we made the decision to officially separate.
Over the last few years, there has been a great deal of transition and change within the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s a nice way of describing the devious deconstruction plan that has been at work for many years behind the scenes. Along the way, we have witnessed scandals, controversies, and division. It is not my desire in this article to add fuel to the fire, however, as a lifelong SBC member and pastor I believe it’s necessary to provide a reason for our church’s decision to officially separate from the SBC effective on January 1st, 2022.
The Commendable
What I will say in this article should not be seen as a denial of the fact that there are many good and gifted professors who are serving in the SBC entities and doing a good job of training men for the pulpit and church planting. When I look back on my time at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I am grateful for many of the professors who invested in me and helped prepare me for the work of gospel ministry.
Alongside professors are many good pastors and local churches who have been healthy and profitable in supporting Christian education and church planting for many years within this network that we know as the SBC. Therefore, we can be thankful for these gifted individuals and churches who have sacrificed much to accomplish much for the glory of God.
But, all is not well within evangelicalism and that also includes the SBC. In recent years, we’ve witnessed quite a transformation take place within the once beloved SBC that has necessitated separation for what I believe is far more than preference matters.
The Downgrade
Over the past decade or more, things began to shift with the SBC leadership that moved the once theologically conservative denomination in a leftward direction. The biggest catalyst to this leftward movement undoubtedly was the acceptance of the social justice agenda which has resulted in the greatest downgrade in our modern era of church history. Any denial of this downgrade is simply a refusal to report the facts about where the SBC is today, where the SBC was yesterday, and where the SBC is moving tomorrow.
While this shift did not take place overnight, it began to pick up the pace drastically over the last 4-5 years. Back in 2018, I was part of a group who assembled in Dallas, Texas for a meeting regarding the problems of social justice. As we assembled, I was concerned but hopeful. Little did I know that our meeting and subsequent Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel would not only serve as a means of confirming what was already in motion beneath the radar, but it would expose many people and institutions within the SBC and their involvement in this devious movement.
Sadly, the top tier SBC leaders continue to double down on their positions. They have sought to deflect charges of theological capitulation and rigorously work to protect their positions through cultural virtue signals and theological word salads.
During this downgrade we have witnessed once trusted voices and institutions accept the ideologies of the social justice movement and platform notable voices within their hallways, classrooms, and conference circuits. They came together under the banner of the gospel only to embrace a social justice gospel that resulted in confusion, division, and in some cases—a complete derailing altogether. This must not be overlooked. If left unchecked, the social justice agenda will leave an indelible mark upon preachers who will be sent out into local churches to serve as pastor.
The SBC once fought a war on the inerrancy of Scripture during what has become known as the “Conservative Resurgence.” After claiming a victory over the “Battle for the Bible” the SBC has moved into a new era where this once theologically conservative denomination has adopted the controversial “Resolution 9” at the 2019 SBC in Birmingham. How could the SBC who openly champions inerrancy at the same time adopt a resolution stating that we need to employ Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality (CRT/I) as “analytical tools” for gospel ministry? This was done, in all reality, without much public debate and through sly political schemes.
Moving beyond the 2019 SBC, after a break in 2020 due to COVID-19, the SBC reconvened in Nashville in the summer of 2021 to discuss business and make decisions as a group of churches. During the meeting, there were multiple attempts from the floor to call upon the SBC to openly renounce the teachings of CRT/I. At each juncture, all of these attempts were rejected and generic language was adopted in place of specific language that openly rejected CRT/I.
One must ask the honest question as to why there was such an open refusal from the SBC leaders at this point? In the past, the SBC openly challenged Disney and eventually boycotted Disney in 1997. One must ask why the SBC was willing to boycott the gospel according to Disney but failed to boycott the gospel according to social justice?
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If you are in Christ, these are not words of condemnation, since you have been washed and renewed in him. You are now already clean and pure, not because of your own merits, but because of God’s gracious intervention on your behalf. Do you still struggle with sin? So did Peter! In fact, not long after Jesus pronounced him clean and pure, Peter ended up denying Jesus three times. And yet, he was later completely restored. Our right standing before God is found exclusively in Christ.

How should we interpret Mt 5:8 which says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”? This teaching comes from Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, and it appears in the opening section of that sermon commonly referred to as the Beatitudes (which is an old English way of referring to the state of “sublime blessedness”). But most of the time I’ve interacted with this verse over the decades, I must admit that I’ve often come away feeling condemned rather than blessed, for if only the pure in heart end up seeing God, then what hope is there for someone like me?
What’s odd is that the Bible itself raises this very question in Prov. 20:9 when it asks, “Who can say I have kept my heart pure, that I am clean from sin?” Jeremiah appears to answer this question negatively when he says, “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jer 17:9). So then, how should we interpret Jesus’ words in Mt 5:8?
In the first 8 verses of Matthew chapter 5, we read the following:
Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’
Too often, I think, we read the Beatitudes as if Jesus had told his followers that they would be blessed if they become meek, contrite, or merciful, and insofar as they work hard to purify their hearts, etc. But this isn’t what Jesus is saying in this passage. Unlike Moses, Jesus isn’t promising his followers future rewards on the condition of obedience to his commands. In fact, as you study these words closely, you’ll discover that there aren’t any commands or imperatives to be be found here in the Beatitudes. Commands and imperatives lied at the very heart and center of the Mosaic covenant. Moses, you may recall, told the people they would be blessed if they kept the law, and that they would be cursed if they did not. After hearing the law proclaimed by God himself at Mt. Sinai, the people responded by saying, “All the words Yahweh has spoken we will do” (Ex 24:3).
But Jesus is not a new Moses. Rather than promising future blessing as the reward of obedience, Jesus first blesses his people and calls them to live in the light of this new reality. This is the fulfillment of the “new covenant” prophesied by Jeremiah: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel…not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke” (Jer 31:31-32). This covenant, according to the prophet, was NOT going to be like the Sinai covenant. Here in Matthew 5, it’s important for us to notice that Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount, not with legal obligations, but gospel blessings. And this becomes even more clear when we consider Jesus’ audience.
At the opening of Matthew 5 we’re told that as Jesus saw the crowds, “he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them…” For most of my Christian life I pictured Jesus standing on the top of a hill as he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and addressed the crowds below. But the words of this passage instead make clear that when the crowds began to follow Jesus on this occasion, he decided to leave them behind as he climbed to the top of a nearby mountain. Then he called for his disciples to join him (Mt 5:1, Mk 3:13, Lk 6:13), and when they arrived, he sat down and began to teach them (Mt 5:2).
Have you ever pictured it this way? Jesus isn’t standing, he’s sitting. And he’s not preaching to the masses, but to a smaller group of disciples who specifically responded to his call. He’s in a remote location, away from the crowds, teaching his followers while he’s in a seated position. In other words, it’s actually a much more intimate setting.1 According to Mark, while Jesus was on the top of the mountain, “he appointed twelve whom he also named apostles” (cf. Lk 6:13). In my thinking, therefore, the Sermon on the Mount was first intended as a kind of ordination sermon at the time the twelve were selected and appointed as apostles.
And yet, who were the men Jesus ended up appointing to this new office? Recall for a moment Peter’s comment when he first saw Jesus perform a miracle. “Depart from me,” he said, “for I am a sinful man” (Lk 5:8). This is the kind of person Jesus selected to become one of his apostles. He didn’t choose super-saints, but ordinary sinners like you and me. But how could Mt 5:8 possibly be received by someone like Peter as good news? If Peter is truly aware of his sin, wouldn’t this statement throw him into despair?
First, I think we need a quick refresher course in the theology of the Old Testament, starting with Psalm 15. This Psalm was penned by David sometime around 1000 BC, and in the first few verses we read the following:
O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who shall dwell on your holy hill? 2 He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and speaks truth in his heart; 3 who does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend…”
As numerous other passages make clear, the people of Israel continually failed to live up to this standard, both individually and corporately. No one walked blamelessly and did what was right from the heart.
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