Pastor JD Greear, who used to lead the entire Southern Baptist Convention, has helped spur the birth of many churches through his Summit Church in Durham. He has also grown his own church. In these respects, he has done very well.
But he recently received much negative attention because of Megan Basham’s book. He fell short in a number of areas from the standpoint of stewardship of the Bride of Christ– i.e., the Church– and also from the standpoint of discipleship.
There is yet another area of his leadership that is explored by Doug Ponder at the Center for Baptist Leadership.
Greear has taken the position that churches should not be political– that they must avoid partisanship because it would shut out part of the mission field he is trying to attract. He feels that his attention must instead be on evangelism.
The problem? Many other pastors have been heavily influenced by Greear. These include those pastors within the Summit family of churches and some of those outside also.
Ponder says the gospel is “inescapably political”. He adds the following:
The trouble with these statements is that, whether intentionally or not, they reduce the pastor’s job to that of a missionary instead of a shepherd called to guide souls to maturity; they truncate the message of the Scriptures to the gospel alone instead of “the whole counsel of God;” and they envision politics through the lens of evangelism to the detriment of both…
The problem is that in an increasingly post-Christian society (like ours), politics is changing in drastic ways. There was a time when Christians of various stripes “on both sides of the aisle” disagreed about the best means to achieve righteous ends. But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the major parties in America diverge so sharply from each other that one of them aligns far more—even if still imperfectly—with a Christian vision for the world. Even non-Christians recognize this. That is precisely why a vast majority of atheists, agnostics, and religious ‘nones’ vote Democratic.
So to all the pastors who think, “I will not risk sounding partisan,” I would say, “Sounding partisan is upon you, whether you would risk it or not”…
(P)astors like these may know there is not a moral equivalence between the major political parties in America, but their people hear them saying “there are errors on both sides” so frequently that the church’s moral scales become terribly out of balance….
As progressives continue sprinting to the left, the ability to maintain an appearance of not being on the right will mean pastors must move with the culture, if not in substance, at least in tone…
(P)rogressives do not fail to give the gospel a fair hearing because of politics; they fail to heed the gospel because of hardheartedness. We cannot soft-pedal sinners into salvation by appearing to be something we’re not. Meanwhile, the attempt to appear non-partisan will drive away many conservative-leaning non-Christians, the sort of people who don’t know the Lord but who do know that abortion is murder, gay marriage is wrong, “Drag Queen Story Hour” is insane, sex-change surgery is impossible, and socialism is disastrous.