In recent news, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) crowed about two of their seminaries. Amid their ongoing declines in both membership and cultural power, amid their ongoing sex-abuse crisis, amid their top leaders’ constant scandals and revealed hypocrisies, Southern Baptist students are receiving intense evangelism and apologetics training. Hooray! These students will totally save the SBC from all its problems! Totally!
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Situation report (SITREP): Two Southern Baptist Convention seminaries pushing the same old stuff
For years now, the Southern Baptist Convention has insisted that two things will save it from decline:
- More personal evangelism: This means person-to-person, amateur selling done between family members, friends, acquaintances, and even total strangers. (My all-time favorite campaign was the hilariously-failed EVANGELISM TASK FORCE from 2018. But the Million Baptism Challenge from the early 00s comes close with its sheer hubris!)
- More apologetics education: Learning all the beloved talking points and logical fallacies that evangelicals have been pushing since well before I was evangelical myself (in the 80s-90s). Of interest, this one usually comes from people who make money by selling apologetics materials to evangelicals.
And for years, the flocks have responded in a consistent way:
- No. Don’t wanna. Ugh. Forget it.
- As long as it’s not too tedious or expensive, and the results are 100% guaranteed, then the most gung-ho SBC-lings will think about maybe giving it a shot with strangers who don’t know them.
Recently, in this newest missive from their official news site, two seminaries crow about their efforts on both ends of that strategy. One of them is pushing very hard on apologetics training. The other is sending a paltry few students into the neighborhoods around their school to hard-sell SBC membership to normies who are probably already Christian.
Southern Baptist Convention Strategy 1: MOAR APOLOGETICS TRAINING!
I always laugh when I hear about yet another evangelical claiming that what the flocks really need is more apologetics training. It’s so obviously wrong, but what else are they gonna do? Not make money selling useless dross to evangelicals? C’mon, now. Be reasonable!
Some apologetics hucksters think that the reason that evangelicals don’t hard-sell everyone in sight is just not feeling confident in their talking points and claims. So then, naturally, the solution looks like drilling more apologetics into the flocks’ brains.
That’s what happened recently at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS). Frank Turek, one of the most popular evangelical apologists, headlined the event, which NOBTS called “Contend.”
A whole entire 250 students (out of almost 2300) attended. One idly wonders if they did it for class credit more than interest in Turek’s tired old manipulations and logical fallacies. (Remember that cringey “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” thing? That was Frank Turek.)
One of the seminary’s deans noted:
“Cliché’ Sunday school answers are insufficient to address the realities of our contentious culture,” said Greg Wilton, Leavell College Dean. “Apologetics helps students wed biblical fidelity with intellectual resolve to present hope and truth that can only be found in Christ.”
Gosh, it’s gonna super suck when those students discover that apologetics is just fancier-sounding “Sunday school answers.”
Frank Turek’s big questions for Southern Baptist Convention students
Of note, Frank Turek discussed four big questions:
- Does truth exist?
- Does God exist?
- Are miracles possible?
- Is the New Testament true?
And he contends (SWIDT?) that since the answers to all of these questions is obviously yes, then that means that Christianity is totes for realsies true.
In reality, the answers are:
- Yes, but Christians don’t have it. That is why they use apologetics instead.
- No, absolutely not.
- We’ve never seen one verified through credible means
- It wasn’t even written contemporaneously with Jesus. Almost nothing it claims happened can be corroborated. And what can, generally contradicts the NT.
For the question about his god’s existence, Turek instructs students to parrot: “I know God exists by His effects.” And those “effects” consist of:
- “The universe had a beginning.” (Maybe, but that has nothing to do with his god.)
- “The universe has a finely-tuned design.” (Physicists and astronomers everywhere laughed the Cosmological Argument off the world stage decades ago.)
- “A moral law exists that humans find compelling.” (Can anyone even hear him over Christians’ long history of violence, authoritarian brute force, forced conversions, endless scandals, and their position on the wrong side of history on practically every social issue that’s ever faced humans? Let’s not forget that one of Turek’s peers, William Lane Craig, is on record as saying that the real victims in the Yahweh-commanded genocides are the poor widdle Israelites who had to carry out those orders. Let’s also not forget that the entire Southern Baptist Convention was born because a bunch of Baptists thought Jesus had ordered them to keep slaves.)
Careful readers might note that all three of his “effects” are logical fallacies. None actually offer any solid, credible evidence to support evangelicals’ claims about their god or their religion. They might also note that none of his four gotcha questions can be answered with such evidence.
But sure, let evangelicals waste their time. If nothing else, the confidence they build learning this nonsense might lead to them encountering targets who are well aware of the shortcomings of all of this blahblah.
Gary Habermas offers self-hypnotism methods to deal with suffering
Another speaker at “Contend” (LOL!), Gary Habermas, styles himself “a top scholar of Christ’s resurrection.”
On that note, I am now a top scholar of the dual life of Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.
Habermas just lost his wife to cancer. I won’t make fun of that, obviously, because cancer is a brutal way to go. Nobody deserves to experience it or to see a loved one die of it. But instead of recognizing what a contradiction cancer represents to evangelicals’ vision of Yahweh as a loving, caring god, he instead drilled down harder on his false beliefs. He told “Contend” attendees:
Believers should expect suffering in life, as Jesus suffered, Habermas said, but cautioned that during trials believers must rely on biblical truth and not emotions.
“We must be very careful how we talk to ourselves about God,” Habermas said.
In suffering, believers must remind themselves that God will not forsake them, that God will remain true, and should keep Scripture close that speaks truth about God’s faithfulness, Habermas said. Most importantly, believers should remember the resurrection.
To this, I reply only that believers must keep reminding themselves that their god is totally not forsaking them, that he’s true, and that the Bible accurately portrays his faithfulness. They must keep these reminders on repeat 24/7, because nothing about reality would ever tell them such things.
If a suffering believer finds a pocket of religious euphoria strong enough to persuade them that their god is totes with them in their suffering, then great! Hooray Team Jesus! If not, then don’t worry: apologists have plenty of ways of hand-waving away those feelings of being abandoned and forgotten.
That last crack about the resurrection feels like a veiled threat of Hell to me. Like if nothing else works, this threat ought to keep their butts warming pews forever.
Apologetics always does seem to come back to that one threat, doesn’t it?
VICTORY IN FORT WORTH, TX: Southern Baptist Convention students go a-soulwinnin’
The second bit of good news from Baptist Press relays a story from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). This past fall semester, 84 soulwinnin’ crusaders at SWBTS scored 130 professions of faith from the normies around their seminary. Woohoo! Hooray Team Jesus!
But let’s examine this victory cry a bit more closely.
In the story, we’re told that these 84 students were enrolled in the SWBTS “Introduction to Missiology and Contemporary Evangelism” practicum. So they were required to spend time doing personal evangelism around town. The instructors there scheduled these jaunts, which they called “Everyday Evangelism.” Their outings took them to Fort Worth “neighborhood, parks, and local college campuses.”
At least they didn’t hit old folks’ homes, I suppose!
In the course of their outings, the students “shared the Gospel almost 1,100 times during the Fall 2022 academic semester.” Shared the gospel is Christianese for making a solid sales pitch. That’s the part of the pitch where the salesperson wheedles: “Won’t you accept poor lonely widdle Jesus into your nasty evil heart so he won’t set your ghost on fire forever after you die?”
And of those 1,100 pitches, these 84 students scored 130 professions of faith. That means that their target agreed with them and acted like they bought the product. It does not imply a baptism, which is the signature on the dotted line in Christianese.
SWBTS is declaring victory a bit early here
These 1,100 sales pitches work out to about 13 pitches per student. By remarkable coincidence, 13 is the exact number that the students are required to make for the class. We don’t know how many sales pitches the class required in the previous semester, but SWBTS tells us that 13 is “more than twice the number” done by the Spring 2022 class.
On the SWBTS site itself, we see a few more details added about the class and its activities. Their writeup profiles a couple of superstars on their evangelism team:
- One older guy from India, who had 20 years’ experience in evangelism and missionary stuff already, shared the gospel with 43 people and “saw three salvations during the semester.”
- An East Asian student shared the gospel 64 times, bagging “two salvations during the semester.” She credits a “one-verse evangelize card” for her success, as well as picking one park for her efforts.
So it sounds like a few students took the assignment very seriously, while others failed to acquire their full 13 sales pitches.
The writeup and the Baptist Press article both make clear that all of this evangelism took place within the context of a class assignment.
What they both fail to mention, of course, is that the Dallas-Fort Worth-Metroplex area is already almost 80% Christian. Only 18% of the area is unaffiliated (which means atheist, agnostic, or none of the above). Depending on exactly where and when these students decided to evangelize, it’s possible that almost everyone they met was already some flavor of Christian.
SWBTS is in solid decline itself
This is all interesting because SWBTS has been, itself, in decline for a while now. I can understand why, too. In 1994, its president at the time, Russell Dilday, became an early casualty of the Southern Baptist Convention’s all-out Conservative Resurgence. His replacement, Ken Hemphill, got pressured to resign in 2003. (Years later, he’d run unsuccessfully for the SBC presidency.) The next president was Paige Patterson, who got fired in turn in 2018 for mishandling sex abuse reports.
Its next president, Adam Greenway, similarly mishandled at least one sex abuse report. Officially, Greenway said he resigned because he simply wasn’t able to help SWBTS recover from its declines. After that, Greenway was supposed to go to work for International Mission Board, but that offer didn’t materialize. His faction enemies have had a good time speculating about exactly why all of this happened, but so far we’ve had little confirmation of their rumors.
Right now, SWBTS only has an acting president, O.S. Hawkins. He presides over a school that has been dropping in enrollment for a while. Last fall, Baptist News Global (BNG) noted that SWBTS’ enrollment had hit its lowest since World War II.
Part of the problem here involves the intense competition for seminary students in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Two other big seminaries have opened up in the area, and they seem to have been siphoning off potential SWBTS enrollments.
In 2020-2021, SWBTS enrolled 944 full-time students. That was a 70% drop, BNG marveled, from its 1990s glory days under Dilday.
Nowadays, the school seems to be doing its damndest to avoid releasing a full accounting of its enrollment. I’m guessing that it’s got a lot of distance learners and part-time students. Eyeballing the 2021 Annual Report (p. 294), Adam Greenway claimed to have 548 bachelor’s students enrolled, along with 2,510 master’s students. So roughly 2,114 students weren’t full-time. (Greenway’s 2022 Annual Report letter on p. 253 doesn’t even talk about enrollment. It was clearly that bad last year.)
There is an entire rabbithole we could plunge down here about this school. But I’ll refrain. For now.
As above, so below in the Southern Baptist Convention
It just seems so sad to be super-psyched about students evangelizing because a class required it, and then that they managed to bag that few conversions from all that effort. Sure, it sounds like about a 11% return (130 professions of faith from 1100 pitches). That is wildly successful by Southern Baptist Convention standards.
But it’s also a direct statement about the target market at hand, as well as weasel wording exactly what success looks like. A profession of faith isn’t a conversion from someone who hadn’t even been Christian before. There’s a good reason why evangelicals have moved their goalposts to make this a victory, and you can probably guess that reason easily enough.
Judging by the area, which is already very saturated with Christians, it’s possible that all these students did was poach a Christian from some competing flavor of the religion. It’s also more than possible that their professing-faith victories were temporary, or that they were agreements made by people who were already Southern Baptist.
What the Southern Baptist Convention can’t do is offer prospective members good groups that are worth joining and sticking around for. So this is what they celebrate instead.
Apologetics and evangelism victories for 2022!
What we do know about this entire article is that so far, the Southern Baptist Convention has been struggling hard to find any good news at all. 2021 did not bounce them back as much as they needed it. 2022 seems poised to be more of the same.
But don’t you worry your pretty li’l feather heads none, they tell us!
They’re equipping seminary students with tons of terrible apologetics arguments that will definitely end all speculation about how real or not-real their god is. Nope, not a single seminary student will notice how there’s no there, there in these arguments. This won’t backfire hilariously in turn.
They’re sending seminary students out into the mission fields around their school to win souls for Jesus (as part of a class requirement). Sure, they’re just poaching students from one flavor of Christianity to another. And sure, they’re wording the victory in a way that seems guaranteed to not care what their marks do after agreeing to acceptJesusintotheirheartsastheirlordnsaviorthankyouamen. That’s still victory!
But the proof will be in the pudding of the 2023 Annual Report. It comes out in about 7-8 months. It’ll be interesting to see if any of this stuff actually turns into a turnaround for the Southern Baptist Convention. Part of me suspects that if they really can just throw unseemly, unreasonable numbers of evangelists at Americans, that it’ll help them recover from their decline at least for a little while. For a while, I mean, Mormons barely held steady doing exactly that. Evangelism, like hard sales and pickup artistry, is a numbers game more than anything else.
But another part of me suspects that Americans are kinda done with evangelicals in general and Southern Baptists in particular. I reckon we’ll see soon enough what all this apologetics and evangelism are doing. Until then, Southern Baptists know one thing very well:
If you can’t perform a good game, then make sure you sound like you’re having the best season of your career. If you don’t, then your restive flocks (and their money) might decide to leave—and flock to the winning team’s banner.
And that’ll always be true for them.
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