The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had an interesting theme for this year’s Annual Meeting: ‘Walk Worthy’. By this, they mean that SBC members should be easily identifiable by how wonderfully they treat each other and those around them. Of course, SBC leaders pushed that motto because they hope that they can lessen the flocks’ pervasive hypocrisy enough to make their recruitment attempts more effective.
But it’s not going to work. Indeed, it can’t.
Today, I’ll show you why the flocks won’t be able to ‘walk worthy’ in the first place, and then we’ll explore what would inevitably happen even if they could.
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SITUATION REPORT: Walk Worthy, O Southern Baptists!
At this year’s SBC Annual Meeting, the theme was “Walk Worthy.” This phrase comes from Ephesians 4:1-3, in which Paul tells his followers to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling you have received.” Clint Pressley, the departing SBC President, set this theme and gave the keynote address on it. If you want to watch his presentation, it begins 3:41:00 into this video:
In his address to the meeting attendees, he had a lot to say about what he thought “walking worthy” entails:
From the day I became a Southern Baptist, I never wanted to be anything but a Southern Baptist. Who are they? A gospel-loving, mission-minded, free people that exist for the Great Commission. [. . .] And our mission is so vital that we’ve got to do all we can do in big ways and small ways to walk worthy of the calling with which we have been called.
To Pressley, then, “walking worthy” means evangelicals conducting themselves in a way that makes the “Great Commission” more effective. The “Great Commission,” in turn, is the order evangelicals think Jesus gave them to convert the entire world. This order appears at the end of the Gospel of Mark, verses 9-20.
If Jesus really wants Christians to recruit everyone on Earth, SBC leaders should be nervous about their next performance evaluation. SBC metrics are looking absolutely dismal. They keep losing followers every year and have for almost 20 solid years. Their baptism ratios are slowly rebounding from the devastating 2020 pandemic year, but membership keeps dropping, churches keep dropping out of the denomination (most from closure, but others from disagreement with the SBC’s increasing zealotry and extremism), and the SBC’s sex abuse crisis—and their leaders’ unwillingness to do a single thing about it—have dominated headlines since 2019.
Christianese: ‘Walk worthy’ as a concept
In Christianese, “walking worthy” means conducting oneself as a proper Christian. As Pressley points out in his address, Ephesians chapters 1-3 relate to theological concepts—like conversion being the start of a changed and altogether better life.
But then, chapter 4 launches into the kind of behavior Paul expects out of his followers after they began changed new lives. Interestingly, I don’t see anything in the chapter relating to the Great Commission. Indeed, Paul might not even have known about it. Most scholars agree the Great Commission was a much later addition to Mark, with no gospel fragments containing those verses until the 400s.
Instead of pushing for evangelism, Paul describes the ideal Christian as someone who treats other Christians well, doesn’t steal or gossip, doesn’t act in anger, doesn’t lie or cheat, and doesn’t indulge in vices. He wanted his followers to be kind toward each other.
So it’s very interesting that Pressley relates “walking worthy” so strongly to evangelism. Paul clearly thought that the infilling of Yahweh’s spirit should produce big changes in believers’ lives, but he doesn’t specifically tell Christians to stop acting like assholes to score more evangelism sales.
The phrase “walk worthy” seems to have been interpreted as admonitions to behave because good behavior should be an outgrowth of faith, not as part of an overall evangelism strategy. A sermon preached in 1704 certainly sounds that way. So does a sermon from an 1846 collection. Until recent decades, “walking worthy” was a behavioral guide for general purposes, not an evangelism strategy.
How the SBC’s take on ‘walking worthy’ relates to the older, out of date Christianese ‘good witness’
I say that because I was Pentecostal from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. I had many evangelical friends in college, as well. We often talked about strategies for making our evangelism more effective. Not once, not ever did I hear the phrase “walk worthy” as part of those strategy sessions.
Instead, we laser-focused on what we called our “witness.” This word described our overall credibility as evangelists. Thus, maintaining a good witness was of utmost importance. Being a bad witness would hinder evangelism, because after all, nobody trusted an evangelist who was an obvious hypocrite. If even we couldn’t live according to our own rules, then how did we expect anyone else to do so? How could we expect anyone to look at us as new creations in Christ if our lives looked exactly like our pre-conversion states?
For people who weren’t in that crowd at the time, it might be difficult to understand just how important it was to have a good witness. We had to behave better than heathens. We couldn’t be seen as hypocrites. It was an unthinkable blow to our credibility.
Certainly today’s evangelicals don’t seem to care at all about their witness. They don’t even use the word anymore. They call hate love, and evil good, and mock us for daring to suggest they at least pretend to care about their own rules. Their behavior online, in particular, reveals just how little their faith has changed them.
My first pastor would have skinned me alive if he’d caught me treating anyone the way today’s evangelicals, as a group, treat people. Of course, at the very time I attended his church, that same pastor was allegedly helping cover up a huge sex abuse scandal in a sister church’s youth ministry. (I don’t see “hiding the sex abuse of minors” in Paul’s list of ideals. But I don’t know “the original Greek and Hebrew,” so who am I to say?)
Now “walking worthy” replaces the old-school “witness” as a figure of credibility. More importantly, now evangelicals directly relate it to doctrinal correctness rather than behavior. Now evangelicals’ behavior will be correct not because their god’s spirit changed them, but because they believe exactly the right things.
To someone of my background, that’s a downright stunning shift.
Clint Pressley makes a characteristic mistake in logic here
As a potent illustration of this shift, Clint Pressley laments the absolute state of his denomination:
One of the downsides of being the president of the Southern Baptist Convention is you actually get to experience some of the Southern Baptist Convention at its worst. You can’t believe some of the things I’ve received.
Naturally, the solution to these “worst” things is being “vigilant about our doctrine.” That matters because, as he puts it, “Christian living actually follows Christian doctrine.” So those “worst” things will become rarer once Southern Baptists become “vigilant” enough about their doctrinal stances.
And I’ve got to ask: Really? Because the architect of the SBC’s last schism, Paul Pressler, believed exactly the correct doctrines. His version of SBC doctrinal correctness came to dominate the denomination. It would be hard to locate a more doctrinally-correct Southern Baptist. And yet he allegedly molested, assaulted, and harassed countless young men.
His equally-correct partner in scheming, Paige Patterson, lost his SBC seminary job because of his mishandling of a student’s rape. He almost immediately got rehired at another seminary and even taught an ethics class alongside another disgraced former SBC leader, Richard Land.
Evangelicals have a lot of trouble accepting that their most beloved leaders can hide some serious skeletons in their closets—that someone can believe exactly and totally the right things, and yet prey on and deceive others for decades.
There’s a reason for that. And that reason is one of the biggest faultlines in their entire worldview.
As the night the day: The zeroth error of modern evangelicalism
For years, we’ve tracked evangelicals’ fixation on correct doctrines leading to correct behavior. The trope name comes from Hamlet:
This above all,—to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Polonius, in his advice to his son, describes honesty toward others as an inevitable outgrowth of honesty within oneself. In his view, it should be completely impossible for him to “be false to any man” if his behavior authentically and consistently reflects his own ideals.
Evangelicals have their own version of that. They think that if they embrace all the correct doctrines and believe very firmly in their correctness, then their behavior will flow out of those beliefs.
I began tracing this mindset almost exactly 10 years ago when reviewing Preston Sprinkle’s book People to Be Loved. He seriously thought that if he could figure out exactly what the Bible says about same-sex romantic relationships, then his behavior toward them would, of necessity, become loving and gracious. So Christians shamefully mistreated LGBT people because they didn’t understand what the Bible said about the subject.
Once I noticed this weird link between correct beliefs and rule-following behavior, I couldn’t un-see it. I noticed it again in The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, wherein Ronald Sider claimed that hypocrisy came from “a one-sided, unbiblical, reductionist understanding of the gospel and salvation.”
And I noticed it again when studying the Conservative Resurgence, that earlier schism, which won largely because its proponents falsely asserted that adopting literalism and inerrancy would lead to huge growth and evangelism success. And again in Christian parenting guides, which asserted that studying and embracing the right beliefs would lead to far more obedience to their group’s rules—in turn leading to better youth retention.
For that matter, my own belief in this notion almost led me to join a cult when I was Pentecostal. No group practicing Original Christianity, I thought, could mistreat its members. I was shocked when I found out that the leader of this cult was beating those members half to death during all-night struggle sessions.
Over and over again, evangelicals hammer at this idea that someone holding perfect beliefs can’t possibly break their group’s rules. But over and over again, real life shows us the opposite.
And why ‘walking worthy’ won’t actually result in better recruitment metrics
Perfect beliefs did not lead to huge evangelism gains for the SBC after their schism completed (around 2000). Actually, the SBC began faltering right around then. Their high point occurred around 2006, but the serious decline began afterward. Around that same time, the first big referendum on the post-schism SBC, a “Million Baptism” challenge, failed catastrophically. And the failtrain hasn’t stopped yet.
Perfect beliefs certainly haven’t led to any great increase in rule-following behavior. Instead, we keep seeing the loudest voices for doctrinal extremism get hit by revealed scandals. Not a single one of these extremists acts anything like Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount, much less as Paul describes in Ephesians 4.
So if any heathens encounter a Christian who is genuinely kind, meek, humble, loving, serving, gracious, generous, self-denying, peaceful, and all that, we will not link that behavior to their religious beliefs. We’ve met too many terrible, hypocritical Christians to imagine that those beliefs have any kind of impact on behavior.
Instead, as an old friend of mine found out the hard way, heathens might just think it’s because the person being so kind is a vegetarian.
The funny thing about Christians having a consistent, reliably-good witness and truly ‘walking worthy’
A consistently good “witness” would definitely be a mark in favor of Christianity’s validity as a faith system. It wouldn’t mean their supernatural claims were true, no, but we wouldn’t be able to ignore the simple fact that Christians were somehow much better people than people from other ideologies/religions. Especially given how poor their roadmap of self-betterment is, how impossible it is to use it to get from Startpoint Conversion to Endpoint Decent Human Being, such a truth would be unavoidable—and even downright surreal. We would have a lot of trouble explaining the data points such behavior would necessarily spawn.
Unfortunately, that’s not the world we inhabit.
In the real world, we know Christians far better for how poorly they live up to their own ideals than for their obedience to them. Worse, the louder and more fervent any given Christians behave, the worse and more serious their hypocrisy tends to be. And worst of all, the more powerful any given Christians are, the less accountable they are for their own hypocrisy.
There’s nothing Christian leaders can do about it, either. There’s no way to compel the flocks to behave at all times. No way to punish them for stepping out of bounds. No way to make them pretend to care about evangelism success, or even personal evangelism at all.
But there is one upside of going with ‘Walk Worthy’ as this year’s Annual Meeting theme:
Nobody has any real way to evaluate whether it succeeds or fails. It gets them far away from any measurable metrics.
NEXT UP: How to become a better listener—in a form of Christianity that cannot allow truly deep communication. See you soon! <3
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