Leading up to the Baptist Conference on the Holy Spirit, Dwight asked me to speak. I have no specialty in the area of pneumatology, so I pleaded my case to be left off of the list. Dwight felt that what I did have to say was important, and prevailed upon me to speak on the subject of cooperation in our unified mission. Since this is related, and is a passion of mine, I agreed.

The following is my speech given on Friday afternoon, following Pastor Ralph Waldo Emerson (whom I called Pastor McPherson in a moment of brain lock, but whom was also kind enough to forgive me graciously). Before I reprint it here, I thought I might take a moment to say hello back to all those that I met – Debbie K and her husband, Alycelee, Harold and his brother, Bart Barber, Robin Foster and many more. I was glad to meet you all. I am sorry I have not responded individually to you on my blog, but I want you to know that I was privileged to meet you and look forward to seeing you again.

Pneumatology – a word from the compounding of two Greek words, pneuma, meaning spirit, and logos, meaning word. A word about the spirit, or, for our context, the study of the Holy Spirit.

I am not a pneumatologist, nor the son of a pneumatologist. I am a simple Southern Baptist pastor with some convictions about the Holy Spirit and His work in our lives. For the sake of full disclosure, I will tell you some of my pneumatology.

I am a Trinitarian. I believe in an indwelling of the Holy Spirit in every saint. I believe that every saint receives all of the Holy Spirit that he or she will ever get when they surrender themselves to the Lordship of Christ, but that every saint also struggles with how much of themselves is surrendered to the Lordship of Christ and the direction of the Holy Spirit through out their lives.

I do not believe that you can lose the Holy Spirit, just as I do not believe that you can lose your salvation.

I am a continualist. I believe that the fruits and the gifts of the Holy Spirit described in various places throughout Scripture are just as valid today as they ever were.

I believe that many things done in the name of the Holy Spirit, while often pointing to Scripture, are abuses of the Scripture.

I believe that the speaking in tongues, both known and angelic languages, is in Scripture and I believe that the argument that tongues have ceased is an argument from absence as I find no place where this is clearly taught in Scripture.

I believe that what many do as a practice of “speaking in tongues” is contrary to specific commands is Scripture.

I believe that if a person speaks to God alone, that we should stay out of their prayer closet.

The only language that I speak is English, but if you do otherwise, I have no problem with it.

Which brings me to the reason I am here. 15 months ago, I began to speak out about issues of cooperation within the Southern Baptist Convention and the topic of the Holy Spirit is one of the issues around which I began to speak.

I will spare you the rundown on our Mission Boards and now one of our Seminaries.

Suffice it to say, that the role of the Spirit and privately speaking to God in an unknown tongue, among so many other issues was a place where I felt we were becoming divided – where one subset of the Southern Baptist Convention was seeking for its interpretation of Scripture to be the official and only interpretation of Scripture for the SBC and its entities.

So I began to speak. Write, actually, on my internet web journal or “blog.” My early writings were filled with passion, and an unmistakable outpouring of raw emotion. Frankly, I was pushing back against internal denominational politics. For more than twenty years, I had forsaken politics within our convention, having gained a disdain for the motives, rewards and tactics involved.

Let me clarify. I am not saying that I was incorrect in my assessment. I really believe that those things to which I have spoken over the last year were deserving of healthy criticism. I am also, however, owning up to the place from whence my passion came.

As time went on, other people began to blog with honest and forthright opinions opposite my own. Sometime in the last 6 months or so, many of the things I was saying were being directly challenged on my own website, and I was challenging others on theirs.

This can be a healthy situation. If you are arguing for the acceptance of diverse ideas, under the umbrella of orthodoxy, then you have to affirm ideas different than your own are equally valid – again, under the same umbrella of orthodoxy.

Unfortunately, this is not what was happening. Rather, a vitriolic, sarcastic, willingly hurtful, sometimes mean spirited war of words began to develop in which I was a primary and all too willing participant. This is not healthy.

Along with this, the stresses of Pastoring, specifically the task of revitalizing a previously declining church, personal family and financial stresses brought me feeling quite empty and burned out in the morning worship service on Sunday, March 11 of this year.

In that service I worshiped in the congregation, alongside my family as is my habit.

Throughout the morning, other stresses had combined with a particularly stressful banter in which I had participated with some of my brothers and sisters in Christ over the weekend to leave me feeling very hollow. In all, I was feeling quite unhappy with the way my life was going at the moment.

I think, looking back on it, I had begun to realize that I had become the very thing that I had once decried, that is to say I was more concerned with the ends than the means, and was disgusted with whom I was and how I became that man.

I reiterate, this sense of lacking was not from the convictions that I had. Those convictions, all of them, were and are still strong. Rather, I was becoming hardened to people who I call brother and sister.

As the service neared the point where I was to preach, a young lady stepped forward to deliver a solo performance of a song that I recognized, entitled, “In Christ Alone,” by Keith Getty and Stewart Townend.

The words of this song are haunting and speak so clearly about the Sufficiency of Jesus Christ as Lord. As she began to sing, I began to weep. As the song progressed, I wept more. The realization of my human wickedness compared to His Grace and the centrality of His Lordship over me and all things broke me down in a way I had not experienced in years if not decades.

I had hoped to pull myself together in time for me to preach and thought that I would have the time, but as the song progressed, the depths of my conviction progressed and I was more broken than before.

I arrived at the pulpit crying and couldn’t move forward. At this point I was weeping and it was strong, but not yet ugly. I decided the best that I could do was to pray. Little did I know there was a movement within the senior adult ladies of the church to come on stage and give me a hug.

I prayed a prayer of humility before God and it was then, speaking to God, that I lost all control over my emotions. Gripping the sides of the pulpit and bending over so that my head hung down, every possible fluid began to run from my face. When I finished my prayer, a box of Kleenex had appeared on the pulpit. I thanked God and the angel of mercy that had visited me. Then I did the best I could with the sermon.

Before I go any further, let me say this: The power of that moment was not so much in the song, though it played its part and is still very moving to me. What happened to me was God intervening, unbeckoned by me, to break me in order to shape me.

Out of that, several things came. In my Pastoral duties, I have prayed more, worried less and drew some lines of appropriate behavior for some of my congregation.

In my relationship to others within the Southern Baptist Convention, I have done two things. I have made a diligent effort to speak toward my bothers and sisters redemptively, no matter their perspective on issues under discussion.

Also, I have tried to give people the benefit of the doubt with their words, trying to understand what they mean, even if they do not articulate it well.

The Southern Baptist Convention is one of the greatest missions sending bodies in the history of the New Testament age. The greatness of our past has been dependent on the willing cooperation of orthodox yet diverse Baptists who were willing to put first things first and less important things in their proper place.

As we dialog here, in this place, about some of the non-essentials of our faith, secondary and tertiary doctrines, as important as they are, I think of Jesus’ words in John 17:20-23.

1. Christ Prays specifically for us (20)

Exp – If Christ has prayed for you, then the subject of His prayer must be of ultimate importance to you

Illus – If a stranger at a gas station tells you how he thinks you should wear your hair, how much weight will you give him? Since he is a stranger, probably not much.

App – Because it is Jesus, the One whom we claim as Lord, we should make his prayer for us of the highest priority

2. Unity is the subject of Christ’s prayer (21, 23)

Exp – Not an issue of uniformity, but the sense of oneness that comes from the knowledge and reality of mutual belonging – as the Son & Father belong to one another

Illus – My wife & I are not uniform – even in our beliefs, but we are one. We are unified.

App – Our view of one another must be governed by the thought that “this person belongs to me and I belong to them.”

3. The realization of the lost world that Jesus Christ is Lord is the fruit of our unity (21, 23)

Exp – They are able to understand a unified, loving God when it is modeled by a unified loving body

Illus – A coach asked his team at halftime, “Do you believe in rebounding?” They all replied that they did, and the coach said, “You are all liars. If you believed in rebounding, you would actually place your body between the ball and your opponent. You would move, you would jump and you would do it in a way that will win you the ball.”

App – We must be one, for the sake of winning the world.

Christ’s prayer for us makes perfect sense. Who would want to be adopted by a dysfunctional family that squabbles and fights? Who would willingly become part of a spiritual body led by a schizophrenic mind that is at war with itself?

Ultimately, we must mind this: if we allow ourselves to devolve into factions rather than being the whole, then we are our very selves resistant to Christ’s own prayer for us. We divide His very body against itself and we do Satan’s work.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I do not argue for universalism, nor even liberal ecumenicism. Let us remember that unity is not uniformity.

I merely call for us to put the things of first order in their place, and all other things in their subsequent places.

Let us love one another and let us reach the world for Christ together. Of all the historical Baptist distinctives, I think the one most needed by today’s Baptists is the ability to cooperate in reaching the lost world, allowing for diversity in their unity on this mission.

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