LOUISVILLE?Southern Baptist Convention messengers passed a short but substantive list of resolutions that included one on the “racial progress signaled by the election of Barack Hussein Obama” that also exhorted the president to defend biblical views of marriage and human life, and to appoint “strict constructionist,” “original intent” judges.

Other resolutions adopted covered adoption and orphan care, biblical sexuality and public policy, the 150th anniversary of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and appreciation to Louisville-area Baptists and the seminary for their hosting the SBC annual meeting.

The non-binding resolutions passed with little floor discussion except for the Obama resolution, with messengers refusing a proposed floor amendment to include statements citing concern about Obama’s perceived promotion of homosexuality in public schools and lauding SBC Executive Committee President Morris Chapman’s call for more Christian schools.

Resolutions Committee chairman Daniel Akin told messengers although the committee was sympathetic to the contents of the amendment by T.C. Pinckney of Virginia, it would be more fitting in the context of the a different resolution.

(A more thorough report on resolutions will be posted later.)

LOUISVILLE– “Getting serious doesn’t mean you adopt something,” Southern Baptist Convention President Johnny Hunt told the audience gathered in Louisville, Ky., for the opening session of the annual meeting June 24. Anticipating discussion on his call for a task force to study how Southern Baptists can more effectively serve Christ through the Great Commission, Hunt asked pastors to recognize “there’s gold in them there pews,” and to gain a vision for what God’s people can do if yielded to Him.

“Talk is cheap. So we’re not here to get anything adopted,” he insisted. Instead, he said, “It’s about all of us starting with the local church, taking a look to see if we’re doing the best we’ve ever done in our lifetime to fulfill the Great Commission.”

Hunt expressed gratitude to God for “men of wisdom” who offered advice following his April 27 release of a Great Commission Resurgence document. “I take to heart so much you shared with me,” he said, referring to input from seminary presidents, the SBC Executive Committee president, state convention executive directors and leading pastors.

“When it comes right down to it, you have to get on your face before almighty God and ask, ‘What in the world am I doing in attempting to lead this convention for such a time as this? Is there an assignment from heaven that God has placed me here [for]?'” Hunt said.

With that mandate in mind, Hunt delivered an exposition of 2 Chronicles 7, weaving into the president’s address key questions pastors and laymen should ask themselves about their ministries and mission. Hunt pled for a Great Commission Resurgence that begins in the pulpits of over 43,000 local Southern Baptist churches and filters through local associations, state conventions and national entities to reach the world for Christ.

“We will have to give an account for what we have done with what God has given us,” Hunt said in laying out the challenge for each Christian, each pastor and all spiritual leaders.

Hunt began with the reminder of God’s promise to hear the prayers of believers, noted in verse 12, and appealed for perception that moves Christian believers to compassion.

“God uses external events to bring His own dear people to the point of humility and remind us that He has sovereign control over our lives,” Hunt added, citing verse 13 as an example of that possibility.

Convinced that God can use economic turmoil to get the attention of Christians, Hunt asked, “Have the financial surpluses of yesteryear caused us to act unfaithfully? Has the declining health in America become an indication that we have lost self-control and that we have been given over to greed and gluttony?”

Hunt recounted God’s provision when believers humble themselves and call upon His name. “Do we have a tender and responsive heart?”

Acknowledging that he must keep in check a God-given capacity to be quick with words, he added, “I flat need Jesus, every hour, every moment. The only thing worse than pride is being prideful, and not knowing it,” he explained.

Citing the 13-year-old who won the National Spelling Bee when given the word “Laodicean,” Hunt said much of America could not define a word drawn from the biblical context of Revelation 3:15 to describe someone who is lukewarm and indifferent. “America has not heard of the word Laodicean, but I’m afraid the church has not perceived it. There’s a vision problem.”

When asked how First Baptist Woodstock is doing, Hunt said he might be tempted to compare his church to others in the association. “That’s not the standard. How’s the SBC? Well, compared to other denominations ‘we’re rich, we have increase, we have need of nothing,'” he answered, parroting the excuse of Laodiceans cited in Revelation 3:17.<o:p

DEARBORN, Mich — An apologist certified by the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board was among a small group of evangelical Christians escorted by Dearborn, Mich., police from the grounds of the American Arab Festival after the group said they were accosted by members of the event’s security detail and several festival attendees.

The official incident report filed with the Dearborn Police Department and first-hand accounts from those involved conflict as to what occurred. Early on June 22, the group filed a formal report with the police department and produced raw video footage of their encounter with the festival security forces.

No one was reported injured in the June 21 encounter.

According to one account filed in the police report, David Wood and Nabeel Qureshi of Acts 17 Apologetics Ministry were being quite vocal with the Muslims attending the event, even telling the people they “were going to hell” for believing Islam.

The police report said the crowd became agitated at the aggressive dialogue. Security was called to the scene and, according to the report, Wood, Qureshi, and Mary Jo Sharp of Friendswood, Texas and a NAMB-certified apologetics instructor, were “escorted” to the security command center and then taken from the grounds by city police.

Sharp told the Southern Baptist TEXAN newsjournal the police report is laughable. The caricature of her contingent shouting hell-fire warnings is contrary to their evangelistic methods and antithetical to their goal of sharing the gospel with Muslims in a logical, well-reasoned dialogue, she said, adding she has video documenting the incident and refuting the security guard’s report to the police.

The group was in Dearborn for a debate between Sharp and a Muslim apologist at another site and attended the festival in addition to the scheduled debate.
“We didn’t ever say that. It’s a lie,” said Sharp, also a member of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s Women’s Ministry Team. She is scheduled to speak in London in July onapologetics issues. Sharp has a master’s degree in Christian apologetics from Biola University.

The Acts 17 Ministry established by Wood and Qureshi seeks to “present evidence for the existence and attributes of God, the inspiration and historical reliability of the Scriptures, and the death, resurrection, and deity of Jesus Christ. We also refute the arguments of those who oppose the True Gospel, most commonly the arguments of Muslims and atheists,” Qureshi stated.

Qureshi became a born-again Christian out of Islam and Wood is a former atheist. In their testimonies, both men attribute their salvation, in part, to the very means by which they seek to testify about the Gospel — by seeking to prove through reasoned debates the veracity of Scripture and its supporting documents.
Sharp was in Dearborn with Wood and Qureshi as part of the “Great Debate Series: Michigan” facilitated by The Center for Religious Debate, a subsidiary of the Acts 17 Ministry. Outside of the debates the group spent time at the American Arab Festival trying to engage the religious leaders in discussions of Christianity and Islam. Dearborn, Mich., has the highest concentration of Muslim immigrants in the United States.

Regarding the encounter as reported by festival security, Qureshi was also adamant in his denial of being confrontational.

“We said nothing of the sort,” he argued. Qureshi said he and Wood were trying to engage in conversation a Muslim booth attendant with the banner reading “Islam: Got questions? Get answers.” The attendant initially did not want to answer Qureshi’s questions as Sharp videotaped. But as Qureshi turned to leave, the Muslim acquiesced. Security guards soon approached the booth and tried to stop the exchange and told Sharp to turn off the camera. A female security guard slapped at the camera, closing the view finder in an effort to stop taping.

Sharp said the three left the booth “to regroup.” They contacted a police officer who assured them the video camera in a public place was legal. Qureshi said he wanted to return to the booth and complete the interview to be posted on the ministry’s website.

This time they had a fourth person with them and three video cameras. Sharp stood at a distance as Wood filmed at the booth next to Qureshi. A different attendant was at the booth and he too was hesitant before agreeing to dialogue. It was no long, Sharp said, before someone grabbed the front of Wood’s camera and pulled it down, demanding an end to the recording.

As the group left the tent, a confrontation with festival security personnel who were not associated with Dearborn police ensued, according to Sharp.

They said they witnessed security guards speaking with two teenage boys. One of the boys approached Qureshi and using abrasive language, began asking him why he was there. As the teen was speaking the second teen approached Qureshi and “snatched” a pamphlet from his hand and gave it to a security guard. The pamphlet was a pro-Islam brochure.

Four security guards then approached the Christian group and told them they could not preach on the streets or hand out literature—neither of which the group said they were doing.

Sharp said she believes security mistook her and her friends for representatives of the Arabic Christian Perspective (ACP), an organization based in California that seeks to reach American Muslims with the gospel.

Qureshi said there were 13 instances in which a camera or persons were struck by security.

Qureshi and Wood continued to tape the aggressive behavior of security guards. At one point, Qureshi is heard calling out loudly, “This is the United States of America!” To which someone in the crowd responded, “No way!”

Qureshi said he and Wood were tripped and kicked as they retreated.

The American Arabic Chamber of Commerce, which host the festival, did not return phone calls requesting comment on the actions of the security firm hired for the event by press time.

The thought of celebrating anything about last November’s presidential election, which sent the man with the most liberal voting record in the Senate to the White House, does not excite most Southern Baptists, conservative as we are politically and theologically.

But there is one thing about it that Southern Baptists would do well to mark this year, and it has nothing to do with President Obama’s abortion record, or his enthusiasm for Gay Pride Month or overreaching big government endeavors.

Pastor Dwight McKissic of Arlington has submitted a resolution to the SBC’s Resolutions Committee for consideration at the convention June 23-24 in Louisville titled “On Racial Reconciliation and the Election of Barack Hussein Obama.”

Here’s hoping the Resolutions Committee takes notice and offers something similar.

McKissic, an African American and an outspoken champion of traditional marriage, observes something that all Southern Baptists?red, yellow, black, brown and white?should see and appreciate even amid the gaping worldview chasm that exists between most Southern Baptists and the president:

The election last November transcended Barack Obama; it is a milestone on the American landscape?a black man lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, placed there by the very system that prevented many African Americans from freely voting early in our president’s lifetime. When Obama was still in diapers in the 1960s, many public schools were still segregated and many Southern Baptist pulpits were yet silent.

We have not yet arrived at Martin Luther King’s dream of people being judged by their character, not their skin color. But the last election was confirmation that we are a step closer.

As followers of Jesus, the one who created every ethnicity “from one blood,” as Paul told the Athenian philosophers, such a milestone is not merely noteworthy, it is momentous.

The resolution calls on SBC messengers to celebrate “the historic nature of the election … as a significant contribution to the ongoing cause of racial reconciliation,” that Baptists would pray that Obama would “promote liberty and justice for all people, including the unborn,” and “that we will join hands with President Obama and his administration to advance causes of racial justice insofar as those efforts are consistent with biblical principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It commends the inclusion of former SBC president Frank Page on a White House faith advisory council despite President Obama “pursuing numerous social, political and economic policies that are in fundamental opposition to the values for which our convention and our churches have stood.”

It also notes the SBC’s 1995 resolution on racial reconciliation that “recognized the failures of some Southern Baptists to affirm the dignity, worth, and equal rights of African Americans, apologized and sought forgiveness for these injustices and purposed to ‘eradicate [racism] in all its forms,'” as well as SBC repudiations of racism dating back to 1937.

As the resolution observes, most Southern Baptists are poles apart from the president on issues such as abortion, which Obama has unwaveringly supported as a legal right through all nine months of pregnancy.

McKissic’s mention of values differences and the life issue are critical to the document; I suspect the Resolutions Committee would be even more specific, pleading with the president to seek divine guidance on not only the life issue but also homosexual marriage and a host of social and economic challenges facing the nation.

Such a Southern Baptist resolution would say to non-white Southern Baptists, especially African Americans, and to everyone else that our faith allows us to see what Jesus sees, to sympathize when empathizing is not possible.

Al Mohler aptly wrote on election night, “Every American should be moved by the sight of young African-Americans who?for the first time?now believe that they have a purchase in American democracy. Old men and old women, grandsons and granddaughters of slaves and slaveholders, will look to an African-American as president.”

Such a “buy-in” by every American can only benefit the advancement of the gospel, not to mention the welfare of the nation.

Richard Land told U.S. News & World Report there is something else about the president we should applaud: “his example as a model father and husband.”

With out-of-wedlock births a vicious cycle in the black community and rising to 40 percent across all demographic groups according to government figures released last month, Land’s comments are even more apropos.

It bears repeating: Such a resolution is not a blanket endorsement of the man or his views; it is an endorsement of the milestone reached and the American credo realized that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights?”

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