Big Evangelicalism wants to replace Conservatives with Woke Churches

SBC President J.D. Greear says the future of the SBC is women and ‘People of Color’

Tucker Carlson did the unthinkable last week—he told the truth about Democratic Party plans to replace traditional America by importing new voters.

“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Tucker Carlson said.

He’s right. It is the cornerstone of the post-Obama Coalition of the Ascendant.

But it doesn’t stop there. Big Evangelicalism in general and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in particular are playing this replacement game.

Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear appointed the SBC’s powerful Committee on Committees making women and People of Color the majority on the committee. He did this despite People of Color compromise less than 20% of the membership of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Diversity drum was beaten by the press release from Pravda, err Baptist Press, as it highlighted Greear’s Affirmative Action maneuver to over-represent newly favored groups considered “oppressed” by Secular Elites and to marginalize the unfavored group, also known as the patriarchy or white male Christians.

And Greear bragged about appointing people based on race and sex.

In a 2019 video posted by Woke Preacher Clips, J.D. Greear said, “Of all the appointments I’ve made, two-thirds of them are either women or People of Color. I do that for two reasons: 1. That really is the future…Secondly, we need their wisdom…I need their wisdom in a changing culture.”

Wisdom. If that sounds like standpoint epistemology to you, then you have been paying attention. Greear is implicitly appealing to the lived experience of the “oppressed” to cure the “blindspots” of traditional Christianity.

Watch the clip. That short video included not only Greear telling you that he is actively promoting People of Color based on their race and sex. Greear also tells you that the SBC is actively trying to expand its brand into minority communities.

The SBC is actively planting churches through the North American Mission Board with a focus on People of Color—which necessarily means the NAMB is neglecting traditional Southern Baptist church planting in favor of an Affirmative Action approach to Woke communities in big cities.

“Already right now today 20% of Southern Baptist membership is people of color which is something honestly knowing our history I do not understand it is an act of extraordinary generosity,” SBC President J.D. Greear said in 2019 at the Just Gospel Conference in a clip shared by Woke Preacher Clips. “Even with things the way they are, the membership is already 20% people of color. 63% of all the churches that Southern Baptist planted last year were led by people of color so it is the Present. It is the very quickly coming future.”

Now the key here is not only the attempt to change the demographics of the SBC, but its politics.

The SBC is spending large sums of money with certain types of church planters—the Woke. For example, the SBC funded and also loaned John Onuwuchekwa’s (popularly known as John O) church $175,000 for renovations. John O announced he was leaving the SBC despite its largesse because of overwhelming SBC support for the re-election of Donald Trump.

However, John Onuwuchekwa is not really a conservative. As Dr. Voddie Baucham explained in his new book Fault Lines, “My point here is not that John O. and I are on different sides of the social justice discussion; we certainly are. It is that he is outside the bounds of Scripture, theology, and Church history. The social sciences may be useful tools, but they are far from necessary.”[1]

So, how did someone so Woke and so outside orthodox Christianity publish two books with IX Marks and get on many high profile platforms promoting Social Justice?

Also, consider how the SBC’s church planting strategy led it to support numerous churches with women pastors. It is the desire to be “on the cutting edge of culture” that is guiding the Southern Baptist Convention.

The SBC’s Replacement Strategy: Hip, Urban & Woke

It started back about 2010 when Ed Stetzer promoted a new approach to church planting for the SBC. The focus would be hip cities, immigrants and people of color. Why? Because, Stetzer argued this was the future of Christianity as white evangelicals were in demographic decline.

Big Eva bought into the arguments about Obama’s Coalition of the Ascendant.

A reminder: the Coalition of the Ascendant is a view that Democrats no longer need white males because of the changing demographics involving immigration and women.

According to NR, “Democrats have been constrained since the 1960s by fear of losing the blue-collar, rural, and older white voters who traditionally made up the conservative end of their electoral coalition…But the ongoing racial and ideological sorting of the electorate has rapidly reduced the Democrats’ dependence on those voters…Yet Obama nonetheless won a solid victory by posting strong numbers with minorities (a combined 80 percent), the millennials (60 percent), and college-educated white women (46 percent overall and more in many key states); moreover, each of those groups expanded its share of the total vote. (For the first time, white women with college degrees cast more votes last year than white men without them.)”

But, back to Stetzer and the 2010 Southern Baptist Convention—where Stetzer promoted this plan to conservative Southern Baptists in a meeting. You can get more details in this Causes of Things Podcast. Essentially, the goal then was to reshape the SBC into something more appealing to hip urban centers and would be more tolerable to Secular Elites.

What is the result of this strategy?

Unmitigated collapse.

The SBC is experiencing a collapse in giving, a collapse in church planting combined with soaring church planting costs. By every metric, the SBC’s church planting strategy of the last decade failed.

As we’ve argued elsewhere, embracing secular progressive politics is a death sentence for churches. Secular research shows the link between anti-Vietnam War theology with the collapse of the mainline denominations. That collapse coincided with a surge in membership in conservative evangelical and fundamentalist churches.

Was that the plan all along? Divide the SBC and lead it into decline and irrelevance?

SBC President J.D. Greear is dividing the Southern Baptist Convention along racial and gender lines. Is counting the number of appointments and classifying them by race and sex helpful or harmful to the mission of the church?

The embrace of Ethnic Gnosticism (“the idea that people have special knowledge based solely on their ethnicity,”)[2] makes the church look more like the World and less like a community of believers where there is no ethnic division. The Church should not conform to the secular worldview but align itself with God’s standard.

It is time to take notice and reject the Racial Identity Politics being promoted by SBC President J.D. Greear and the North American Mission Board.

Send notice to the SBC that it should not covet being “on the cutting edge of culture” but stand firm on the promises of God, and do so knowing that the Devil will not overcome it.

[1] Voddie Baucham Jr., Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, p. 119.

[2] Baucham coined this term and defined it on p. 92 in his new book Fault Lines.