This story is hilarious, at least if you despise the Southern Baptist Convention (which I do). It’s hilarious in a poetic justice sort of way. It’s hilarious in a pinky-to-the-mouth bwahahaha sort of way. A predominately black Southern Baptist Church just voted to leave the SBC because it’s not woke enough.
Let me explain the dark humor and then extrapolate a lesson to be learned…
Cornerstone Church of Atlanta, pastored by John Onwuchekwa (sounds like the name of a summer camp for privileged but troubled youth), was planted by Onwuchekwa and the rapper, Trip Lee. Lee is an artist in Christian hip-hop, a genre largely considered relatively sound and promising until only recently, when it got ‘woke’ with the rest of urban America. Their church was planted using Southern Baptist money. In short, they started as a welfare baby of the North American Mission Board, sucking at the teat of the Cooperative Program.
Now keep in mind, when the church was formed in 2015, it had the red carpet rolled out for them by the Southern Baptist Convention. The “racists” in the SBC bank-rolled the church plant, tickled pink to have a minority-led church in the inner city, a part of Kevin Ezell’s mission to urbanize NAMB’s planting efforts (I wrote about their infatuation with all-things-urban back in 2013).
Also keep in mind that back in 2015, the SBC’s racist past was, you know…in the past. Since 1945, the SBC has officially apologized for slavery 3,435,256 times (I’m rounding) and recently, an anti-racism resolution has been offered (and passed) at the SBC’s annual meeting almost every year. Meanwhile, the SBC messengers have voted to appoint the first black convention president, the first black pastor’s conference president, and the first black chair of the Executive Committee (all with resounding applause and Obama-like declarations that the Convention could now begin to heal from stuff our ancestors did). They were all token-negroes, for sure, but the SBC has been pandering to the racial agitators for decades.
The last 36 months has been nothing but incessant racial unity talk coming from Albert Mohler, Danny Akin (and their respective seminaries), the Democrat-in-Chief at the ERLC (Russell Moore), and each and every single entity. Heck, they even hosted a veneration party for that bi-sexual whoremonger Commie heretic, Martin Luther King, Jr.
What more could the Woke Religionists want?
Well, the folks over at Camp Onwuchekwa want more. The pastor broke up with the SBC over Twitter.
He said, “Often when you find yourself with people you dearly love and want the best for, you end up staying around longer than you should. That was us. In the coming weeks, I’ll be more vocal and comprehensive as to our reasons why. But for the time being, I’ll say this much, whenever you swim in certain streams, you implicitly hold up a sign that says ‘Come on in, the water’s fine.’ We don’t want to hold up that sign. Instead, if I’m going to hold up any sign—it’s going to be one on the outside of the pool that says ‘Enter at Your Own Risk!”
Profound.
I can only imagine those albino-white, effete, latte-sippers at the ERLC panic-tweeting JD Greear over black folk leaving the Convention over some obtuse, poorly explained racial grievance. The snowflakes must be melting at Ronnie Floyd’s office, where the president of the Executive Committee is in sackcloth and ashes lamenting the racial division that the most racially sensitive tip-toers in the history of the SBC are somehow guilty of causing.
Lol. Deal with it.
There are some lessons here that can’t be overlooked:
First, you can never be woke enough. That’s not how wokeness works. The religion of wokeness requires eternal progression. Progression to what, God only knows. It’s just marching forward toward whatever cliff social engineers decide the herd should be marched. Cornerstone Church of Atlanta left the most woke, pandering denomination the founders never could have imagined. But that’s not good enough for woke progression. The ideology is rooted in never being content. Its chief virtue is basically a repudiation of the Tenth Commandment, the sin of discontentment. This is why Woke Religion never leads to racial harmony ever.
Secondly, the SBC elites are apparently not the experts on racial harmony they have advertised. In fact, SBC leadership asked for this. JD Greear asked for this. Ronnie Floyd asked for this. Albert Mohler asked for this. Russell Moore asked for this. Danny Akin asked for this. They have all spent the last three years self-immolating the SBC for crimes no living Southern Baptist perpetrated, engaging in racist witch hunts against fine brothers like Paige Patterson, and instilling Critical Race Theory into its seminarians by men like SBTS Provost, Matt hall. Then, Critical Race Theory causes racial disunity rather than racial harmony (who’d have thunk it?).
Idiots [insert chortel].
Third, this black church has victimized the SBC and should pay restitution for theft by deception. There is nothing about the SBC that Cornerstone Church of Atlanta didn’t know when it chose to take Cooperative Program cash to launch it. It was a Convention that had sufficiently repented for slavery, bigotry, and racism over the course of its 170-year history. But this church took SBC cash, got on its own two feet, and then left the SBC with two black middle fingers to the wind without the slightest explanation other than, “y’all racist.”
But, such is the mentality of inner-city entitlement towards the welfare state.
Fourth, if you want to stay on the yellow line, you’re going to get hit from both sides. JD Greear best exemplified yellow-line apologetics with his annual address this year which amounted to a stirring endorsement of Black Lives Matter (with a tiny *asterisk that he was not necessarily endorsing the organization, just the slogan).
If SBC leaders had any prophetic voice whatsoever they would publicly denounce Black Lives Matter as the God-hating, pro-queer, Communist organization that it is. They would bravely and unashamedly denounce Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory and do what Mohler promised us he would do (but lied instead), and that’s fire SBC professors who teach it. If they had an ounce of intestinal fortitude they would call the whole social justice movement anti-christ and mark it as causing division in the church. But instead, they have pandered to unruly black people – convinced there must be a “browning” of the denomination if it is to survive demographic trends – and decided to straddle the fence in the culture war.
My church left the SBC because it threw a sainthood party for Martin Luther King and spit on the Gospel in the process. This church left because the denomination that’s 24-7 focused on saying sorry for racism hasn’t apologized enough.
Welcome to the yellow line, suckers.
P.S…
Prediction: NAMB, JD Greear, or Ronnie Floyd will come out expressing ‘deep sorrow’ and offer public laments about the tragedy of slavery and our various corporate sin-guilt, promising to “do better” moving forward, doubling-down on Woke Religion…meaning they have not learned their lesson at all.
