Language Used in Reference to Ministry to Families and Plans to Continue Examining the Many Interpretations of FIC Concept

I thought I would breeze over this book in one post, but I received some comments by email about it, some asking questions about the book itself and some that related to some real life situations that are addressed by the author in some very productive ways. So in some upcoming posts, I’d like to look at some of the “pros” and what I found to be “cons” in the book. When I ordered this book, I also ordered a copy of Voddie Baucham’s book entitled “Family Driven Faith.”

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More From Randy Stinson in the FIC (Part II): Rejection of the Church as a Family of Families

Thanks to readers of this blog who also have knowledge of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's (SBTS) beliefs about the Family Integrated Church (FIC), I've become aware of more distinctions between between their views and those held by SBC minister Voddie Baucham and those at Vision Forum, etc.

 The following quote from Randy Stinson at Steve Wright's "reThink Conference" in May reflects something only vaguely described in the Towers Online announcement about the SBTS concept and unique version of the FIC. Though the seminary shares many common beliefs with Vision Forum, it does reject this concept of the church as one big family that is comprised of many families (not acknowledging the individual apart from a family).

 Randy Stinson's "reThink Conference" presentation (audio download from blog sidebar):

There are some, in their effort to help this problem, some are defining the church in such a way so that the family will be prioritized. Some are defining the church as made up of a family of families. And while it may be just a subtle shift, a subtle move, this kind of definition, frankly, leads to certain expressions of ministry in local churches that can lead to and can be exclusive, that can be isolationist, it has a tendency to homogenize the congregation and produce sameness. 

You see, I would argue that it’s not that the church is a family of families. I would just stop at the family part. The church is a family. In fact, if you look at Romans 8, it’s your real family. I mean, what Romans 8 is teaching us is this: Paul says, “You didn’t receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, ‘Abba Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ provided we suffer with Him in order that we may be also glorified with Him.” ..... Outside of Christ and outside the family of God, you don’t buy yourself in, you’re not born into it, you’re adopted. Adoption is central to the Gospel. 

Because you’re outside and then you’re in. You’re adopted in. And so, while three of my daughters were born into other families, they’re in their real one right now. This is their real family. And when you come to Christ, those fellow believers around you are your real family. Now you may have some people in the real family that are biologically related to you, and that is an added blessing. But when it’s all said and done, what Paul is saying here is that the family of God is your real family. 

So it’s not that the church is a family of families, it is a family – it’s your real family. I mean, Jesus said – just think about this. Jesus said almost just the opposite. Don’t expect everybody to come, you know, with a mother, father, sister, brother lined up. He said, “If you’re not willing to forsake mother, father, sister, brother, you’re not worthy of Me.” What’s He saying? There are going to be people that are coming who have had to forsake families. There are going to be husbands whose wives have rejected the Gospel. 

There are going to be wives whose husbands have rejected the Gospel. Teenagers whose parents have rejected the Gospel. I mean, that’s where this is an unbelievable picture of the Gospel -- when the church is truly operating as a family, like a family. We went to Taiwan, we had three kids already. We went to Taiwan and brought two home, dropped them in and told everybody, “Love them. Deal with it. They look different than you and don’t even talk your same language. Love them”... I mean, that’s exactly what’s happening every time somebody comes to Christ, God’s bringing some into the local church whenever somebody comes to Christ, and He’s saying. “You’ve got to love them. 

Here’s another one. Deal with it.” They’re not going to talk like you, they’re not going to have the same socioeconomic background. It’s every tribe, every tongue and every nation – it’s not just people like you. It’s not just people that talk like you. It’s not just people who look like you – who have the perfect family like you, who have the same socioeconomic background as you with the same hobbies. We’ve got church for cowboys, church for sky divers, church for homeschoolers. So, wow. You can get a bunch of people that look like you, think like you, and talk like you and love each other. Where’s the exhaltation of the Gospel in that? Big deal. That’s not what the Gospel says. 

The Gospel says that everybody’s going to be different. Now see what you’ve got. Now let’s love them and see what you’ve got... So if we believe that the church should be understood in this way, then I think we should structure the ministries in our church to cultivate this, to encourage this, to promote it. What we’re talking about here is such a – it’s not a radical shift. It is a trajectory shift which means that we’re saying that we’re going to re-tool this thing. 

We need to make it a shift, but it’s not radical, but it’s enough that it puts you in a different trajectory. You are going to end up somewhere other than where you were going to end up before. I mean, it’s family focus, it’s an intergenerational approach, that treats all believers as part of the family. This is where I think so many people are missing it.

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More From Randy Stinson on the FIC Part I: Vision Forum Commonalities

Steve Wright's concept of revising and "reThinking" youth ministry outlines the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's concept of the Family Integrated Church. At least, that's what I'm told. On Wright's website entitled "Lasting Divergence," in the sidebar near the bottom, you can access Randy Stinson's message at Wright's May 2008 "reThink Conference."

In upcoming posts, I would like to point out where SBTS departs from the Vision Forum FIC concept, but in this quote, I note language that echoes the language that Vision Forum and others like Philip Lancaster have used for many, many years.

Randy Stinson's "reThink Conference" presentation
(audio download from blog sidebar):

We’re really talking about creating an ethos, a way of life in the church, a climate in the church.

A climate where as you’ve discussed all day long, where families are brought together, not fragmented. Where dads are encouraged to lead, where parents bear the primary responsibility of discipling their children, where the hearts of children are turned towards their mothers and fathers, where the hearts of mothers and fathers are turned toward their children, where teenagers who come without their parents have a place, where single moms and broken families can come and understand what real family living is all about but being part of the broader family of God. 

Because the Bible teaches that the church is a family. Or at the very least, it teaches that the church is supposed to operate like a family in its structure, in the way that members relate to one another. It’s supposed to be a family and it’s predicated on the family, and so the family is central to this and we need to pour a lot of energy into the preservation of the family because the family is the picture and the family is the paradigm for how the church is supposed to operate.

Please visit again for upcoming posts that point out some sharp contrasts between the SBTS concept and the Vision Forum concept of the FIC.

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More From Randy Stinson on the FIC (Part III): No Rejection of Age-Appropriate Education

Other topics addressed by Randy Stinson at Steve Wright's "reThink Conference" (note audio download from sidebar):

Concerning the integration of ministry, unlike what is professed within some FICs, what Randy Stinson described does not rule out separate ministries in the way that those who founded the FIC concept originated. Doug Phillips and Philip Lancaster vilify separate activities so that they are not permitted. Randy Stinson describes a system that directs families who minister and study together, but it does not vilify these separate activities, just as Steve Wright points out in the “reThink” book. 

Stinson says that it’s not the ministries themselves but it is the lack of integration in these ministries. Previous statements did not distinguish the SBTS model from these pre-existing groups, and perhaps SBTS honestly did not realize that in the original FICs, activities like Sunday School and age-appropriate groups were not just discouraged but were outright forbidden. The practice in many FICs (specifically that advocated by Voddie Baucham and Vision Forum) is not so much of an integration model as it is a rebellion against and a rejection of group leaders and separate groups themselves, integrating by exclusion rather than by inclusion. Stinson argues against the exclusionary model that rejects age-appropriate education. Is this not all the more reason for SBTS to distance themselves from the groups that do vilify programs like Sunday School, particularly if they are going to use so much common language and terminology.

Stinson does say that those who do not have a traditional family can be “looped back in” so that they can participate in the church, just as fragmented family members are brought back into the whole of the church. He does not go on to describe how this is accomplished, but it does NOT sound anything like the “adoption by normative families” by the assignment of a surrogate “federal head of the family” as is necessary in Doug Phillips’ FIC.
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"reThinking" the FIC in the SBC -- More Distinctions

In previous posts, I described how individuals within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) criticized my inclusion of their seminary professors' statements within a lecture on patriarchy, and how at least two of their seminaries embrace a concept of ministry that they call the “Family Integrated Church,” (FIC) a system that originated outside of the SBC.

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"Stand For Family and Save the Nation"

Watch this film produced by one of the many organizations operated by Reverend Moon.

I would like you to ask yourselves how different this message is from the family-centered message of the so-called Biblical patriarchy movement. Moon does not preach Christ crucified, but how much of the same subject material do many gender obsessed Christians preach? The basic message seems the same to me: restoration of the family will save our nation and our churches and ourselves. But this is not the preaching of Christ and Him crucified.

From the Unification Church's description of this video:

The Family is the 1st institution created by God. The Family is the school of love where life's most important lessons are learned. Based on this understanding, the American Clergy Leadership Conference, an organization inspired by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, led a movement to rebuild the family in order to save the nation and the world.

How different is this message from what we hear from many evangelical Christian ministries that focus on the family?

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The Power of the Situation

More thoughts on how good people are influenced, enabling them to do horrible things.


PART I



PART II



PART III

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White Supremacy , Greed and Survival

Doug Phillips quotes Heman Humphrey’s mention of the first U.S. Census, noting large families and their benefit to the agrarian family. This same census data also strongly influenced growing concerns about population and wealth at that time and provides some interesting glimpses into the "aggravated" mind of the South in the years leading up to the War Between the States. The first census near the turn of the century in 1800 revealed that the residents of the country outnumbered city dwellers by a factor of ten to one, but near the end of the 19th Century, the agrarian population accounted for only one-third of the U.S. population.

Rural wealth increased four-fold during the latter half of the 19th Century, but urban wealth increased by a sixteen-fold factor. Farmers also watched their children depart for the cities where they could earn more wealth by working shorter hours under better conditions. In addition to the aforementioned price gouging of Southern goods shipped to Europe, the Southerner paid a higher percentage of tax than did those who worked in industrialized cities.

As Solon J. Buck notes,

“It was easy to demonstrate that the farmer...paid taxes higher in proportion to his ability to pay than did the business man or the corporation... The revenue of the Federal Government was raised wholly by indirect taxes levied principally upon articles of common consumption; and the farmer and other people of small means paid an undue share of the burden in the form of higher prices demanded for commodities.” 

 This steady proportionate decrease in wealth and population added to the troublesome ongoing efforts to eradicate slavery, a conflict and struggle that developed shortly following the ratification of the first U.S. Constitution according to Palmer. My original 1875 edition of Thornwell’s biography (penned by Palmer) paints the scene of the political landscape and the federal government’s efforts to marginalize and limit slavery in the new states admitted to the union.

 In 1790, when “Dr. Franklin headed a petition” to abolish slavery in the States, Congress resolved at that time that slavery was a States rights issue (pg 471). Palmer then goes on to describe that the Louisiana Purchase, the ceded territory, would enjoy the same liberties that the existing states were afforded. But this was not true of Missouri, eventually resulting in the adoption of the Missouri Compromise, contributing to the South’s minority voice in the defense and free exercise of slavery.

When, however, in 1818, Missouri knocked at the door of Congress for admission upon these terms [Louisiana Purchase], the attempt was made to fasten upon her the restriction of slavery, in the provision “that the further introduction of slavery, or of involuntary servitude, be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been fully convicted; and that all children born within the Union shall be free at the age of twenty-five years” (pg 472).

When California presents for Admittance as a State of the Union, the subject of slavery produces much discussion ultimately resulting in the Compromise of 1850, and California is admitted as a free state. By this time, Former Vice President, Constitutional Attorney, now Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina has grown ill with tuberculosis, so Virginia Senator James A. Mason reads his speech for him, arguing for the constitutional rights of the South. Calhoun not only argues the disparagement in the growth of the population and the wealth outside of the Southern States, he also argues that only 25% of the land mass of the new territories added to the Union classified as Southern States, those that provide for the free exercise of the practice of slavery by definition. He argues also that the North has essentially strategically “stacked the deck” so that the North grew in power and financial gain.

The result of the whole is to give the Northern section a predominance in every department of the government, and thereby concentrate in it the two elements which constitute the federal government: a majority of States, and a majority of their population, estimated in federal numbers. Whatever section concentrates the two in itself possesses the control of the entire government... [T]here is not a single Territory in progress in the Southern section, and no certainty that any additional State will be added to it during the decade... There is a question of vital importance to the Southern section, in reference to which the views and feelings of the two sections are as opposite and hostile as they can possibly be. I refer to the relation between the two races in the Southern section, which constitutes a vital portion of her social organization. Every portion of the North entertains views and feelings more or less hostile to it. 

Those most opposed and hostile regard it as a sin, and consider themselves under the most sacred obligation to use every effort to destroy it. Indeed, to the extent that they conceive that they have power, they regard themselves as implicated in the sin, and responsible for not suppressing it by the use of all and every means. Those less opposed and hostile regard it as a crime--an offense against humanity, as they call it and, altho not so fanatical, feel themselves bound to use all efforts to effect the same object; while those who are least opposed and hostile regard it as a blot and a stain on the character of what they call the "nation," and feel themselves accordingly bound to give it no countenance or support. On the contrary, the Southern section regards the relation as one which can not be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness; and accordingly they feel bound by every consideration of interest and safety to defend it.

So even in Calhoun’s well reasoned argument, he acknowledges the issue of slavery and the nature of the practice as an integral element of the South’s economy and structure. To abolish it will further impoverish the already suffering South who cannot begin to compete with the growth in both numbers and in wealth of the Northern States and Territories. California became what Calhoun therein calls the “test question” and asserts that the real issues are “power and aggrandizement.” 

Certainly, the South did suffer after the approaching war under Reconstruction which was not only impoverishing but emasculating. The “gentle view” of slavery then seems to hold up until the very difficult problems of racism present themselves. Some claim that advocacy for one’s own race constitutes “racialism” and differs from “racism,” though by today’s standards, most of my contemporaries would agree that their position amounts to bigotry. And I fancied Calhoun as someone who did not capitulate to this view, basing his arguments purely on the integrity demonstrated by individuals, the rights of individual States based upon Constitutional arguments alone and the North’s exploitation of power and circumstance. In this discourse, I realize that Calhoun does argue that there is a disparagement between peoples based upon their race and admits to this paternalism. It is somewhat reassuring that he does not argue this as a central factor or with the vitriol that his other contemporaries did. He seems to justify the good of slavery by comparing it to the free societies with poorer conditions. Slavery a Positive Good, (6 February 1837)

To maintain the existing relations between the two races, inhabiting that section of the Union, is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both. It cannot be subverted without drenching the country or the other of the races...I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually...In the meantime, the white or European race, has not degenerated...This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes...I might well challenge a comparison between them and the more direct, simple, and patriarchal mode by which the labor of the African race is, among us, commanded by the European. I may say with truth, that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age...

I have yet to read any writer so miserable on this point as the great Robert Lewis Dabney. He did advocate kind and fair treatment of slaves and wrote in support of humane treatment of those entrusted to a person, but they were “heritable property” and “mere chattels,” not truly human like those of greater races and sons of Noah. And though he may have been noted for his wisdom on other matters of theology as I have observed myself in his Systematic Theology, he did not hold non-European races in high esteem.

 I was shocked to see that he actually did have a modicum of respect for the African race, but only when he compared them to the Native American. Blacks would at least work and could be subdued, but the miserable Native American could not be broken. They would not work and made too many attempts to escape from their captors, so they were not as valuable of a commodity. They were not described as people in need of Christ but as some lowly type of farm animal. There are also the miserable comments that he made claiming how futile it was to educate any Negro because among other scandalous things, it was not only impractical, it was also “dishonest.” This rhetoric was quite offensive, perhaps just as offensive as the denigration based on pagan religious belief but upon race. The Negro was an inferior race, “constitutionally prone to improvidence” that could not transcend their condition and the European was divinely superior by God’s providence.

  From the Conclusion of “A Defense of Virginia and the South”:

The black race is an alien one on our soil; and nothing except his amalgamation with ours, or his subordination to ours, can prevent the rise of that instinctive antipathy of race, which, history shows, always arises between opposite races in proximity...But while we believe that “God made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,” we know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of genus. 

Hence the offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all the feebleness of the hybrid, and incapable of the career of civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble before the righteous resistance of Virginia freemen; but will have a race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political subjugation, which they desire to fix on the South.

In Alexander Stevens' “Cornerstone Speech,” Presbyterian and Vice President of the Confederacy, we also see the same element of the Canaan curse that Dabney details in his “Defense of Virginia.”

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. 

The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition.

I expected to believe, according to the gentle view of the Southern Perspective, that slavery in the South was actually short lived and would have been gradually and eventually abandoned. It was supposedly a dying institution, and slavery had nothing to do with the instigation or the waging of the War. Yet the Christians who argued for the right to enslave others for their economic gain also did so based on the superiority of their race and their views that slavery actually solved problems of poverty and anarchy. Why is it then that those who argue states rights also argued for white supremacy, the white man’s duty to assume their paternalistic care of their lessers, that the Africans could not be taught anything, that it was evil to mix the blood of the races and that it was actually God’s will to maintain a slavery system?

And why then am I supposed to believe that not only was the South on course to relinquish their slavery system in due time without resorting to extreme measures, but I am also to believe that the war was not waged over the issue of slavery? States rights certainly played a major role, and the precedents set as a consequence have been detrimental to the U. S. The source of the difference between the North and South was indistinguishable from slavery and the economics of it, though the Confederate also fought for Southern chivalry, their homeland, tradition and a Christianly way of life.

I can’t help noting that the attention paid to the changing demographics of the country as revealed by both the census data and as cited in the works of those who advocated for the Southern Cause noted the disparagement in economic growth and political power. Did the government system really fail, or was the world changing in response to many other forces? Were there truly no other alternatives? And if God’s divine providence provided for the system of slavery, why did providence see to it that the South lost the war? And though reconstruction was horrific, why did people not heed the admonishments of Lee after the war who called for unity and healing under God’s providence? 

Perhaps agnosticism skyrocketed after the war because these issues of secession were wrongly presented as providential and people became disillusioned when they realized the that providence would have them loose the war? And these were men of their day, reflecting the contemporary views, contending for truth and liberty and faith just as I do my writing here. God has mercy on us and shows patience beyond my ability to fathom. But why then to men of this day still make these old, tired, bigoted arguments? Lincoln,

Lee and Jackson all stated that God may have intentions that are higher than ours, and that He was sovereignly guiding us all. I don’t doubt any of that. I wish Jackson had survived to encourage the South to accept God's providence. But why resurrect all this and hang on to anger, strife and hatred for generations? And why preach hateful racial superiority from pulpits today? Are the gender arguments so weak that we do need to resurrect ideals that center around racial superiority in order to prop up those gender arguments? This does not mean that all those who make gender arguments based on hierarchy are racists, but why dredge up the writings of the past when we have the all-sufficient Word? That's not enough?

“The fact that one man, or race of men, may have more intellectual capacity than another man, or race of me, gives no just ground for enslaving the inferior; otherwise the most intellectual man that exists may have a right to enslave every other man – white man and black... Otherwise, he who has a fairer skin...than you or I, may have a right to enslave us; and the fairest man in the world may enslave every other man.”

  John G. Fee, 

“The Sinfulness of Slaveholding Shown by Appeals to Reason and Scripture”

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How Much Goodness Does the Image of God Lend Us? State Rights, Autonomy and Slavery

As in all times of war, particularly in the United States, religious pulpits become ideological rallies for the cause. Though our nation was very Christian at its inception, though there was no established state religion, prior to the “War of Northern Aggression,” even the Unitarian pulpits reflected our nation’s Christian nature. Thomas Jefferson who drew heavily from the writings of John Locke in his works concerning our independence from England had a deep and thoughtful prayer life which openly acknowledged God and drew our inalienable rights from God and not from the State.

How did the Calvinistic Puritans cope with the religious tensions posed by the differing views of the theistic Unitarians? They did so under a natural and unavoidable tension, but one that our founding fathers provided for through representative government. Young America comprised a group of different people with different beliefs, yet our common respect for one another and our liberties that were granted by God (and not man or the state) and observed by the government afforded a milieu of religious freedom and protected private convictions in matters of faith. Here, too, the significance of states rights plays a role, because each local state could determine their own laws and inject their unique religious beliefs into their states and local governments as they saw fit.

I was raised in Pennsylvania’s Quaker country and within a community of Moravians, both evangelical Christian groups that are classified as pietisic groups. Massachusetts contained many Puritan communities as well as Unitarian groups. The Puritans often exiled those they found to be in violation of their Calvinistic based beliefs to Rhode Island where many Anabaptists dwelled, giving Rhode Island a negative connotation for some. Religious interpretations were delegated to local governments, and the federal government possessed only a limited role and limited power. From the many diverse peoples and groups, we relied upon respect for one another’s rights, avoiding the tyranny of the state in specific matters touching on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson’s reiteration of enlightenment thinker John Locke’s “life, liberty and property” statement). 

In so doing, our founding fathers did advocate some degree of faith in the goodness of man, an ideal of the Enlightenment that many Christians believe was an outgrowth of and was fostered by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. The Constitution delegated all these matters to the discretion of the individual states, attesting that majority rule resulted in a type of tyranny that is unavoidable in purely democratic systems. For this reason, our founding fathers gave us a system of representative government – a republic – by which to govern our affairs, though this process worked by means of the principles of a democracy on a local level. By this unique process of representative government that was utilized both house and senate that voiced both the concerns of each state and balanced by representation by population also, through a system of checks and balances, one nation that truly represented the people could emerge from many diverse beliefs and peoples. E pluribus unum – "from or out of the many, one." Representative government then held back the tendency for tyranny of the mob based on sheer numbers, fleeting popular opinion and other such trappings of collectivism.

Religious creatures by nature, man creates religion out of any system of belief that helps him transcend the problematic factors of the human condition. For this reason, nationalism or a love and devotion to one’s homeland and country proves a type of religion for those who strongly identify with their peoples and nations. God created us in this manner, and when we displace Him, we easily find ourselves making religion of our nationalism. In America before the Civil War, our religious Protestantism mixed fairly well with our nationalism, though this created tensions because of our political system that counted upon man’s higher reason and capacity to respect one another. From this perspective, men like John C. Calhoun wrote extensively about privileges that were afforded to men, not arbitrarily (based only on an assumption of the inherent goodness of mankind) but based upon that which each man merited. When studying some of his writings (with the League of the South), the phrase “If a man does not work, neither shall he eat” crossed my mind, something I offer here to give the reader a general flavor of a portion of his arguments.

 I’m also reminded of a quote from Harold O. J. Brown from “Heresies” wherein he says that our pietisitc religions aided our national efforts in America’s early history, but in some sense, America may not survive because of our religious beliefs. America will then always suffer an unavoidable degree of perpetual tension and conflict because we afford citizens this right to diversity. We are human after all, and our system was not perfect, and our greatest strengths also create reciprocal weaknesses – an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. In very general terms, the Southern States based their economy on agrarian means, a system that relied upon slavery as an integral element in a way that the Northern States did not. Though the North utilized as many or more slaves as the South did, their economy was more diverse, drawing increasingly more revenue from industrial sources in their growing cities.

For many Southerners, this industrialization and the growing cities were an outgrowth of the religious idealism of Unitarianism, Transcendentalism and even the increasingly popular Spiritism. I would like to briefly mention that transcendentalism has nothing to do with the unrelated “meditation” but refers to an idealistic movement that developed in response to rationalism that stressed social responsibility (eventually birthing the social gospel). The transcendentalist viewed man’s degree of inherent goodness by virtue of the imago dei and by virtue of man’s ability to reason as sufficient for reasonable conduct within government.

In contrast, the higher numbers of Confederate Presbyterians in the South held a far more pessimistic view of man based on the principles of Calvinism, eventually stereotyping the North as a group of religious individuals who followed an heterodox Christianity that they found highly offensive if not outright heretical. Slavery advocates like Robert Lewis Dabney railed against Enlightenment thought while arguing against the North, though he seemed to ascribe to a view of the Enlightement as a monolithic movement rather than a general category used to describe a vast variety of convictions and beliefs. I find this ironic, for without the Enlightenment thinkers, Dabney and Virginia would not have their rights to state sovereignty and autonomy.

It was the Enlightenment concepts – the best of the Enlightenment that avoided the pitfalls of other nations by deriving rights from God and not from man’s goodness – that gave Dabney the very platform from which he spoke, the idealistic foundations of which he railed against quite vehemently. Dabney then characterized the North as a group of collective Jacobins, a group of godless, self-determined zealot Arminians who rejected God and God’s ordained order. Other minsters also stereotyped the whole of the North in this same manner. . J.W. Tucker, a Methodist minister said in 1862 that “your cause is the cause of God, the cause of Christ, of humanity. It is conflict of truth with error – of Bible with Northern infidelity – of pure Christianity with Northern fanaticism” ( cited in Mark Noll, pg 39). Within the South, not all but many believed that slavery was both a religious and economic matter over which the federal government should have no control.

 In Benjamin Palmer’s autobiography of James Thornwell, he points out that the tensions and arguments regarding slavery were most notable as early as two years after the first U.S. Constitution was ratified. Mark Noll cites James Henley Thornwell as “not only the South’s most effective defender of slavery on the basis of the Bible but also one of the South’s most powerful defenders of secession as a strictly constitutional step” (pg 23). In general, the advocates of slavery in the South argued that slavery was advocated in the Bible and was not condemned as an institution. It was seen as a type of “Christian philanthropy” that the whole counsel of the Bible taught as a very natural institution and a means of controlling poverty when carried out benevolently.

The Presbyterian advocates also relied heavily upon the arguments that God sovereignly placed slaves in their station, the place that divine providence chose for the slave for justice and reasons beyond our understanding but for the overall benefit of man. The whole of the country and the activities in the war were believed to be God’s sovereign plan on part of both North and South, though the South held that God also sovereignly ordained slavery and social hierarchy as well. 

Though Heman Humphrey spoke strongly against the errors of his cousin John Brown, he also advocated agrarianism and believed that the hierarchical system of slavery was God’s providential care of those whom God ordained to their social station, an institution that should not be challenged or transcended as to do so would amount to rebellion against God’s natural order. The slavery system demonstrated a high degree of paternalism for those within the lower ranks of hierarchy based on race (and upon gender). In contrast, the North held that the full counsel of the New Testament worked toward freedom for all men in a general and overriding sense in great opposition to “Patriarchal Servitude.” Many founding fathers believed that slavery was not God’s ideal and that all men should be free, all based upon a broad American ideal supported by self-evident truth and common sense.

In 1776, Samuel Hopkins, one whom Noll describes as a close friend of Calvinist Jonathan Edwards, argued that the “whole divine relvelation argued against slavery,” and that tyranny and slavery were both moral evils that “the Gospel thoroughly opposed” (pg 40). Noll also includes a very telling argument offered by Rabbi Raphall in 1861, one strongly influenced by a Catholic commentary on the subject that maintained that the American system of slavery dehumanzied the slave. “The slave is a person in whom the dignity of human nature is to be respected; he has rights. Whereas, the heathen view of slavery which prevailed at Rome, and which, I am sorry to say, is adopted in the South, reduces the slave to a thing, and a thing can have no rights” (pg 47).

This also adds to the weight of the argument that the modern so called “Biblical patriarchy” movement draws more of it’s ideals from the pagan Roman paterfamilias than it does from Scripture. It also reflects the testimony of Stan Gundry who observes that the arguments made in today’s gender debate do not differ from those once made in defense of slavery, arguments that do not derive purely from the Word of God. Sadly, these same arguments and a similar war still rages today, mostly played out in the arena of the ongoing evangelical gender debate. Noll states that though the Northern and Southern theologians of the past largely agreed on God’s providence, “they were in almost all cases powerless to convince others that they were correct, unless the others already shared the partisan perspective on events” (pgs 92 -93).

I believe that part of this rings true today, and certain camps and cadres within evangelical Christianity are very much engaged in this very same argument. Full or partial Arminian-oriented Christians still deeply offend some Calvinists, though now it seems as though the Calvinists have become more like “Southern fanatics” who argue for the old hierarchies that characterized the Confederate South. Many groups of evangelical Christians rage against individualism, argue for paternalistic views of salvation and sanctification by means of hierarchy and seek to establish these ideals as the only acceptable interpretations reflective of proper Biblical Authority.

These same ideologies also play out in paternalistic politics, both in those who desire the state to assume the social gospel concept of serving as one’s “brother’s keeper” (as in Obama's campaign) and in those who oppose Sarah Palin, advocating servitude and their family religious issues as just another, different type of social gospel. Both amount to a type of an American national folk religion with zealous goals for saving mankind.

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More Thoughts About the Role of Transcendentalism and the Social Gospel

Though I do not even remotely assign his writings to a level of importance as equal or necessarily within the same category as the Word of God, I do appreciate aspects of the writings of Henry David Thoreau. I enjoyed his style, his appreciation for nature, his encouragement to be good stewards of both land and government, social responsibility and stewardship, and particularly his love for solitude. He may have embraced evolution (a point that I would enjoy arguing with him as I have with many a professor and friend), but he alluded to all sorts of Scripture in the process, something I noted and greatly appreciated. (We share knowledge of the "borrowed capital" of a Christian society.)

“Simplify, simplify, simplify” should also offer a strong appeal to those who follow agrarian idealism. Held in balance with the Word of God and as a general outworking of “the golden rule” (Christ’s second commandment of doing unto others as we would have them treat us), I find the social gospel principles to benefit American society. For those who do not hold to a Calvinistic or Reformed view, it offers a climate of cooperation and general Christian principle within which all Christians and even agnostics can find common ground. It is however, no replacement or rival to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the full counsel of the Word of God. I also find that the social gospel does hold it’s own concepts of moral and social superiority. It promotes its own type of caste system that results in its own variety of paternalistic arrogance.
T
he “bleeding heart liberal” can feel the same type of superiority and paternalism that the “Patriarchal Servitude” of the South promoted, but out of a sense of self-salvation. It is a man-centered view, it’s own special variety of Christian existentialism. Ultimately it’s up to man to carry out God’s will, and it has a very high degree of confidence in man’s own ability apart from God. Again, it is a gospel with Christian elements, but it is no substitute for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I offer here another perspective that challenges the views of Transcendentalism that were held in the South, views that many still carry today in one manner or form or other.

I’m not a big fan of Mark Twain, not necessarily because I disagree with him so much as I don’t find his writing style easy and natural for me to read. Maybe I was dropped on my head when I was young, but I find the writings of the Russian Moralists much more easy to digest. I’ve plugged through Twain out of necessity but did not click with his style and therefore really developed no opinions about his work from a philosophical or theological standpoint. I became interested in the subject however, following a discussion of the topic on Mars Hill Audio. I do find his work to be quite essential to the American landscape, both from a religious perspective and an historical one. We do live in a pluralistic society, one with which our founding fathers entrusted us.

  From the Book Jacket of Harold K. Bush, Jr.’s “Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age”:

Mark Twain is often pictured as a severe critic of religious piety, shaking his fist at God and mocking the devout. Such a view, however, is only partially correct. It ignores the social realities of Twain’s major period as a writer and his own spiritual interests: his participation in church activities, his socially progressive agenda, his reliance on religious themes in his major works, and his friendships with clergymen, especially his pastor and best friend, Joe Twichell. It also betrays a conception of religion that is more contemporary than that of the period in which he lived. Harold K. Bush, Jr. highlights Twain’s attractions to and engagements with the wide variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime, and how these matters affected his writings. 

Though Twain lived in an era of tremendous religious vigor, it was also a time of spiritual upheaval and crisis. The rise of biological and psychological sciences, the criticism of biblical texts as literary documents, the influx of world religions and immigrant communities, and the trauma of the Civil War all had dramatic effects on America’s religious life. At the same time mass urban revivalism, the ecumenical movement, Social Christianity, and occultic phenomena, like spiritualism and mind sciences, all rushed in to fill the voids. The rapid growth of agnosticism in the 1870s and 1880s is also clearly reflected in Twain’s life and writings. Thus Twain’s career reflects in an unusually resonant way the vast changes in American belief during his lifetime.

This reminds me of discussions of men like Kierkegaard who were criticized as miserable modernists and existentialists who rebelled against God. I’ve heard R.C. Sproul, Sr. defend Kierkegaard as one who earnestly wrestled with the problems and thinking of his day, writing honestly about the religious challenges that these dilemmas posed.

Many are quick to label these men who write honestly and with the logic that Gallileo once esteemed as God’s gift and not a curse. Those who lived in the Antebellum Period also confronted the challenges of their own day and were just as subject to the influences of their generation. Twain was no different, and we miss a significant perspective of American life if we dismiss him and cover our eyes and ears as he took on the dilemmas of his time. In defense of faith in God’s providential work that is ongoing over the course of the life of a believer, I often remind people that Martin Luther was once a willing and zealous participant of the Catholic church.

We’re all on a learning curve, and if we dare be brave and honest, we all traverse serious tensions in our times. Many of these tensions will not be resolvable – one such example of this is the poor that the Word tells us we will always have with us. To wholeheartedly discredit the Transcendentalists with a broad brush in their earnest struggle to make sense of God, themselves, and the world is not Christian and is far from American. A wholesale denouncement of any group proves fallacious and demonstrates the arrogance and the insecurity of man’s carnal nature something to which we are all subject.

Though the North may have wrongly been caught in the sensational trappings of the slavery issue and thus exploited by those with the greedy interests of economics, the South was certainly guilty of stereotyping and dehumanizing their brethren in the North. We all have a starting point, and I believe we should rejoice if that starting point includes godly principle. We should be ever mindful that our hearts, beliefs and our very societies are also sovereignly governed by the Holy Spirit’s guiding Hand and under the care of our providential God. We must start somewhere, showing tolerance and God’s love and grace to those who believe differently, remembering that our nation requires that of us. We must also yield to God’s providence, something that may not make sense to us or yield to our expectations.

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Race and Slavery as Synonymous or Separate Issues?

From Mark Noll's
"The Civil War as a Theological Crisis"

The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill, 2006

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The Problem of Solving Theological Problems with Military and Industrial Force

From Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis" The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, pg 50:

The country had a problem because of its most trusted religious authority, the Bible, was sounding an uncertain note. The evangelical Protestant churches had a problem because the mere fact of trusting implicitly in the Bible was not solving disagreements about what the Bible taught concerning slavery. The country and the churches were both in trouble because the remedy that finally solved the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms. The supreme crisis over the Bible was that there existed no apparent biblical resolution to the crisis. As I have written elsewhere, it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant. 

  pg 159 -160:

The theological crisis of the Civil War was that while voluntary reliance on the Bible had contributed greatly to the creation of American national culture, that same voluntary reliance on Scripture led only to deadlock over what should be done about slavery. After the shooting stopped, two great problems in practical theology confronted the United States. One was the enduring reality of racism, which displayed its continuing force almost as virulently through the mob and the rope as it had in the chain and the lash.

The other was the expansion of consumer captialism, in which unprecedented opportunities to create wealth were matched by large-scale alienation and considerable poverty in both urban and rural America... But the Civil War was won and slavery was abolished not by theological orthodoxy but my military might and a hitherto unimaginable degree of industrial mobilization. 

Although the war freed the slaves and gave African Americans a constitutional claim to citizenship, it did not provide the moral energy required for rooting equal rights in the subsoil of American society or for planting equal opportunity throughout the land. Although the war showed what could be accomplished through massive industrial mobilization , it did not offer clear moral guidance as to how that mobilization could be put to use for the good of all citizens.

Pg 162:

From the historical record it is clear that the American Civil War generated a first-order theological crisis over how to interpret the Bible, how to understand the work of God in the world, and how to exercise the authority of theology in a democratic society.

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What is the Southern Perspective? A Story of One View Among Many Diverse and Perverse Ones

I was raised in Eastern Pennsylvania, and upon researching it a few years ago, I discovered that sixty of my relatives from just one branch of my family alone fought for the Union in what I was taught was called the Civil War. I knew that brother fought against brother and that it was one of the bloodiest wars in history, touting what may still stand as the highest death toll of any U.S. war.

I believed, as the writings of Union soldiers attest, that the war was waged to liberate slaves that were held in the South. I knew that there were slaves held in the Northern States, but I also knew that many of our founding fathers and their wives advocated that all individuals be granted freedom, including slaves. I know that my husband admired Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, particularly the Gettysburg Address, and he kept a vellum print of the speech in Lincoln’s own handwriting among his precious, boyhood treasures.

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Racist Roots of the Constitution Party? Maybe Some Tree Branches...

The other day, I received an email asking about what I knew of the “racist roots of the Constitution Party.” I denied that there are racist roots but I did explain that I believed that there were Christian Reconstruction roots from a vein that appealed to the writings of Confederate Presbyterian ministers.

 I don’t think it’s fair, right or reasonable to say that the roots of the organization extend much beyond states rights and a notably Christian perspective, but the Constitution Party (CP) unfortunately does attract "racialists," racists, and neo-confederates. There’s also the problem of the League of the South (LoS) which, at its inception, did not appear to be an organization with any racist or racialist interest. (This may be idealistic naivete on the part of my husband and myself, but this is what we believed.) I’ve never heard anything racist or anything remotely racialist from the CP itself during our participation which ended in 2003, and I know only what everyone else does about its inception. Our departure from the CP came about because of the patriarchal rhetoric from both Doug Phillips who directed the CP efforts of the state we lived in at the time and from Michael Peroutka during the 2004 election.

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About Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (???The Hierarchy Effect???)

Find more information in the MIT online video or read the Lucifer Effect. Please note that the MIT video contains images that are very disturbing and some offensive language is used (time mark 21:00 to 24:00).

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The Asch Conformity Experiments

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More About Milgram

Here are two depictions of the Milgram study. If you've followed the posts here for some time, you may remember a video wherein Philip Zimbardo explains the Milgram study in a lecture he gave at MIT. (Note that the video contains objectionable and offensive material at time mark 21:00 through 24:00 in the video. The photos of Abu Ghraib are disturbing, and Zimbardo uses some related language during this section of the lecture.)

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But For Grace, There Go I.... Steve Hassan's Account and Discussion of How to Talk to People in Cults

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MORE Discussions About the Family Integrated Church

Please visit "thatmom" Karen Campbell's website for a new series of posts discussing the phenomenon of the Family Integrated Church (FIC).

Karen and her family cycled in and out of FICs, bringing a unique perspective to the discussion. When you finish reading the post on this topic on Wade Burleson's blog where Karen gives an overview of her experiences, venture over to" thatmom" for a more detailed discussion.

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The False Assumption of “Gender-Based Sin”

My parents often complain about one another’s “junk.” Part of their problem stems from having inadequate places to keep their separate items. When venturing through the door after a long day, they both often take the path of least resistance and drop the items in the room closest to the back door. Who can blame them when they are tired, particularly when in physical pain or fatigued because of illness? The problem arises when one’s person’s “junk” gets in the way of the other. Here we see the truth in the statement, “One man’s junk is another man’s (or woman’s) treasure.”

My mother’s items tend to be related to some kind of paperwork or craft items which she makes and sells, all things that are basically feminine and do not generate dirt. My father’s items pertain either to his technical, outdoor job, sporting goods or home repair, generally items that are dirty. The contents of their pockets vary also. Mom carries paper clips, safety pins, hair clips and breath mints, while my father’s pockets generally contain (dirty!) coins, washers, nuts and bolts. I think that if it did not cause injury, my father would carry fishing lures in his pockets as well! Though each person has many accumulated items that could be given or thrown away, considering the application of the items, each person’s “junk” is equally useful (just not to one another).

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Two Major Distinctions between SBTS and Quiverfull's Family Integrated Worship

In the previous post, I mentioned that the only distinction I could find that sets the Reformed movement's Family Integrated Church (FIC) movement (including SBC ministers like Voddie Baucham and Scott Brown) from the FIC mindedness and patriarchy at SBTS/CBMW was their statement regarding evangelism. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President, Dr. Albert Mohler states that the school's focus on families via the FIC serves to accomplish the Great Commission and as a means of living after God's grace. But...

I've noted another distinction between these two groups:
their support of a woman holding a position in the civil government.

(Provided that Dr. Mohler's personal position is somewhat reflective of both SBTS and CBMW, I interpret his blog post as at least a tacit indication of the general (non-formal) positions of both organizations in Louisville.)

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How Patriarchy Necessitates Family Integrated Worship, and Why Evangelism is the Only Southern Seminary FIC Distinction

There are a host of practices associated with the Family Integrated Church (FIC). Previous posts already established a fairly extensive history of the FIC and its developments from within homeschooling-minded communities. This FIC concept stems upon a unique interpretation of headship and the writings of John Calvin (preferring a strong and often static hierarchy in terms of all relationships). Previous posts also described the influence of neo-confederate idealism on the Christian Reconstruction movement (a Calvinistic movement) and how those influences affected the growth of the homeschooling movement in most Reformed circles who created the FIC concept. As stated many times in the past on this blog and in other venues, the FIC is not a monolithic movement and is comprised of a diverse combination of associated principles, beliefs and practices.

They are connected however, in terms of beliefs in a rigid male headship and the subordination of women as the ontological lesser of men (of lesser essence physically and metaphysically per the classical philosophical understanding of the word). The teleology of woman (the divine purpose and design for woman) also deems her as a more limited creature (role, evangelism, etc.) as a consequence of her lesser essence. (Man is made in God’s image and woman is made from and after man’s image without transfer of the same spiritual qualities of the imago dei that only the male gender retains.)

The most basic fundamentals of the FIC:

• Patriarchal dynamics within the family and the church (strictly hierarchical)
• Focus on “top-down” leadership as a function of a particular interpretation of male headship (paternalistic view of church and family)
• Limited operations and functions for women in home, church and society
• Promotion, support and preference for large, homeschooled families Prejudice against “segregated” groups within both collective worship and church ministry, perceived as a cause of the progressive decline in church membership, particularly the subgroup of children
• Presuppositions consistent with Covenant Theology/Doctrines of the Reformed faith

To further summarize, I believe that all of these elements can be traced back to one single element: an aberrant re-interpretation of Calvin’s doctrine of federal headship, stretching the understanding of Adam as the father of us all who introduced sin into mankind into idolatry of man’s traditions. The spiritually regenerate man becomes a new type of “improved”Adam (a new creation in Christ like unto Adam) who saves his family through works of the law under this aberrant teaching. The profound focus on the virtuous, salvific abilities of the paternalistic system and the focus on legalistic performance standards (finding an antinomian under every pew) brings their profession of this aspect of Reformed faith somewhat into question. Jesus is seen only as a type of catalyst that does not dissolve or obliterate our relationship to Adam (and our relationship to the law) but rather enables the Christian man to perform works of the law to progress and enhance his own sanctification (and thus that of individuals with his family because they are spiritually dependent upon him and his efforts to various extents, depending on the FIC in question).

In an effort to honor the law, idolatry of both family and the mediator of all things pertaining to family ensues. I’m sure that those who advance the FIC cause would willing state vehemently that they oppose idolatry and do not conform to it, yet this spiritual pride becomes quite evident despite the best of intention in this system. This FIC element is also consistent with Bill Gothard’s teaching wherein grace is viewed like the opus operatum, a mystical dispensing or infusing of power or merit that is earned through works and through right attitude, rather than a forensic application of grace as God’s unmerited favorable disposition towards the believer.

In this system, initial salvation by belief in and confession of Christ as Savior does come through faith; but thereafter, man participates and enhances his own sanctification process through works and faith together, partly dependent on following the law. Salvation in this type of system is thus works mediated and not entirely faith mediated. Pelagius taught that mankind was not ill-effected by Adam and thus did not inherit a sin nature. All men could thus achieve God’s will through his own virtuous moral free will without spiritual rebirth and guidance by the Holy Spirt of God. For that reason, I believe that these views are actually very functionally semi-pelagian because of the confidence in the abilities of the virtuous patriarch who redeems his family and self through works of the law. 

Patriocentrists do not deny the sin nature, but they consistently behave as though, with a certain degree of mastery over the sin nature, their works of the law mediate holiness and spiritual transformation for themselves and dependent others (rather than works being an outward expression of faith). Augustine spoke of the visible church (church members who may or may not be believers) and the invisible church (believers only whether members of an established church group or not). These traditional definitions, long held to accurately describe the church do not apply under an FIC concept. Because the FIC only sees the church as a family of families and not as a group of individuals as a part of one body, all ministry must flow through this “federal head” of the family. The Family Integrated System is thus family dependent.

The FIC rubric views father as the “federal head” of the family and a minster or elders as “federal heads” of the church. Based on the views taught by the patriocentrics and this paternally dependent view of family, if one holds to this novel interpretation of spiritual headship under the guise of male headship that is taught in the Bible as a strict diagram of hierarchy, then all Christians must follow a family integrated model. (!) The FIC thus appears to reject the concept of the “invisible church,” because it is so focused on outward appearances and proper hierarchy, denying many their rightful place within the invisible church.

The Family-Dependent Concept of Ministry Within the FIC

The FIC Concept Promoted by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) As previously stated, I endeavor to demonstrate how the Family Integrated concept professed by SBTS does not demonstrate itself to be unique from the basic beliefs, assumptions and many of the condoned or prohibited practices in the pre-existing FIC within other Reformed circles. First, I am not the first and only person to connect the FIC concept with Doug Phillips, Philip Lancaster, Eric Wallace and R.C. Sproul, Jr. I offer the FBFI statement, other discussions on the fundamentalist website “Sharper Iron,” and a private document sent by Pastor Jack Brooks to his Evangelical Free Church in America colleagues in his Southeastern District to warn them about his personal concerns about the factional and schismatic FIC ideology as three of many such examples.

The Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy and the Confession for Uniting Church and Family appears on Vision Forum Ministries website for those who wish to review this formal depiction of the FIC, and this list of some of the more extreme practices of the FIC (“fringe” per SBTS) also includes some of the informal practices associated with that group. Second, let me also state again that it was the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) that came to the FIC concept years after Presbyterian and Reformed denominations created the term, even adopting it into their church mission and vision statements before the SBC ever acknowledged the FIC. The Southern Baptist Church and Home Education Association (SBCHEA) formed to “foster communication between Southern Baptist homeschooling families and the SBC,” but not until 2004. In 2005, the SBCHEA then endorsed the FIC model.

Per the Ethics Daily article reporting on the FIC, though he contended for the concept for many years within the SBC, Voddie Baucham co-sponsored an SBC resolution that advocated for home schooling as opposed to public, government school education, but not until 2005. Previous posts document some of this history and authors who wrote on this subject throughout the decade of the 1990s. And in 2006, the FBFI denomination had been so ill-effected by the movement that they passed a resolution denouncing the FIC, describing well that the FIC produces “an innate suspicion and distrust of, not to mention disloyalty to, their local churches and local church leadership.”

This would suggest that the FBFI experienced the FIC phenomenon on a fairly wide scale to be compelled to pass a resolution against the model. This suggests that though other Baptist denominations were well aware of the concept, but that the movement had come later to the SBC. What is SBTS’s purpose for creating an FIC focus and adopting it at Southern Seminary if they have no knowledge of, connection to or similarities to these other FIC groups?

What then qualifies SBTS as a source of expert training in the FIC model? According to President Al Mohler and Dean Chuck Lawless, the FIC concept was adopted in order further the Acts 1:8 Great Commission with “missions, evangelism and healthy, biblical church growth” at the forefront to thus reflect God’s gracious character “in all that is done” at SBTS. Mohler states that the “family ministry is at the very heart” of what they want to accomplish in local churches toward achieving the ultimate, evangelistic end of the Great Commission.Randy Stinson states in general terms that he wants to encourage spiritual growth and model it after the process that takes place within a family under male leadership, so one can assume that thse goals are consistent with the “fringe” model of the FIC. He also states that, as consistent with the “fringe” model, church ministries have become unfocused because of what he defines as age and gender “segregation.” It also seems women’s, youth and children’s ministries are to be merged, suggesting that groups that do separate for focused, age-appropriate Bible study or ministry do not conform to a “Titus 2 mold.” (???) Somehow reintegrating them will better achieve a Titus 2 model, yet Stinson states that all these groups should be integrated under the "unified vision" of the leadership of men. 

And drawing from the teachings of CBMW, one can infer that the FIC gender roles that Stinson recommends also conform to the “fringe” FIC groups. In Defense of Age-Appropriate Education I would like to say that in defense of Sunday School and other such ministries that I never saw them as interfering with unity but as a great means to carry the Gospel to as many people in the most effective means possible so as to minister the witness of the Good News of Jesus to them. In that context, it was not “segregation” but effective ministry.

Particularly with age-appropriate ministry, a child may learn to sit through a long sermon that is geared toward a much older crowd. (I remember as a small child, laying under the pew where my mother sat with a bag of Cheerios and a coloring book.) And to this day, I sometimes have images of flannelgraph pictures of Bible stories pop into my mind, as my teachers were kind enough to meet me like a lost sheep, bringing me a more meaningful message because it brought Jesus to me at my level of understanding. One of the longest and most meaningful relationships of my life, along with those within my family, is the relationship I shared with my Sunday School teacher when she prayed with me at the altar when I was five. She served as my Sunday School teacher many times after that day, and she modeled Jesus Christ to me over the course of my life. That relationship with her strengthened my faith, watching her raise sons as a widow and braving breast cancer, and certainly did not weaken it or cause me to turn away from Christ.

My mentor in Christian School who introduced me to the writings of the Doctrines of Grace (as such) served as both my highschool teacher, my youth group leader and the pastor that officiated at my wedding. I am infinitely all the better for their enduring witness and friendship in my life, not worse. In fact, I can’t imagine where I would be without all of these mighty testimonies that I came to know by virtue of age-appropriate Christian education.

 What DOES Makes SBTS Different? The only distinction that I can discern is that SBTS professes a desire to evangelize, something most of the FICs outside of the formal SBC advise against. In Karen Campbell’s most recent podcast series on “militant fecundity," she explains how that belief in the supposed “fringe” following of the FIC, those adopted children that are not biological are frowned upon in the FIC. She lists several teachings of Gothard and others about the negative view of adoption. What she did fail to mention was RC Sproul’s adoption of a son which the neoconfederate sub-group of kinists protested because the adopted child was of a different race and ethnicity, so the here is yet another example of the splintering that takes place within the FIC. (Not all the neo-confederate idealists are kinists, but all kinists are neo-confederates.) But also mentioned in this podcast on militant fecundity are Doug Wilson’s teaching to pray for the unborn of the non-elect to die in utero and allow the poor and destitute children of the non-elect to remain unclothed and hungry in the gutter. As previously stated, because male intercession interferes with the priesthood of the believer, so being born into the covenant community through Christian parents grants children a higher status than those who come to Christ in faith by conversion. Church membership through a blood relative by virtue of one’s birth (as God’s providence) supercedes the individual’s belief and profession in Christ which explains why so many FIC churches focus upon “militant fecundity.” 

Therefore, the children of believers always enjoy a higher status through this odd FIC-associated, sick twist on election, a view that is far more cruel than even the pagan concept of karma. This profession of evangelism as a goal of the FIC concept of SBTS serves as the only single identifiable factor that distinguishes the SBTS concept of the FIC from that of the patriocentrists. And it remains to be seen whether this stated “family centered” evangelistic vision of the SBTS version of the FIC produces the desired end of the Great Commision, proving whether this confession can overcome the rest of the problematic FIC system. Time will bear out whether the SBTS adaptations of the FIC will also become a warped tool of condemnation, aggressive proselytization of the non-Calvinist and a pious retreat from compassionate ministry to our secular culture.

 For the sake of both saint and sinner, I pray that it miraculously does not. From my experience and from the reports of so many others, this cure for our culture, our churches, our families and our beloved children proves to be worse than the disease. It’s proved far worse and operates far more quickly than the inconsistencies found in Gothardism, producing its painful, idolatrous fruit. People seem to cycle through the FIC mill into realization of the fallacies and aberrant teaching far more quickly than they do through the Bill Gothard experience, so I suppose that this is one of the many silver linings contained in this dark cloud. But judging from the already SBC affiliated FICs to date, they differ only from the pre-existing FICs in terms of expression of the desire for evangelism, but not in kind or function.

Lord God, please have mercy on us and deliver us from ourselves – from the traditions of our own making that work to make Your Word ineffective. Do a new planting in us, that we might be oaks of righteousness unto Your Glory rather than tombs full of dead men’s bones. Amen. Amen. And, AMEN.

Isaiah 61 [KJV]

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified. And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers. But ye shall be named the Priests of the LORD: men shall call you the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves. For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall possess the double: everlasting joy shall be unto them.

May this become the final chapter of the story of the testimony of the Family Integrated Church! . ,

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