Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: If you are new to our channel, my name is Zach Terry and I am the host of Code Red. I have the privilege of serving as the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Our church is located on Amelia island in the northeast corner of the state. Serving the Lord in a resort community brings me into contact with some of the most amazing people, many of whom are on the front lines of cultural change around the world.
When I would spend time with these leaders, I would frequently leave the conversation thinking to myself, I wish my friends could have heard this. And that's exactly why we created Code Red to bring you into the conversation.
Recently, I sat down with Timothy Pigg, pastor of Fellowship Church in South Florida and director of the Conservative Baptist Network. In this conversation we delve into why a group of concerned church leaders came together to revitalize the conservative resurgence within the Southern Baptist Convention. If you enjoy this episode, help us out by liking, commenting and sharing it with others. And make sure to subscribe to this channel for all of the latest content that we have to offer.
Now, here is my conversation with Dr. Timothy Pigg.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Some of our people know first Jack's very well that have been here. I lived in Alabama. I knew the story of First Jack's the downtown, the miracle downtown. For those who don't know the impact of that church, give them a little bit of the context. What were y'all running in worship?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: Oh, Jacksonville was a unique place. It truly was a miracle of downtown Jacksonville.
During my time there were 29,000 members was at its at its height. Sunday morning attendance was around 8,500 to 9,000.
Sunday school is probably the truer number. We always boast the worship number, but Sunday school set about 4500 and baptizing anywhere between 1300-1500 people a year. It's kind of hard to wrap your mind around that. When we would do youth camp, we would do it in two groups. We had a middle school camp and a high school camp and both groups would take roughly 25 school buses to camp. So we would have 50 school buses that would go to camp, one for a middle school week, one for a high school week. Our high school choir had probably 300 voice choir, 100 piece orchestra in it. We would do high school tours in the summer where we would go to a church and church maybe that had 200 people in it and you had 300 high schoolers show up and would fill the stage and the front area and we would put on a choir revival. Really. And we saw God do some incredible things during that time. I was just telling your pastor before we came in here that I was 18 years old before I ever sat in a church service in which somebody did not get sick. Saved.
That's Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Growing up, it was regular to see people coming down the aisles. And it used to, as a kid, I enjoyed the service so much. Our music was wonderful in Jacksonville, and it was great. But we would always start Sunday night service with baptisms or Wednesday night service. And I remember sitting with my friends saying, I wish they would hurry up and get done with the baptism so that we could have music. Well, now that I'm a pastor, I wish we had more baptisms than music.
But it was just. It was a miracle. It was something unlike anything. We put on a pastor's conference every year.
That at its Height was in 2006, 14,000 pastors from across the country and the world came into town to the Jacksonville area and attended that Jacksonville pastors conference. It is that relationship with other churches and pastors, really, that has shaped what our conversation is going to be about tonight.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Absolutely. You know, at that time, especially, not only was it impacting the city of Jacksonville, but it was impacting the nation and really doing that through the Southern Baptist Convention, you know, so bringing those pastors in, investing in them, and sending them back out to their churches was a very influential thing.
And those were years not entirely unlike our own, when things were sliding, when they were drifting back. If you go back to the late 70s, the 80s, liberalism had almost taken over the Southern Baptist convention.
And so, Dr. Vines, Dr. Lindsay, they were influential in that movement and not only helping correct the ship, but also having just a flagship church that we could look to for leadership. And so, thankfully, you were able to be there and set under your dad's influence and the. The ministry of that church all through those years. And now today, you're serving down in south Florida.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Tell me about that.
[00:05:17] Speaker C: So in 2015, the Lord called us. I went to school and at Southwestern Seminary. I did my undergraduate in humanities, master's degree and have a doctorate from. From Southwestern as well. But in 2015, God called us to. To southwest Florida, to a little town called Immokalee. It's a town that means. It's a. It's an Indian word that means my home. And it was a farming, rural community. And the church there was the First Baptist Church of Immokalee. It was founded in 1916. It was a church that has a rich history to. It was noted at one time in the Southern Baptist Convention is one of the fastest growing churches in South Florida and south of I4 and had was recognized for its baptisms. But by the time I got there, it was a church that was in great disarray and a church that needed a lot of revitalization.
I was a young pastor coming out of seminary excited for this, but I did not realize until week two that I was much over my head and God has come and just blown a. A fresh movement of his spirit into that place and to a church that when I got there, was 18 months from closing its doors, losing about $60,000 a year to a church now that has over 350 people attending on a Sunday morning meeting, budget, baptizing people and seeing God just bless in immense ways. It's an incredible movement. It's the miracle of Immaculate in a lot of ways.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Amen. You know, I'm a little older than you, and so I've been watching the nature of not just our convention of churches, but other denominations. And it's very typical. Just like our Ivy League schools that began so well, that began as a place to train pastors and send them out into the mission field, that eventually drifted from their main mission and ended up being just places of extreme liberalism and the leftist movement coming out of many of those institutions. The same thing happens with denominations and church movements. Churches can drift in the same way. So we've seen that many of you perhaps are here tonight because you were influenced by that. You looked up one day and you realized that the denomination had left you. You haven't left it. Well, that happened to the Southern Baptist Convention and they were able to rescue it and turn it around.
And so when I came to christ in the mid-90s, many of the men that you would know and that you would, you would agree were just stalwarts. They would take a bullet for the faith and would preach the word faithfully and didn't pull any punches, didn't dilute the truth.
That was very attractive to me as a young man. I wanted to be around men like that.
And that's why I became a Southern Baptist. It really wasn't anything to do with the name or the denomination. And they were the ones that reached out to me and they were the ones that when I showed up, I looked at the pastor and said, I can respect him. And so as a young man, I became a part of a Southern Baptist church. And that's where I've been for the last over 30 years now, serving the Lord.
But Movements have a tendency to drift.
And so I know you saw it probably well before I did, but there were some concerning things that began to happen along the way. And the reason that the two of us became friends is because we're among a tribe of men within the convention that says, we're gonna do something about it. We're gonna get involved. And so tell me some of the things that you witnessed that began to be concerning there in South Florida.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I think what's interesting with what you were just sharing denominations, everything based on its nature has a tendency to move away from biblical truth. It's the human nature. Now, our own flesh does not desire the things of God. We always desire something opposite. And a lot of times those can be noble reasons.
For instance, the influence of things like pragmatism. You know, I want to see people reached, so I'll do anything it takes to get somebody reached with the gospel. And you end up departing from the Scriptures because you'll do anything it takes to reach someone. And then you try to bring them the Word, and they don't understand that that was the foundation all along.
So some of the. Some of the departures I began to see was really a denial that you, as a born again believer with the Holy Spirit, had the ability in and of yourself to interpret scripture with an open Bible.
Southern Baptist Convention began to incorporate this. Really, it's almost like an identity politics in biblical hermeneutics, where in order to get to the biblical understanding, the true understanding, you must have at the table people from different backgrounds, races, gender, age, you name it. And unless you have the opinion of this person or that person, and all the different viewpoints need to come together. And when you bring all the viewpoints together, that's where truth is. Well, the problem with that is how can you have a quiet time with Jesus if you have to invite seven people to sit at the table to help you get to an understanding of Scripture? So what was happening with things like critical race theory and intersectionality was you are unable to interpret God's Word on your own, and you need help to do so. Now, this was being taught in our major seminaries.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: The main reason that I wrote Parenting in a Culture War is simply because that the world that I grew up in has changed. It's radically different than what we were equipped to talk about and to answer as young people back in the 80s and the 90s.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Today, we're faced with things like the.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: LGBTQ movement, the pride movement that's seeking to take over our communities, and even our churches.
And when our young people go into the world, whether it's through public school or college, whatever it may be, if we don't give them answers and a worldview to interpret things around them, they're going to be easy pickings for the enemy.
[00:12:44] Speaker C: Professors like Curtis woods and Jarvis Williams and Matt hall, other professors like Jeffrey Bingham at Southwestern Seminary and Malcolm Yarnell at Southwestern. These are professors that were standing up and endorsing this collectivity of interpretation in order to get to truth. And, and I'm sorry, when I read God's Word, he tells me I don't. It's not that I need a migrant woman in her 80s sitting next to me to understand scripture. Jesus was very clear, I'm going to leave, send you the Spirit, and the Spirit of God is going to guide you into truth. He. He's going to teach you everything that I have said and my father has said so. An open heart to the leading of the Spirit of God. With an open Bible, you can be confident that you're understanding God's word clearly.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: And the idea, it was beyond just saying. It's a group interpretation. It's the idea that as a white cisgender male from the south, if anybody can understand the scripture, it's us. Right? We're the ones that really can't without the help of everybody else around us.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: That's exactly right.
It would be impossible for me as a young white man to know what God has to say. Now here's why that's a problem for us as Baptists.
A mentor of mine would say this. An open mind and an open Bible makes a Baptist every time. Okay, I would completely agree with that. Now, why it's so significant for us to push back against this thinking is because it's very Catholic in thought.
I pastor a campus. We have our immokalee campus. We started an Ave Maria campus. Ave Maria, you could only imagine right in the center of town square is a beautiful Catholic cathedral. The founder of Domino's, Tom Monahan, wanted to create a Catholic community in southwest Florida. And he relocated a a Catholic school in Michigan down to Florida to start Notre Dame of the South. That was his whole goal. Well, we thought it would be great to put a Baptist church in the community. That just sounded like something fun to do. I'm young and I wanted to pick a fight. So that's what we did. And.
But if you understand Catholic dogma and teaching, most Catholics do not walk in with a Bible. Most Catholics don't even own a Bible is what I'VE learned why. Because they are incapable, based on their dogma, to interpret the Scriptures rightly. They need a priest to do it for them.
Now, what we did in the Southern Baptist Convention, we didn't call it a priest, we just called it a group of other people. But what we're really saying is you are incapable of knowing God through his spirit on your own. That's problematic for us and that creates a host of problems that are detrimental.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: It began very subtle to where there were just sorts, slights and. Well, of course you would say that, you know, but if you are enlightened and you have these other people groups at the table that can speak into your situation, you would understand that what the Bible seems to clearly say is not accurate at all. And it would never affirm and lead toward the more conservative position. It would always lead you away from the clear teaching of God's Word. And so at first, but without denying.
[00:16:33] Speaker C: None of these people would ever deny that the Bible is inerrant or authoritative or even say they're not conservative.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Where they would depart is in the sufficiency of Scripture that God's word, yes, it's authoritative, it sits there as authoritative. But you need all of these analytical tools to bring to the table in order for it to be applicable for your life and in your area. Well, I'm sorry, the Bible, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord endures forever. Which means it's not only authoritative and inerrant for all time, it's also sufficient for all time. There will never be a second edition of the Bible because it will always be vogue, it will always be right. There's never a need for an edit or an update.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Right. And you'll see with things like gender issues that became more and more prevalent that those type of issues, you can't say that only men can be pastors because in certain communities that's frowned upon and it would drift more toward an accepting of positions that our tribe has just never affirmed.
[00:17:47] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we began to open up the door to say things like this. The term pastor is more of a gifting than it is an office.
Well, no, the. The church has two offices, the office of pastor and the office of deacon. Now, certainly we understand the New Testament does teach there are some words that could be used interchangeably for pastor, such as bishop, overseer or elder or something like that, but there's only two offices and there's quite qualifications for those offices. And both of those qualifications necessitate specifically with the office of pastor. It has to be a man occupying that office. Now, that is not to say that women cannot be gifted in the church, that women cannot serve in the church. Absolutely. Not at all. But here's my question. Isn't it interesting that in our culture, the role that God has given to women, that a man cannot do that. Titus 2 even lays out the caring of the home, the childbearing, the caring for children. All of that our culture has said is irrelevant. The feminist movement has taken what God has assigned only to a woman and said this. That's not important. You need to pursue something else. So what we did in the Southern Baptist Convention is we embraced this. Candy Finch, Dr. Candy Finch @ Mid America Baptist Theological Seminary would call it the fourth wave of feminism. We've embraced this fourth wave of feminism that has not only said, women can do anything man can do. Women have the right and are no different from men whatsoever. Denying complete complementarianism, denying what scripture lays out, and saying, now women can be a pastor. They can serve as a. As a pastor at a church. Well, she's not the lead pastor. She's the children's pastor. I'm sorry that there's only pastor or deacon. If you're going to use the nomenclature of pastor, you have to meet the biblical qualifications, no matter how gifted the person is.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: And that's not something. That's Southern Baptist. That's something that. We just see that in Scripture.
[00:19:59] Speaker C: Yeah, we're not even talking about Southern Baptist issues.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:02] Speaker C: We're just talking about clear reading of scripture. Scripture says that by the spirit, you can interpret. Scripture says, here are the offices of pastor and deacon, and here are the qualifications. We're not talking about Baptist. We're just talking about being biblical.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: Like that. That. That's a critical thing for us to recognize here is we're just talking the clear reading of the word of God.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: So back, you know, in. When I came to faith in the mid-90s and began to. Since God's call on my life, those type things were settled issues.
No one that I knew of in the movement in the Southern Baptist Convention would have argued with any of those kind of issues. It began to be debated, and I don't think it was debated. I think it's like we looked up one day and a percentage of our churches had changed in that area.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Yeah, if you're getting it, like, why. Where did that come from? What's the. What was the spark that set the forest ablaze?
[00:21:11] Speaker B: My name is Zach Terry, and I am the host of Code Red, where we bring you to the epicenter of some of the most urgent conversations happening around the world regarding the Christian faith and the marketplace of ideas. Never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast app or by visiting Codered Talk.
While you are there, be sure to leave a review and share the content you find with the people in your circle of influence. This is Code Red.
[00:21:48] Speaker C: I think we have to do a little bit of a history lesson.
I don't know how much time I've got, but let's just do some history for a second. You had the conservative resurgence that occurred in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Okay? That was the turn of the seminaries back to the inerrancy of Scripture. I mean, you had seminaries that weren't even affirming Genesis, the historicity of Adam and Eve. They were saying that. That Adam and Eve are fictional characters. They were denying the universal flood. They were denying the first 11 chapters. There was an entire commentary published by Brobman Holman at this time that was denying the historical record of Genesis 1 through 11. Okay?
By God's grace, through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there was a resurgence of conservative coming back to Scripture.
As soon as that happened, I come onto the scene as a young kid watching not the battle happen, but the victory lap.
And what occurred was there were some hallmark churches that were focused on evangelism, and they were focused on preaching the Bible.
And there's something very interesting that will happen.
Children and grandchildren always want to be as successful as their dad and grandfather was. It's just natural within us. You know, you look up, I. I look up, I see what my dad's accomplished. I want to be a part of something just like he was, and even excel beyond that. But we missed a key element. It was biblical preaching and passionate evangelism. I would say it's biblical preaching and biblical evangelism. That's what was happening. But the generations after began to say this. I want a megachurch, too. I want a big church, too.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Whatever it takes.
[00:23:37] Speaker C: Whatever it takes. So William James pragmatism comes into the Southern Baptist Convention through the noble means of growing a church, through the noble means of church planting, through the noble means of multiple campuses, through the noble means of bigger is better.
But they were doing so not with expositional preaching and biblical conversion through evangelism. They were doing so through pragmatism.
So the moment that began to occur, you actually can chart it in the records.
The membership of the Southern Baptist Convention grew, but the baptisms Decreased.
Did you know now not only are baptisms at an all time low as they were Pre World War II in the Southern Baptist Convention, but now our membership is dwindling rapidly. You say how far? Southern Baptist used to be the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
Did you know that just in the last five years.
Five years.
Mormonism, which we, all of us would call in here a cult, Mormonism is now a among sociologists and anthropologists larger than the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: And you can almost watch the chart. Watch this. As the Southern Baptist Convention is declining at a rapid rate, Mormonism is increasing at a rapid rate.
And I would submit this, Mormons are more faithful to the writings of Joseph Smith Smith than Southern Baptists have been over the last five years in faithfulness to the scriptures.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: Sad but true.
[00:25:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it is sad.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: With the pragmatism. Just so that everyone's following what he's suggesting. If the idea is to produce a megachurch or to fill every pew, then whatever it takes to make that happen is pragmatism. So if it's putting a dancing pony on stage, then do that. If it gets people, you know, to pack the church the way it did for my dad and my granddad kind of thing, where Dr. Rogers used to say, it's my business to fill the pulpit. It's God's business to fill the pews.
This is not my responsibility. That's the Holy Spirit using the word of God and the people of God. So departure from the fundamentals of the faith, from our core beliefs for the sake noble cause of reaching people. And so all of these things began to be on our radar. Now, tell me, what was the nexus of the Conservative Baptist network coming together and saying we got to do something?
[00:26:43] Speaker C: Well, I got a phone call in, actually, I think it's this week in 2019, my church was putting on what was called the Great Commission Weekend. We're heading into our fifth year, sixth year of doing that Great Commission Weekend. And we had invited a guest speaker to be on the program.
And the reason why I invited him was invited Dr. Patterson to come and be a part of it. He was my professor at Southwestern Seminary, and I knew two things about him. Number one, he would preach the gospel, and number two, he would come for free. And I was at a small church. And what is the old saying?
[00:27:24] Speaker A: Do you believe in freedom of speech? Well, we'd like you to give one of those. All right.
[00:27:28] Speaker C: Exactly. Exactly. So I knew he would preach about evangelism. I knew he would come for free. I was A small church, didn't have any money. He'd fly himself, put himself up, pay for all the food. It was superb. Okay.
Little did I know I was in Orlando, even eating at Disney Springs at Morimoto, that I got a phone call that our church was being doxxed by a Southern Baptist Convention entity known as the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, all because of who we had invited.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: So as a convention we have different entities. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Office Commission, they're basically our lobbyists, would you say public policy?
[00:28:17] Speaker C: They're advocating for issues, faithful issues before Congress that would represent the views of.
[00:28:25] Speaker A: Southern Baptists and educating Southern Baptists on biblical understandings of things happening in culture and in public policy. And so it had been a great asset for many, many years and helpful to the convention. Things began to change at some point. I guess Dr. Moore began to lead that institution.
[00:28:48] Speaker C: He took it over for Russell lan.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: And the idea has always been the Southern Baptist Convention. If you want to go to the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, go to a Southern Baptist church that this is.
It's not a top down entity. It's not a organization that's run like the Catholic Church. In fact, it's flipped on its head that where the churches and then these other entities serve the body of churches.
And something began to shift and you may be able to speak to that, to where that began to. It began to function more like a denomination.
[00:29:25] Speaker C: Well, again, in our desire to be big and our desire to boast, I really believe, Pastor, that the nexus for this was personal pride in the church. I really do believe because we desired to be big, we desired to have more, we desired to look grand, that we said as pastors, all I'll do is preach. And I'll let missions happen by the International Mission Board. I'll let church planting be done by North American Mission Board. I'll let my cultural engagement happen by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. I'll let my discipleship happen through Lifeway. I'll let my training of the next pastors and leaders happen through our seminaries and I'll just sit back and preach and I'll let them do everything else. Well, let me just ask you guys something. If you, if your pastor gave away all of his responsibilities to everybody else and all he did was just preach and that was it, he didn't give any oversight or anything. I don't know about you, but we'd all be pretty upset. My church would be furious at that because my responsibility as the local church pastors be caring for the flock, not farming it out to other people, Right? So the moment we as pastors gave away our responsibilities to these entities, we propped them up as being a top down structure. So now they began to say, what should you learn in Sunday school? Whatever Lifeway tells you to what, what should you believe in the public square, whatever the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who should be your next pastor? Whatever seminary professor told you that you, you should have. And it became a top down structure. All because we as pastors said all we want to do is preach and grow a big church.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Right?
[00:31:27] Speaker C: And we handed off everything because our structure means it had to come from the church. It couldn't have come from somewhere else.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: And the Great Commission was not given to entities, it was given to us as disciples and churches. And so in the training of pastors, it's our responsibility. We can't farm that out. They can assist. But that's why we say even things like here at our church, we can't disciple your children. That's mom and dad's responsibility.
That's your, you will answer to Jesus for discipling your kids. We'll help and we'll create a structure to assist in that. But if you're depending on Gabe to disciple your kids, then you'll answer to the Lord for that. He'll answer for his kids. But he's a pastor. He's helping us here. But the same type thing as churches, we can't say missions are an entity's responsibility. We have to be engaged as churches and as pastors. And that's a large part of what we do week to week is keeping us engaged in these different. And in the public school, you know, we have issues that are taking place right here in Fernandina.
The Southern Baptist Convention isn't showing up to help us correct that. That's things that our churches have to be engaged and involved in. And so when you got a call, concerned about who you were having speak.
[00:32:53] Speaker C: So I got a call and our world got turned upside down again. I pastor a small church and from December, this week, in December of 2019 to our conference at the end of January, I had members of my church. I had my own. My wife was receiving social media messages from Southern Baptist Convention leaders, their wives saying, because of who you're having come, because of X, Y and Z, if you want to get out. And they were labeling me as an abusive pastor. Because you're inviting Dr. Patterson to come preach at your church. You're, you must be a harbor of sexual abuse yourself. You must be an abusive pastor yourself. And here's the hotline, sending it to my wife. If you need to get out of your marriage and divorce, here's the number to call to leave to the tune. This is going to blow your mind. 100,000 messages, phone calls, emails, letters, people coming to our church, taking a picture in front of our church mocking what we're doing.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: And this, this is not the, the local atheist aclu. This is not Atheist International.
[00:34:15] Speaker C: I had the president of the Southern Baptist Convention at that time, pastor that we would all know, JD Greer called me on the phone and he said, timothy, My name is J.D. greer. I'm the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
[00:34:31] Speaker D: Hi, my name is Chris Hughes. I started listening to Maximum Life on Spotify about a year ago, approximately. Maximum Life really has been just such a blessing as it has really allowed me to learn and grow. Gained incredible insight from Pastor Zach in what I would call small bite sized pieces that are able to be listened to while you're in the car or just essentially taking care of things you need to do.
[00:35:05] Speaker C: And I said, Dr. Greer, let me stop you right there. I said, if you're calling me as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, I did not know that the Vatican had relocated to Raleigh, Durham.
I said, you need to understand something very quickly. I do not answer to the Southern Baptist Convention. I answer to the Lord Jesus Christ. And number two, if you want to have a conversation with me, I'll be happy to have a conversation with you, Dr. Greer, as pastor to pastor. Because when there was a problem in Antioch that came from Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas were sent by the church to have a conversation with the pastor of Jerusalem, James, at that time. And it should be pastor to pastor talking, not pastor to a convention elected president who has no authority. So we began to see this as a problem. And I was, I came out to Dallas, I met with Dr. Coulter, I think he was here not too long ago with the Danbury Institute, met with him and a group of other pastors and the Conservative Baptist Network was formed. Now, it was formed in my mind and now as the director of it, this is where we're pushing towards. It was formed because I gotta be honest with you, in my first meeting, Pastor, you'll know this. There are highs in ministry and there are lows.
I've never been at my lowest before other than that time that in 30 days my wife was being told to divorce me by convention people.
I was getting a daily email from a leadership team member at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission saying a Whole host of things. Pastors, wives at my church were being reached out to members of my church. They got phone numbers of them were being reached out. I was at the bottom.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: And let me say this. As a Floridian, as a. As a pastor in Florida, you didn't have any kind of negative reputation?
[00:37:05] Speaker C: Oh, zero. Not that I. Not that I knew of.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: No. I mean, no. Nobody had told me, pastors never gossip. But those who do, I would have heard. And he had.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: The way he said that. Can we just. Can we just. Pastors never gossip. That is, we eavesdrop. We eavesdrop. That's a good way to put it.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: But, you know, there are guys who have reputations, just like in the community.
His reputation was stellar among people who knew him in the state. Respect. He's on the state board of Missions, along with myself. And, you know, we would have stood with him, but this was happening in a vacuum. This was happening in his church. Nobody reached out and said, hey, can we all gang up on this pastor in South Florida?
And so when that goes down, you want a band of brothers around you?
[00:38:00] Speaker C: That's exactly what happened.
I literally flew out to Dallas asking questions like, can my wife and I endure the pressure we're under right now?
I mean, news media, national news media, asking for comments, asking for quotes. You can go back and look online. I didn't give any. I didn't take any interviews. Scripture says in proverbs, respond, not a fool in his folly, lest you be like him. There's no need to talk to fools. They don't listen.
So I made the decision not to say anything. Now, I did make a mistake. I kept my Twitter account.
My wife should have broke my phone in two and kept that phone away from me because I was just reading everything that was negative. And I went out there to Dallas twice.
35 men sitting around a conference table gathered around a hurting pastor.
And they laid their hands on me and they prayed for me.
I'm part of the Conservative Baptist network today.
Not because I want to see a Southern Baptist convention reformed, because there are more pastors out there, maybe not getting doxed by entities, but are serving in obscurity. They've never had a deacon invite them to dinner. They've never had a friend in ministry. The only friends they ever had stabbed on the back when they made a decision at the church they didn't like.
But I want that pastor to know that we're a network of brothers and churches who love you, where you might have people turn your back. The Conservative Baptist Network desires to connect pastor to pastor, churches to churches, to fulfill the great commission and influence culture with a biblical worldview. And I'll tell you this, will we see a strong Southern Baptist convention? Only God knows. But I do know that a strong Southern Baptist convention, a healthy Southern Baptist convention, will only happen if you have healthy local churches.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: Amen.
[00:40:17] Speaker C: So the focus has to be at the local level. Caring, building relationships, friendships together for the.
[00:40:27] Speaker A: Glory of God as our church, as our leadership, our deacon body, our pastors.
I don't consider myself at least as bad as I once was. I'm not as gullible as I once was.
I used to think, man, people, they have all these conspiracy theories until like a lot of them came true, you know. And so I began to kind of slow down a little bit before I wrote them off. But you know, there were these, there were these conversations taking place online and I would read and I would go, people saying the entity is persecuting me or whatever it might be. And I thought, oh man, you just read it wrong.
But then it was 100,000 messages. You don't read. I mean, you can read one or two wrong, but that's a lot.
And when I would see those things start to happen and then I would be in conversations of things that I thought we all agreed on and it wasn't that way. And so I'm looking around the room going, why am I the only one that sees an issue here? And at some point along the way, several months ago, I began to talk to our deacons and share with them some of the concerns.
And we said, let's look for a group that would affirm and encourage us in our convictions.
[00:41:52] Speaker C: And let me tell you how needed this group is.
We're a very small organization. There's, there's four part time people who, who help run this thing. Someone who oversees the website, does graphic design, one who does the finances, and that's it. There's three. Okay.
My wife is one of the ones who gets the emails.
Every week she gets 50 emails just from pastors asking, is there anybody who could call me and help me because I feel alone.
50 a week.
So we began doing this. I was the on the steering council. And when it was started, one of the founding members of it became the network director on May 1.
So from May to December, by the end of December, we're talking seven months. What year was this?
[00:42:56] Speaker A: This year?
[00:42:57] Speaker C: This year, this year, May to December, seven months. I'll complete the end of the year as the network director.
That means we have seen 1400 pastors who are asking for someone to be their friend.
Wrap your mind around that smallest Southern Baptist church. Twenty people, you know, small congregation, fine. That means in that 20, he doesn't have a person he feels like he can talk to.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: And we wonder why pastors fall and do. Do crazy things.
[00:43:35] Speaker C: Fall out, quit the ministry, right? Walk away.
If we want to see America reached with the gospel, we have to have strong local churches.
And the way to have a strong local church is to have a pastor who's healthy, who's loving the Lord, who loves the word, who knows that he has somebody he can pick up. The friend at midnight he can pick up and talk to. So just over the seven months, 1400 pastors have asked, is there anyone who can call me? I spend my afternoons calling these pastors.
Sometimes it's 30 minutes, sometimes it's five hours. Sometimes it's Sunday afternoon after a business meeting, because he talked to me on Friday, didn't know how the business meeting would go. And he calls me on Sunday afternoon to tell me how it worked, went, and he's been fired. Sometimes he wasn't fired. He just called me to say, hey, it was a good one. This time I made it another week. Sometimes it's things happening in his community, but pastors are hurting, and that's why the network exists, to love them.
[00:44:44] Speaker A: Amen. Well, we. About the same time that you came in to lead the organization is around when we as a church affiliated with the group and our deacon body said, we've read the website, we looked at their statement of faith and their affirmations, and we said that resonates as our tribe. And I think that's really what we want, is a sort of a city within the city, a group within the convention that we say if you go to their church, if you go to Pastor Timothy's church, you're not going to be shocked to hear that he's also preaching an expositional sermon. He's also delivering the word of God and standing for the same things we're standing for. And that's not always predictable, you know. And so how can we pray as a church for the Conservative Baptist Network? And how can we get involved?
[00:45:43] Speaker C: I would tell you to pray. We have several things that are coming up.
Probably most important that is coming up on March 16, 3 16, we as a network are doing an international day of Evangelism. We have over 150,000 churches worldwide who've agreed to preach John 3:16 on March 16th. Wow. So 3:16 on 3:16, we're praying that that ushers in an awakening of the soul around the world and that hundreds of thousands of people would be saved that day. So number one, let's pray for a harvest of people to be saved on March 16th.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Amen.
[00:46:30] Speaker C: Number two, I'd encourage you to pray for support financially. We have a very small budget at the Conservative Baptist Network. It only takes about $60,000 to take care of our part time and also the subscriptions we need to just operate our softwares and everything.
Everything over and above that we give away to these pastors and to these churches who are doing the Lord's work.
So I got a call from a pastor. I'll just give you a quick story. I got a call from a pastor in North Carolina. He's at a church of 25 people in the Sandy Creek Baptist association, one of the oldest Baptist associations in South Carolina. And he's revitalizing a church and he's doing an evangelism conference. And he said, I don't know if the network would be able to help me, but is there any way you could help us pay for it? It's a revitalization. So we, as a network, he doesn't know this yet unless he watches, but we're going to send him a check to serve him because we want to come alongside these guys and serve their churches and partner together and work together. Who knows, maybe the Lord will, will lead you guys as a church to be a mentor to another church, to, to be a Barnabas. I've said this. Every church needs a Barnabas and every church needs to be a Barnabas. So there, there's a church out there that needs to be encouraging you, but there's also a church for First Fernandina to be encouraging as well. You say, what does that look like? Whatever you want it to look like. It could look like your pastor calling. It could look like you picking up the phone and letting the pastor know or writing him a card on his birthday or just going by and visiting. When you're on vacation somewhere, I'd encourage you to pick a good spot. Southwest Florida is not too bad. I'm going to just tell you, okay, it's 75 degrees right now in southwest Florida. Okay. But that's what the network's about. So Those are the two things I would pray for the support. But then March3,16 that souls would be saved.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: Well, the same way that you come alongside these pastors and encourage them, we want to come alongside you and encourage you. And so as I've already shared with you one of the things on December 22, that's the day when we dedicate our entire offering to works that are outside of this campus. And so one of the things that we're going to do, if you're faithful to give, we're gonna send $30,000 to the Conservative Baptist Network to say, we believe in you, we believe this is important, and we want to help move the needle within the Southern Baptist Convention. So you make plans to give, be praying, lift up this March 16th event and we'll participate in that and we'll start kind of promoting and getting people invited for that. But be faithful to give on December 22 so that we can help fuel the tanks of these guys that are doing such a wonderful work. Would you help me thank Pastor Pig for being with us tonight?
[00:49:35] Speaker B: If you enjoyed this episode of Code Red Talk, help us out by liking, commenting and sharing it with others. And also be sure to subscribe to the the channel and turn on notifications so that you will be the first to know when new content drops. Thank you for joining us. I'm Zach Terry and this has been Code Red.
