For sometime I've been concerned about the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention. As the old guard passes off the scene and the new guard fills their shoes, it appears to me that we are walking away from what we've stood for in the past. For instance, the cooperative program, our "rope of sand," is being rubbed out with the feet of the new guard. Their "rethinking church" is sinking our convention. As a result, mission giving is plummeting to the point of drastically reducing the SBC footprint in our world, as well as to the point of imperiling the future survival of local associations and even state conventions. As disconcerting as all of this is to me, what I find even more disturbing is some of the actions and recent comments of SBC leaders, like Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

I recently took Moore to task in a Time Capsule for his contention that Alabama judges must either resign or uphold the same-sex marriage ruling of a renegade federal judge who took it upon herself to overrule the voices of 697,591 Alabama voters. According to Moore, this judge, Callie Granade, must be submitted to out of "respect for the law." As I pointed out in our recent Time Capsule, my contention with Mr. Moore is over his definition of the law, which is apparently anything a judge says, regardless of whether or not it is constitutional or has any legal precedence. Unlike Mr. Moore, I don't believe we are required by our "respect for the law" to coronate judges and turn their gavels into scepters and their bench into a throne.

Another thing that disturbs me about Russell Moore is his apparent sympathy with our president's declaring of millions of illegal immigrants "legal" by executive fiat. How else can you explain Moore's meeting with President Obama in the Oval Office over the matter and his referring to Jesus as an undocumented immigrant? 

While I could go on for quite awhile over other things that Moore has said or done, like his recent participation in a conference on marriage and the family at the Vatican―the seat of the world's foremost apostate church―I'll refrain from doing so and conclude my remarks with a recent and most disturbing quote. According to Mr. Moore, "The time has come to replace moral majoritarianism with moral communitarianism." This truly troubling quote raises the question of whether or not Russell Moore is an adherent to communitarianism. Communitarianism has been described as a sort of "communism lite" or "mild-form" of socialism. It is the belief that social justice may be brought about by merging socialism with capitalism, as well as by merging government and business with the church. 

Russell Moore has every right to say whatever he believes; however, as a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, he has no right to misrepresent Southern Baptists as adherents to communitarianism, allies of the world's foremost apostate church, and advocates of illegal immigration and same-sex marriage. If the SBC is going to remain silent while Moore keeps speaking out, then it must not care if one of its spokesmen is misrepresenting us. Of course, there is a worse case scenario. Moore may be accurately representing what the SBC has become, in which case, it's time for Southern Baptists like me to find a new place to go!