The Age of the Predator? A Question of SBC priorities

A pastor who lives fairly close to me who has become someone that I really value and also someone who encourages me as he leads his church to grow is David Kaster. David is the pastor of Fairport Baptist Church in Fairport, MO. Fairport is a town where, literally, the only features to the town are their town cafe and the church. In spite of these demographic obstacles David has led FBC to become a church that is growing at an incredible rate and who is reaching a younger generation in a way that precious few churches have found possible. In a recent email to me David addressed the quote that I posted below in the post "Itching to Fight." David's email was extremely insightful, I thought, and so I have asked his permission to reproduce it for your benefit. He has graciously allowed me to do so and ! so it is below.

History has shown us that churches started because of a fight tend to continue to fight. When they cannot fight some common outside foe, they will inevitably turn on each other, I submit that the same basic trend is present within the Convention today. Conservatives once rallied the masses to stand against incorrect doctrine and called for a return to the teaching of the Word of God without apology. The fight was so successful that it is now believed by some that the only way to succeed is to fight. Many of the independent Baptist churches I knew and attended growing up in Iowa in the 1980’s followed a similar path. It has left them in ruin. When we are more dedicated to identifying and exploiting the small differences between us than promoting and celebrating the great things we have in common; we have forsaken the very essence of fellowship and what it means to be the people of God. As a pastor dedicated to the fundamentals of God’s Word, a! nd a man with very conservative values, I find myself an observer of this slow motion train wreck. And I have to ask myself: what good is it to be so right that there is no one left? Isolation is the goal of a predator.How ironic that those once seeking to save the Convention from dead theology and ‘easy believe-ism’, would now divide us until there is no real association between us, and instruct us that we cannot believe in anything they have not endorsed. This new wave of legalism and the furor with which it is unleashed will lead to death just as surely as the rampant liberalism of the past generation. While the time of the pacifist may be past for now, I fear the carnage that we will surely see if this proves to be the age of the predator. (emphasis mine)