I attended my first Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois when I was 8 years old. Needless to say, I have attended my share of conventions and enough for the share of some others.\u00a0 I enjoyed every one, partly because it was a place and a time to see friends, former students, past colleagues, etc., but also because it was always the best show in town (well, with exception of when it met in the city of a major league baseball team when they were playing home games). There seemed to always be a conflict, a disagreement, a debate on the floor, motions amended, and on and on.\u00a0 Because my pastor-father knew the insides of most of these, I learned from him.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never forget the year someone made a motion that we pray for rain.\u00a0 There was a\u00a0 second and a unanimous vote in favor of praying.\u00a0 My Dad turned to me and said, \u201cFirst unanimous vote I\u2019ve seen in years.\u201d\u00a0 This past week, we had another disagreement.\u00a0 This time is was over an amendment that would withdraw fellowship from churches who had women on their ministerial staff who carried the title of \u201cpastor\u201d \u2013 such as Children\u2019s Pastor, Student Pastor, Women\u2019s Pastor, Senior Pastor, etc. The vote was 61.45% for and 38.38 against.\u00a0 Because the amendment needed a 2\/3 majority to pass, it failed, and social media was flooded with the bad attitudes of the losers.\u00a0 Now that the vote is over, I would just like to encourage messengers on both sides of the vote to re-read the words of Jesus in Matthew 52:26, \u201cPut your sword in its place,\u00a0for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.\u201d Sheathe your swords, my friends, sheathe your swords.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I attended my first Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois when I was 8 years old. Needless to say, I have attended my share of conventions and enough for the share of some others.\u00a0 I enjoyed every one, partly because it was a place and a time to see friends, former students, past…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3519,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions\/3519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}