NOTES ON THE FOUNDERS DOCUMENTARY:
In General: I hated their trailer, but I loved the full documentary.
Beginning thoughts:
Because the trailer was so bad, I prepared myself NOT to like the video. In fact, I was predisposed against it due to the trailer.
Beginning to watch it I saw that it was like 2 hours long and I thought (man, I don’t want to watch this for 2 hours). It seemed too long…. Man, this is going to be boring.
…but I only felt that way at first. And probably because I broke my viewing up over 3 days.
I watched 30-45 minutes a day until finished and I thought (at the end) that the final doc could have probably been 3-4 hours when watching it this way, or broken up into episodes. Having a course broken up over 30-minute episodes could allow even a 5-hour documentary diving deeper into these issues. So I started out dreading even 2 hours, but now I wish there was MORE.
One early criticism:
At 1 minute into the film they identified Woke-ism as
THE greatest danger in the church. What? really?
Naw. It is
one of
many dangers, but not the main danger. But anyway, YES, it is one of the dangers of the church today. And so, yes, this video is needed. We tend to think of the particular battle we are fighting as being THE main battle the church is facing. This is a necessary mindset to those fighting those battles, I suppose, to keep them motivated for the battle.
Sexual abuse is tied in with Wokeism:
Around the 6-minute mark we get into the sex abuse issue. I had serious reservations going into this subject, especially in how Rachel Denhollander was initially portrayed in the trailer before the trailer was edited due to overwhelming criticism.
I was very relieved to see how the documentary handled this issue, however. It seemed to be fair.
I believe the SBC has done a terrible job in addressing sexual abuse by clergy. Last year right after the bad Founders Trailer was released, Pastor Tom Ascol wrote an article saying that a BIGGER issue than sexual abuse in the church was an unregenerate membership. I thought this article was really dumb and ill-timed as well, since many of the abusers were not church members in need of discipline but rather clergy and pastors who were in charge of church discipline (and in some cases pastors have wrongly disciplined church members who divorced abusive spouses). Churches with tight church discipline also suffer from sexual abuse in those churches. And a huge problem in the church is authoritarianism and the misuse of church discipline. Yet Ascol wrote an article last year that even bigger than the problem of sex abuse in churches was unregenerate people on the church rolls. Come on!
So I prepared myself to be mad at the Founder Documentary on this issue. But I turned out fairly please.
The doc displayed the statements of unsound theologians like Dwight Mckissic (spelling?) trying to tie in abuse with the rejection of women preachers. If we hold to traditional gender roles and reject women preachers, then we are more prone to abuse in our churches, they claimed. That is a very questionable claim.
The full documentary did much better in addressing the sex abuse crisis in the SBC, whereas the trailer (rightfully) got a lot of flack.
Women Missionaries:
At 15 minutes women missionaries were addressed. At 16 minutes Tom Ascol answers these questions very well. The IMB allows for women to serve but says the role of pastor is still exclusively male. This was a very good part of the doc.
I have heard much over-reaction by many Reformed Baptist churches who will not send women missionaries to the field. They don't believe in women missionaries. So I am glad Ascol stated the IMB policy to allow women missionaries but to disallow them as pastors. The IMB position is the correct one.
Lottie Moon was mentioned WRONGLY as a woman missionary who became a preacher. But it should be noted that Lottie Moon tried very hard not to preach to men. Here is a good article on this topic:
https://sbcvoices.com/women-preachers-is-lottie-moon-our-standard/
Minute 27 is very good, the interview with Dr Mohler:
Mohler says he grew up in a culture where any abuse towards women was not tolerated. This was good. Traditional American culture would beat these men senseless. I have still heard of traditional pockets of America, like the Ozarks where the church heard of a man beating his wife and so the deacons (who are like elders in most Baptist churches) took the man down to the creek and beat the offender up, and then delivered the wife-abuser to the local Sheriff, and the Sheriff thanked the men of the church and then prosecuted the man. We’ve lost something in America.
Minute 30 is good in explaining how to handle abuse. But then Ascol goes back to the issue of regenerate church membership. But I ask: how can we tell who is regenerate and who is a pretender? And what of the clergy abuse committed? These are all presumed regenerate.
Again, Ascol is mistaking the issues. Ascol mixes these problems into his long-held belief (his hobby horse) that unregenerate church membership is THE main problem in the SBC. He says, again, that regenerate church membership is a BIGGER issue. Again, Ascol even wrote that article last year that sexual abuse was not the biggest problem in the church, but unregenerate church membership was. But the problem is that many of the church abuse issues are done by CLERGY, who are assumed to be regenerate. These clergy are vetted, they are looked up to…and then they abuse members of their flock. Ascol gets his priorities wrong. Healthy church discipline would still miss many of these pastors who abuse. Don’t divert the topic from sexual abuse to membership and church discipline. It is not a cure-all. Many pastors abuse their flock and even children, and they are assumed to be regenerate. And then, sometimes elders try to silence folks who speak out or, in several cases (such as the Village Church) the woman divorcing her husband for abuse is then church-disciplined. These are all greater problems than unregenerate church members on the church rolls. Ascol should have remained silent about his ecclesiological hobby-horse and stayed focused on the sex abuse issue and this was one mistake of the documentary. A very small mistake, though.
Then comes the most dramatic and compelling part of the whole documentary, a recap of the last SBC Convention. It is alarming, to say the least.
SBC Politicking (a look into the machinery of the Convention):
This was the most dramatic part of the documentary.
Minute 33 give us a glimpse into the politics of the SBC. There is definitely politicking involved and political maneuvering. Minute 35 was very telling. The political maneuvering within the SBC is disgusting. There seems an intentional effort to push these views in a way that minimizes debate. They tried to pack many resolutions together and pass them all at once to minimize scrutiny. It really shows how untrustworthy JD Grear is as a president. Next to Russ Moore, the documentary really proves Grear to be a terrible leader.
Again... I hated the Founders trailer, but minute 33-37 is what convinced me that this documentary was needed.
Minutes 49 and 50 are astounding. I am glad the Founders Doc put this in there.
Crazy James Cone:
At 58 minutes we see a shocking admission by James Cone, the founder of Black Liberation Theology that he has syncretized the gospel by bringing in the teachings of Malcolm X. He is trying to combine the Christian teaching of Martin Luther King with the teachings of Malcolm X. This shows that many blacks do the very thing that they accuse white Christians of doing, i.e., they value their skin color over their bibles.
At 1:02 Matt Chandler says some idiotic things, such as expressing a willingness to choose lesser qualified blacks over higher qualified whites just because they were black. This is not a good thing for truly qualified blacks because it casts their competence into doubt (“Did I get this position because of my skill or because they needed a token black guy?”). When Affirmative Action reigns, we start to wonder if our black surgeon or pilot is really as qualified as the others guys or if he is going to fly your family at 40,000 feet or slice you open merely because the school had to fill a token slot for a black. Chandler's comments at 1:02 are well-intentioned, but applied to all disciplines and jobs, merely makes one assume the lesser qualification of black employees or candidates in those jobs. We must maintain a pure meritocracy
At 1:17 Voddie Baucham knocks it out of the park in his assessment.
Too much Ascol:
Overall, I think the filmed focused on Pastor Tom Ascol too much, as if he is the only one against these issues. For instance, one long section shows Ascol setting up his laptop, sitting in his study. This doc is not about him, but it makes it appear he is the main champion of this cause. At 11 minutes he is just sitting there while a janitor pushes chairs and sets up, the lone never-resting warrior. The documentary featured him too much.
Whispering about sexual sin?:
At Minute 1:32 we see J.D. Grear saying more stupid things. He contends that God “whispers” about sexual sin. This stupid statement by JD. Grear really shows how unfit he is to be a leader. Dr Gagnon at 1:33-34 calls him out on it and really replies profoundly (as he always does).
Around minute 138 of course Voddie Baucham (as he always does) hits it out of the ballpark (again) in his interview with Pastor Ascol.
Final thoughts:
This was a needed documentary and I hope as many people see it as possible. The doc dealt with these issues very in-depth and fairly.
This leads me to question what went wrong with the trailer? The trailer did not seem to reflect the thoughtfulness and irenic tone of the full documentary. I hated the trailer, but loved this documentary. I know Marcus Pittman was involved somehow and sometimes has a snarky polemical tone. Maybe he was over-involved in the trailer and ruined it?
Were they trying to shock people with the trailer or to grab people’s attention? I don’t know; but it did not work. Perhaps they began with these mis-steps and the many criticisms prompted them to produce a better product? Several board members even left the board of the Founders, right? I wonder if they will reconsider now that the documentary has been shown to be high-quality and not like the trailer.
Perhaps they were needlessly confrontational in the trailer to build an interest? But not all attention is good attention, after all. We learned that as kids, didn't we? I am glad, however, to see the final product was so well-made.
Conclusion:
I do think it is time to leave the SBC. The Downgrade is happening. Kudos to the Founders for staying and fighting these errors from the inside.
My biggest takeaway from the video is that I should stay in a jungle setting and away from all the controversies in America. Every week there is a new Twitter war. Meanwhile, the world burns. But that does not mean these battles should not be fought, and I am glad for those folks called to fight these battles.
I do think these issues play out on the mission field. We have true justice issues in Papua. This is not social justice, but basic injustice as the proverbs tell us to speak against.
How do these issues tie into missions?
(1) Reactionary Americans have sent me emails because we use many godly women to teach children. Nope, I don’t believe in women pastors. But if one of my godly women co-workers is teaching the tribal youth and an adult man walks out of the jungle and sits and listen, so much the better.
(2) In the focus on social justice, I think many reformed types are becoming reactionary to true issues of justice on the mission field. Fighting child marriage does not mean you are an SJW. Some westerners are drawing false dichotomies and condemning valid fights on the mission field because they are seeing it through American lenses. The tribal folks have never heard of intersectionality, they just don’t want their land stolen, cut down in search of illegal gold, and then mercury dumped in their rivers. They are not SJWs for wanting this. They just want basic justice.
(3) There are missionary efforts focused on these justice issues, such as fighting human trafficking, etc. I would hate for these efforts to be labeled SJW or to lack support. They are doing good things. Prioritizing the Gospel does not mean we ignore human need. The Church is the answer to all of these problems.
