The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention met in Nashville last month. Morris Chapman, the president of the Executive Committee, asked a pertinent, poignant, and penetrating question: “Is our convention any better spiritually because biblical conservatives are leading?”

It is a good question and worthy of some careful, prayerful consideration. I would like to weigh in with those who believe that the Southern Baptist Convention is better off as a result of the Conservative Resurgence.

I do not believe that we as Southern Baptists are anywhere close to being where we need to be spiritually, ecclesiologically, denominationally, or otherwise.

Some of our churches are experiencing a taste of revival and witnessing the salvation of souls on a regular basis, but most Southern Baptists are as far from revival as Rosie O’Donnell is from getting her own talk show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Prior to the 2005 annual SBC meeting in Nashville Bobby Welch, who was serving as the president of our Convention, stated, “Southern Baptists are in the doldrums,” and indicated that the plateau in the number of baptisms reported annually was a “worrisome sign.”

However, when I consider what has happened to other mainline protestant denominations during the past 28 years I cannot help but wonder what would have happened to Southern Baptists if we had not experienced the well documented “resurgence” that started with the historic election of Adrian Rogers to the presidency of the Convention in Houston in 1979.

We are living in an age of apostasy and many evangelical churches have dumbed down Christianity so that their teachings are based on pop psychology, self-esteem, tolerance, and secular humanism. A strict, uncompromising commitment to the Word of God is not well received in many quarters in America, but Southern Baptists have made a commitment to embrace the Bible as inerrant and infallible regardless of the criticism or the consequences.

The Conservative Resurgence has probably had a greater impact upon our seminaries than anything else. My own seminary education was largely a disappointment. Until recent years, training ministers to be doctrinally sound and equipping them to develop a theological approach to ministry was overshadowed by other concerns in many of our seminaries. Relativism was exalted. Existentialism was preferred over truth. Style was more important than substance. Dogma was heresy. The goal apparently was to get students to be enamoured with some new idea or philosophy.

As a result of the Conservative Resurgence new seminary presidents came on the scene, presidents who were inerrantists. Not only did substance and doctrine begin to transcend style and methodology, but passion and inspiration were added to the educational process – the result – “scholarship on fire.”

While Southern Baptists generally may have embraced biblical inerrancy, we need to make sure that our behavior is compatible with our beliefs. We need to make soul winning a priority. We need to make sure that our lines of communication are open to one another, that we are a family of believers, and that we are not resistant to change.

In the Peanuts cartoon Lucy showed Charlie Brown her fingers and admitted that separately they were small digits without much power or influence. Then she made a fist and boldly stated, “When all my fingers come together into a fist like this, it is a mighty, powerful, indestructible force.”

Charlie Brown looked down at his fingers and remarked, “I wish you guys could get together like that.”

I have never been for getting together just for the sake of getting together, but if Southern Baptists, who have proven that we can get together on the inerrancy of Scripture, would resolve to get “in accord” as the early Christians did prior to Pentecost, we just might have another great revival.

Southern Baptists are made up of Calvinists, non-Calvinists, charismatics, culture warriors, bloggers, and educated, uneducated, rich, poor, famous, even infamous people all in need of revival. We are certainly not where we need to be spiritually, but I shudder to think of where we would be if the Conservative Resurgence had never occurred.