Here’s the riddle for the day: What happens when
Christian/Evangelical organizations act like those in the non-Christian world?
Answer: [I’ll provide one for you later.]
If you’re having difficulty, let me give you a few facts to clarify
your thinking.
Every day I receive an e-mail from Baptist Press. It bills itself as “News with a Christian
Perspective” and it’s a publication of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
One of the stories in the May 24th edition concerned Richard Land
receiving the “Watchman on the Wall” award from the Family Research Council
(FRC) and its president Tony Perkins. Land is the outgoing president of the Ethics
& Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization of the SBC.
“How wonderful,” I thought. “I wonder exactly what the
Watchman on the Wall award is.” So I pop up the ol’ Google and off we go. A
simple search led me to a page with this headline “Family Research Council
President Tony Perkins to Receive Distinguished Service Award from ERLC.” What?
Did I misread the abbreviations?
Turns out this is a press release - a press release announcing that Perkins was
going to receive an award in February 2013 from the ERLC. A what’s worse is
that the award Perkins was receiving was the Richard Land Distinguished Service Award from the ERLC.
Holy smokes, boys. This looks a lot like organizational
incest. Couldn’t you have waited a year or two to hand the awards to each other
instead of three months?!
ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE: It doesn’t necessarily tarnish your
testimony with the non-believers of the world (they probably don’t give a hoot
anyway), it destroys your credibility with the believers you are trying to minister
to and influence.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE: With these
gentlemen parading around and patting each other on the back, why would any
hard working Christian want to donate his/her hard-earned money to either
organization?
Come on, gentlemen. Surely you must see how bad this looks!
It smacks of Pharisaism.
If you want to follow the trail of the smelly fish, here are
the links to the two stories.
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