Thursday, January 11, 2007

Out-Fundamentalling Fundamentalists?

Doug Smith has written a great article for SI that summarizes a Capitol Hill Baptist Church Weekender. Doug's experience closely mirrors mine from spring '05. It had such an encouraging impact on me in my love and appreciation for the church that I applied for one of the internships to which Doug refers.

Doug wrote this about CHBC and fundamentalism:
Several Weekender attendees were current or former students at fundamentalist seminaries. Several CHBC members had come from fundamentalist churches and schools. Have these individuals become liberal? Or have they only joined because they could not find a “fundamental” church in the area? I don’t know about the second question, but as for the first, the answer is no. They have not turned liberal. They were attracted by the focus on practicing the Bible as a serious community of believers at CHBC and appreciated the sound teaching and preaching. They were not against separating from false teachers, but they obviously had jettisoned some of the more extreme varieties of secondary separation. While many fundamentalists certainly would not laud CHBC as a bastion of Fundamentalism, they should admit that there is much to be thankful for there.
Doug said this quite well, but I'll take it a step further. I absolutely do think CHBC is a bastion of fundamentalism. I think it is "out-fundamentalling" most of the fundamentalist movement when it comes to foundational matters of Scripture, the gospel, local church health, discipleship, and evangelism.

3 comments:

Ben said...

Interesting you should say that, Joel. It actually points out my point of disagreement with your grading system. I know you've taken tons of heat over it, so I'm not intending to add more.

But I think the reality is that you have constructed a grading system for the fundamentalist movement, not the fundamentalist idea. A system based on the idea would put some type A's, B's and C's all in the same category, whereas some type A's would be type NF for "Not Fundamentalist."

Take that for what it's worth. You know my appreciation for you and your ministry.

Anonymous said...

Well Ben... if you think things are so great there, maybe you should just move there... oh wait... nevermind.

Ben said...

What a great idea, Jason. Why don't you come up here this weekend and share more ideas with me.