Topic category:  Religion & Philosophy in the News

David Platt has been elected president of the Southern Baptist International Missions Board.

The pastor is also author of “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From The American Dream”.

A description of the tome at Amazon.com reads, “It's easy for the American Christian to forget how Jesus said how his followers would actually live...They would, he [Jesus] said , leave behind security, money, even family for him.”

Here we go with yet another attempt to use missions not so much as a methodology to bring those in other lands to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ but rather as a pretext to bash the American way of life.

For how are those things listed above: security, money, convenience, and family any different than what the inhabitants of nearly every other country on earth desire?

If one does not consider security all that important, perhaps one should be willing to exchange places with the persecuted and slaughtered Christian populations of Iraq and Syria.

Without money and security, it is doubtful that Rev. Platt would have wiggled his way into a megachurch pastorate nor American's rich enough to purchase his reflectively narcissistic manifestos.

God has indeed blessed America with an abundance of these things that have enabled Pastor Platt to become something of a celebrity in Evangelical Christian circles but which he begrudges the remainder of his fellow countrymen and coreligionists.

Is there a reason why we must flagellate ourselves in shame because of what God has given us?

For example, on the list it is insinuated that loyalty to family even when they are not tempting you towards things forbidden by God is not so much a strength but rather a weakness.

Yet the very same leftwing religionists that applaud the renunciation of bourgeoisie values insist that we must embrace nearly every illegal that pours across the border because these new arrivals are such family oriented people (even though the relationship arrangement being admired is not so much pro-child as it is the mother being afraid to cut off carnal access whenever daddy comes home sauced three sheets to the wind).

Interestingly, most of the migrants pour here for the same things we are supposed to be wracked with guilt over like Phil Donahue for possessing.

In his acceptance of the presidency of the Southern Baptist International Missions Board (a body found nowhere in Scripture if one is going to argue how we as Christians could lead more spiritually meritorious lives if we were more willing to embrace penury and destitution), “We talk all the time at Brook Hill [the church Platt pastors] about laying down a blank check with out lives, with no strings attached, willing to go wherever He leads, give whatever He asks, and do whatever He commands in order to make His glory known among the nations.”

And that is absolutely correct.

However, that blank check is to be written out to God, not so much the prelates and functionaries operating in His name through the organized church.

As Ann Coulter quipped, how come no one can serve God in America anymore?

It is about time religious leaders stop bashing those in America leading the perfectly ordinary lives that keep the mundane operations of a complex society functioning so robustly that there exists sufficient leisure time for a particular class to arise that enjoys nothing more than to wallow in this kind of existential criticism.

By Frederick Meekins

Frederick Meekins
Issachar Bible Church & Apologetics Research Institute

Biography - Frederick Meekins

Frederick Meekins is an independent theologian and social critic. Frederick holds a BS in Political Science/History, a MA in Apologetics/Christian Philosophy from Trinity Theological Seminary, and a PhD. in Christian Apologetics from Newburgh Theological Seminary.