I think many of us should, at least those who have suffered at the hands of the IFB and SBC. It's crazy how those who believe that the pastor should have most of the power, especially in light of all of the stuff that has gone and the damage that has been done to homes, families, and churches, need to have their heads examined. There should be safeguards.
You just gave me a perspective I hadn’t really considered before. IFB churches are fiercely independent and like to condemn churches that are under the shadow of denominational leadership, but at the same time, they are more than willing to give a pastor 100% autonomy to act like an overlord and rule with an iron fist. I know in some IFB churches I’ve attended the pastor is supposedly accountable to the deacons, but the thing is, no one becomes a deacon without the permission of the pastor. It’s really a win-win situation for the pastor with no real accountability unless the pastor gets caught doing something so horrible that the deacons have no choice but to dismiss the pastor—and even this doesn’t always happen!
In Presbyterianism, pastors are accountable to their presbyteries rather than the churches they serve. A pastor is a member of the presbytery that oversees churches in the area he lives and is thus not a member of the local church. At the church level itself, he is accountable to the session, which oversees the church and represents it before presbytery. One of the problems with Baptist polity is that pastors are accountable to nobody, and this can breed abuse if things go wrong. Pastor worship is present not only among orthodox Baptist people—liberal ones do it, too! Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas under George Mason is a case in point. Mason (whom I believe may have ironically been a Hyles man—though I have not found proof for this, though I know he did his grad training at Southwestern before the Resurgence). He also did some undergrad work at the University of Miami, and was even on their football team. Anyway—Mason (from what I have read and have been told by an ex church member of his) used the traditional Baptist pastor-is-a-dictator thing to push liberalism on unsuspecting congregants ever so subtly in such a way that it eventually caused the churches he served to split. This man was at the church in AL that Mason pastored just before he came to Wilshire. He says that at the time, Mason and his wife were a young couple in their twenties excited to have their first church as pastor and pastor's wife, and suffice it to say say that with at least three small kids and another one on the way (ca. 1984), who were they to judge? The church was older and declining, and thought that a younger pastor would help them grow—especially in attracting families, youth, and young adults. Long story short, his insistence on women deacons fractured the church. Fast forward years later and the same happened at Wilshire over gays.
I was nine the first pastoral change I had. Our pastor (now dead since 2010 or so) had accepted a call to pastor a church (SBC) in GA, and would be leaving us within a month or so. The new pastor we called was a Cuban named Oscar Ramirez, who ended up starting a Spanish ministry to the people living around Hialeah, and after we left, Graham Baptist Church transformed from a traditional white American congregation into a Hispanic one that did everything in Spanish. Our family and another one were the only technical minorities there, though in reality we likely had a little more looking back, since one of the ladies (she ran the nursery and was the church van driver) was married to a Hispanic guy despite being white American (Paula and Ody Valhuerdi). Their daughter Lauren was in the youth group when we came there in 2000, and I was basically one of her favorite little ones. The next pastoral change that I remember was when the senior pastor of New Testament Baptist Church was fired (Matt Pettit) in 2012 due to an inappropriate relationship he had with a woman from the Dade location. The last pastoral change I went through was in Washington, DC when David Renwick retired and we had an interim for about nine months (Allan Poole) who looked after us until we got our current pastor, Ray Hylton—a Jamaican and the second non-American in a row to pastor the National Presbyterian Church. Pastor Renwick was Scottish.
1982 - Ed Morris - Southside Baptist Church, Millington TN - Got baptized here (Now with the Lord)
I find it interesting that you had Adrian Rogers as your pastor. He was one of the folks who helped bring the SBC out of its flirtation with liberalism in the 70s-80s during the Resurgence. One of my pastor friends from back in the DC area actually heard him preach at his school growing up in the early 70s. Dr. Hayward says that Rogers preached on Jonah, and from what he can remember, it was one of the most powerful sermons he'd ever heard in his life. He looked up to men like Rogers, Lee, Roberson, Criswell, Rice, and the rest of their crowd despite obvious doctrinal disagreements (Larry is Presbyterian and they were Baptist). Larry basically implied once that it was while hearing Rogers that God called him to preach. Larry was ordained in the old PCUS (Southern Presbyterians) in 1978 at the age of 23, merely five years before reunion with the more liberal PCUSA (Northern Presbyterians). He has pastored Westminster for 20+ years now.
It was a God thing. I came to faith during the summer between my junior and senior years of highschool. I was occasionally attending a Lutheran church at the time but I wasn't being trained in the Word... To me, church was mostly dead; certainly not like the Young Life meetings I was going to. Long story short, I got involved with Bellevue Baptist after I joined the Navy and for the first time in my life, I was in a church that taught from the Word. It was ALIVE! The teaching of the Word resonated with me and I had to have more. Since early 1983, my walk with the Lord had been a mostly upward adventure.
I'm friends with a family at church in DC named Alms.The husband (Bill) is the son of a Lutheran preacher, and the wife (Kimberly) grew up Baptist. They decided on the Presbyterian church because it would be a good way to balance how they both grew up in a middle way (even though Presbyterians are closer to Baptists than they are to Lutherans from a doctrinal standpoint. Doctrinally and even structurally, I would say that Lutherans are closer to Episcopalians of the traditional kind). Fine Christian people the Almses, though the oldest kid (a daughter named Catherine) is not a Christian and does not identify as such despite being baptized as a baby by her paternal grandpa). They were married at National Methodist a few blocks away from our church (National Presbyterian) in 2005. Bill's a doctor (dermatology and internal medicine) who met his wife at church in the early 2000s or late '90s when he was in his thirties and she in her middle twenties. His Lutheran church was very solid and Bible-believing, though in terms of service would have been akin to a toned-down Catholic service. Very formal and liturgical. This is because Martin Luther retained much of the old Catholic structure when creating the Lutheran religion, discarding anything else that he felt was unbiblical, like the mass or transubstantiation (though Lutherans hold to something similar called consbstantation, wherein the broad and wine are indeed the body and blood of Christ, yet the bread and wine also still remain bread and wine and don't physically change into the literal body and blood as Rome teaches). This's higher than the Presbyterian or Baptist views of the supper. For Baptists today (though not historically), the supper is a mere symbolic thing done in remembrance of Christ, but for Presbyterians like me (and historic Baptists), communion is a means of grace in which Christ is spiritually present in the bread and wine—though only for those who believe in faith. Physically, the bread and juice are still just that—bread and juice. If you're saved and born again and take communion, for Presbyterians you already are eating the body and blood, but lost people aren't. I believe the early Christians viewed the supper this way, too.