Here’s the first suggestion for steps to improve things in the SBC. It’s probably also the one that may disappoint some of you the most: We need to be more fair and less condemnatory toward (ostensibly) minority positions like the @BaptistNetwork.

One unhealthy characteristic of our present state is the degree to which a cabal of influential people can make it very hard to get anything approaching a fair hearing for a different point of view.

Very good ideas (including trustee training, which will be an item I will take up in a future thread) are made as motions time and again only to vanish into the apparatus.

believe the idea is widespread within our convention that “the platform” is not there to empower the messengers but rather to act as a gatekeeper. Different years have seen different tactics emerge, and they haven’t all been equally bad.

But during the GCR floor debates a motion to amend that had earned a valid second was just ignored while the platform, who didn’t like the amendment, decided to try to craft a substitute rather than to allow debate and a floor vote on the valid motion to amend.

The brother who brought that amendment: The next time he has an idea for change, how likely is he to peaceably trust our polity and do it the right way by stepping up to a microphone and bringing an amendment?

If you have the perception of oligarchy, then people who desire change seek to foment a coup, because the only way to change an oligarchy is to form your own cabal to replace the current rulers. And so we see attempt after attempt to do just that.

I believe that God uses dissenting views. Even movements that have 30 things wrong with them may bring us one idea that is a valid improvement of our organization and our mission.

We need to work hard to make sure that we treat people with differing points of view—within reason and within the bounds of our statement of faith and other boundaries—that we treat them as brothers and sisters in Christ and that we listen carefully to what they are saying.

By taking that approach and by determination to make our polity more accessible and user-friendly, we encourage people who have a different point of view to use healthy means to express and organize that point of view.

Let the messengers be the gatekeepers. Let more things come to a floor vote. Let more people speak. Let more people listen. Trust the work of the Holy Spirit among believers to take us, in the long run, in the direction of His will.

From what I have seen, our voting messengers have an average of getting things right that far exceeds the batting average of the Toronto Blue Jays.