For the last several years, the social justice movement has swept the Southern Baptist Convention and it’s tentacles reach every possible corner of nearly every single church in the entire denomination leaving a stain of intersectionality, feminism, and even in some cases, LGBTQ activism.
The current Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) president, JD Greear has ushered in a new era for the denomination with his liberal rhetoric. From calling on Christians to stand up for LGBTQ rights to calling on Christians to stand up for Islamic rights, he has helped move the denomination from a solid, biblical God-honoring foundation to one that defies the mission of the Church.
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, Al Mohler has stood in the way of any meaningful conversation on the fact that social justice has been taking over the denomination and his protege, Russell Moore has been leading this dog and pony show. From open-borders initiatives to asserting that white people are idolaters of racial power, nobody can deny that Moore has ushered the denomination into this new paradigm.
But SBC leaders are quietly abandoning the entire narrative now, pretending that they never supported, or outright denying it altogether. Starting with Al Mohler, he’s held a number of podcasts where he’s recently denounced the worldview of Critical Race Theory — a worldview the denomination officially embraced and adopted in 2019 at the behest of Mohler’s underlings — and calling it “antithetical to the gospel.”
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And, after spending years promoting every possible tenet of social justice and intersectionality, SBC president JD Greear denounced it on Twitter recently.
Which can only lead one to wonder, why all of a sudden are these people — he just as recently as January, intended to double down on their support for Critical Race Theory and intersectionality at the convention all of a sudden jointly shift?
If the Southern Baptist Convention is anything, it isn’t coherent. And the denomination’s lack of any meaningful confession of faith and doctrinal standards leaves it open to being tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14) and never landing on anything to cohesively hold the denomination in place.
In other words, the denomination goes through cultural movements like dirty diapers and paper plates and when they’re done, they move on to the next. In this case, they appear to be abandoning social justice and embracing a new heresy — at least, new to the Southern Baptist Convention.
Enter the New Apostolic Reformation.
The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) is a dominionist cult — though they deny any organization — that typically embraces a movement called the Seven Mountain Mandate. The Seven Mountain Mandate is what NAR cultists say are seven cultural “mountains” that Christians must conquer in order to usher in the Kingdom of God. These sevel mountains include the arts and entertainment, business and finance, church and religion, media, education, family and health, and government.
The idea is that Christians must take “dominion” (hence the name, Dominionism) over these areas of culture and “Christianize” them. Once Christians have achieved full dominion over these, the Kingdom of God can finally be ushered into Earth.
This is where Ronnie Floyd comes in. Floyd, former SBC president and now president of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee, announced earlier this year that he was launching an investigation into the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) which is headed by Russell Moore (mentioned above). Moore, who has single-handedly turned the denomination into a social justice boat ride, has been under fire for his push to shift the denomination to the left. Now that he’s being investigated — and churches have withheld money from the denomination because people are tired of throwing their tithes and offerings at his agenda — other SBC leaders are taking note. Several high-ranking employees at the ERLC have moved on in recent months.
But Ronnie Floyd is a dominionist — though he denied this in an email to me a few years ago. His actions speak much louder than his words and his eschatology on several fronts is deeply flawed and over-realized. So much so that Floyd has embraced rank heresy.
Floyd is a friend of Mike Bickle — one of the most highly influential NAR leaders of today — and Floyd has spoken at his IHOPKC church in the past. After participating in the ecumenical NAR event and fully indulging himself in it (he wasn’t just there to preach the gospel, he is fully immersed in the movement), he has spent years attempting to move the denomination in that direction.
Floyd has an over-emphasized view of the power of prayer. While prayer is certainly biblical, edifying, worshipful, and powerful, Floyd’s version of prayer has entered the realm of mystical. And Floyd, as the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee and as a leader of the National Day of Prayer, Floyd is merging his mystical beliefs of prayer with the Seven Mountain Mandate and calling on Southern Baptists to join him.
And other SBC leaders have joined him. JD Greear, David Platt, Kevin Ezzell, and a host of other Southern Baptist leaders have joined him. But, interestingly, Russell Moore was not mentioned.
They’ve massaged the mountains a bit. They put the arts and entertainment mountain together with the media mountain and invented the military mountain. But military falls under the government mountain. Nevertheless, the United States New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) types are obsessed with their own US military and war.
It appears that this NAR heresy is going to be the next heresy that Southern Baptists are going to have to fight. The leadership of this denomination are so egregiously undiscerning and unqualified that they just take whatever cultural movement is tossed in their lap at the moment — whether it’s from the progressive left or the conservative right — and run with it until it dies or something new comes along.
