There’s a sickness, or possibly a judgment, in the house of God, and no polite resolution or committee report is going to fix it. It’s the kind of sickness that made prophets tear their clothes and cry out at the city gates. The kind that takes the murder of a man and uses it as an opportunity to lecture the living about tone.

This past Sunday, James T. Roberson III—pastor of Bridge Church NYC and a flagship product of the SBC’s North American Mission Board—stepped into the pulpit with the blood of Charlie Kirk barely dry and decided that what the sheep really needed was a rebuke.

“Charlie Kirk and other political activists… fight for Jesus with anger and harshness and rage,” he said, as if the funeral had already passed and it was time to get to the postmortem. Then came this: “I also denounced the way he carried himself and especially the way he talked about black people… Just because someone fought for Jesus doesn’t mean they fought like Jesus.”

It felt less like a pastoral reflection and more like a second assassination.

Watch:

But perhaps the most telling part of Roberson’s script is his implication that Kirk was responsible for causing his own death because of his own words:

Charlie Kirk and other political activists, particularly some on the evangelical right, often see ideas and policies that claim to be Christian, but they’re fought with in a carnal posture. They’re fighting for Jesus with anger and harshness and rage. And the danger of that is when you when you fight spiritual battles in a carnal way, the world responds with that same carnality.

I’m guessing Roberson believes that Jesus, too, was fighting spiritual battles “in a carnal way,” which led the world to “respond with that same carnality”? Or maybe he’s just another unqualified fool in the pulpit, like so many other NAMB church plant pastors.

But this wasn’t an off-the-cuff slip. This was catechism—exactly the kind of product the NAMB machine was designed to produce. Exactly the kind that is informed by Critical Race Theory being a “useful analytical tool” sanctioned by the Southern Baptist Convention.

NAMB leaders, Kevin Ezell and Vance Pitman, have spent years turning church planting into a branding campaign, churning out pastors who talk about multiplication and fresh vision while platforming women elders and preaching Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion like it was handed down at Sinai.

When challenged, they don’t repent, they rebrand. When women preach, they shrug. When plants go egalitarian, they look the other way. As long as the metrics look good, the checks keep clearing.

And so we get pastors like this who cannot simply mourn the dead without apologizing to the world first. Pastors who quote 2 Corinthians 10 about spiritual warfare and then use it to tell you to sit down, be quiet, and stop fighting so hard. Pastors who treat boldness as the enemy and conviction as the real threat, instead of the wolves who devour the sheep.

But Scripture never calls us to wince at boldness. Jesus was crucified for being too clear, not too winsome. The apostles weren’t accused of turning the world upside down because they whispered—about homosexuality or anything else. They were accused because they proclaimed the truth and refused to bend.

NAMB, however, has built a machine that bends first and asks questions later. It catechizes pastors to speak softly to wolves and scold the sheep for barking. It has turned the Great Commission into a diversity initiative with a worship set, and the product is men like James Roberson—not the exception, but the standard. His prayer for Christians to be “wise about what they post online” might as well have been a prayer of thanks for the NAMB directors who signed his checks.

The tragedy is not just that Charlie Kirk is dead. I myself have been critical of him and his movement…but for much different reasons than Roberson’s. But the real tragedy is that his death will be used as yet another sermon illustration to warn the church against standing up for its biblical convictions and to convince the sheep that their barking is the real problem. To preach a gospel of optics that pleases the watching world while leaving the wolves unchallenged.

The house is burning. The watchmen are fiddling with their branding guides. And unless the SBC repents, the machine will keep churning out more Robersons—shepherds who fear headlines more than they fear God—and the sheep will keep being scolded for daring to scream while the slaughter continues.

Yet, in all this, God will not be mocked. He will be glorified. Either in our salvation or our judgment.