This past Sunday, a bit over a 6th of the Southern Baptist congregation showing up for the vote elected Julie Pennington-Russell, a married mother of two, to become the senior pastor of their Atlanta-area megachurch.Said Pennington-Russell, she is "for anything that brings people together rather than divides them." And, "Sometimes I think you have to choose to set some of the divisiveness aside and lean into the worthy part of the event."
Umm...This means you "sometimes choose to set aside" the very clear and timeless teachings of Scripture. For only then can you "lean into" the politically-correct, pop culture, feminization of the modern American church.
Here's the story from Christian Post.
And here is an example of Pastor Pennington-Russell's preaching in which you'll read this illuminating paragraph, one that shows how she mystically "boils down" Christianity to remove such restrictive little bits as doctrine, rules (including, of course Scriptural rules relating to the qualifications of elders in Christ's Church), creeds, and confessions.
...See, if you take Christianity and cook it down to the essence—boil away all of the peripheral concerns—you find that one thing remains. What remains is not a doctrine, is not a set of rules, is not a creed, not a confession. You boil the Christian faith down to the essence, and what remains is a face, and it's the face of absolute, unambiguous, undiluted love. And if we're wise, we'll take the advice of the writer of Hebrews and fix our eyes on that face—the face of Jesus, the Christ...
Pennington-Russell, by the way, embraces "a big tent philosophy" and has served the liberal Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Also, Pennington-Russell was one of the main speakers for the New Baptist Covenant meeting last winter organized by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to create more of a network of liberal Baptists to work against the influence of the Southern Baptist Convention.
