Contemporary debates on alcohol and the bible hit a new turn this past week as a state assembly of Baptists now link loan money to church planters and their teaching of “the strong biblical warnings” against drinking beer and wine.
Steve McCoy, a SBC pastor and blogger, wrote about a Christianity Today news piece regarding a “brewing battle” with in the Missouri Baptist Convention (the state division of the Southern Baptist Convention):
Church planters who receive money from the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) must now teach alcohol abstinence. The policy change was sparked by the Journey, a growing interdenominational church that borrowed $200,000 from the MBC to renovate a church two years ago. One of the Journey’s outreach groups meets in a St. Louis microbrewery.
Apparently, this emerging church plant has gatherings at three local pubs, called “Theology at the
Bottleworks,” to “reach people who are actively opposed to Christianity, by discussing contemporary cultural issues in a neutral environment” as founding pastor Darrin Patrick explains. These gatherings attract around 1,500 people total each week, creating safe space for non-followers to explore the intersection of God’s story and theirs. And the MBC has a problem with this style of missional engagement.
The outreach caught the MBC off guard, said interim executive director David Tolliver. “We need to engage the culture, but without compromising our biblical, traditional Baptist values,” Tolliver said. “For me, that includes abstinence from alcohol.”
Two questions come to mind: 1) What does “traditional Baptist values” have anything to do with anything? and 2) Where in the Bible can anyone say that God cares about alcohol?
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The first question is important, because it is in inextricably linked to the second: the executive director of the MBC essentially links historic, institutional Baptist “values” (read: preferences) to what is “biblical.” So what exactly is “biblical” in regards to alcohol?
The only, and I say it again…ONLY (as in singular, just so we are all on the same page) place in the Scriptures that references alcohol in relation to an instruction on living is Ephesians 5:18:
Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.
If you look at the way this passage of Scripture reads, Paul links alcohol (wine) to a Rhythm of Life; in this verse, the Spirit’s way of living (which in essence are the fruits of the spirit) is set over and against overly intoxicated patterns of living (debauchery), not the consumption of alcohol. Alcohol and wine isn’t the issue. The issue is conformity to a wild, promiscuous pattern of this world that has no place in the life of a follower of the Way.
That’s it. That’s what God cares about. God cares that we live in the Way of Jesus and live a life controlled by His Rhythm, and not the steps or missteps that result from intoxication and excess.
So if this is what God cares about, what do “traditional Baptist values” have anything to do with anything?
Nothing!
Well, actually, they do have to do with something: white, old men’s personal preferences for how to live and what to put in the body. And taking it a step further, what constitutes “doing church,” where church is, how to be a part of the lives of those who are “outside” of the church walls, how to engage those people, and what is an acceptable or unacceptable form of engagement.
What irritates me about this whole drama isn’t so much that “traditional Baptist values” exclude alcoholic consumption so much as those exclusive, value preferences are placed within a “biblicalness” that far surpasses what is biblical. And more so, this tradition and preference is completely acontextual and wholly unhelpful to reaching the “Other.”
Prefer alcoholic abstinence if you must, SBC. But please, please do not equate traditional, value preferences with Scripture. And please, please keep your grubby dogmatic hands off of missional, gospel enterprises that reach people outside of the sterile, drooping walls of Churchianity!
