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by  Dr. Ergun Mehmet Caner                                                                                                             Vol. XXI, No. 8, September 2008

I remember attending my first Evangelism Conference, almost twenty-five years ago. I traveled with my pastor down to the Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, Georgia, to hear some of the greatest preachers of the day.

I was a young Christian, and I was overwhelmed. As men such as Junior Hill, Bill Stafford, and Manley Beasley preached, my pastor would whisper who they were to me, and give me their background. Pastors like Adrian Rogers and Jerry Vines preached with fire, and I heard of the amazing work God was doing in their churches. As a neophyte preacher boy, I listened intently, because I wanted God to show me how I could follow them, as they followed Christ.

Oddly today, the SBC no longer emphasizes these events. It is difficult to even get a church to hold a protracted meeting, much less an evangelism conference!

While we could bemoan this situation as a result of busy lives and busier schedules, I believe there is another culprit – the blog. Blogs are online opinion journals, covering a wide variety of topics, and there are now millions of them. It seems that every pastor, every church, and every Christian has one.

The problem is, a blog is just an opinion, and as we know, Baptists have many opinions. It has been said that if you get twenty Baptists in a room, you can find forty opinions. This is very true. There are no qualifications for blogging, just a computer and a keyboard. Some in the SBC have become notorious, not for building a mighty soul-winning church, but for being loud.

Simple logic could remedy the situation. If a man has “grown” his church from 200 to 80, I don’t believe his opinion on church growth is necessarily one any of us should follow. And perhaps the proposed solutions these bloggers offer could also be the problem. How can anyone effectively pastor a church when they are spending fifteen hours a day on the internet, writing blogs on how to pastor a church?

I would like to suggest a new corollary to an old piece of wisdom: Those who can’t preach…teach. And those who can’t do either…blog.

[Dr. Ergun Mehmet Caner is the President of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and Professor of Theology and History at Liberty University. He writes a regular column for The Baptist Banner. For comments, he can be reached at ecaner@liberty.edu <mailto:ecaner@liberty.edu> . For complaints, don’t bother.]