In an effort to understand "the other side," I browsed around a few Arminian websites just to get a feel for what they believe and their reasons for believing it. First, let me just say that I was surprised to learn that Calvinists and the Boogey Man are cut from the same cloth. One site, baptistfire.com, actually has an entire section of their website devoted to warning Baptists of the impending doom Calvinists are bringing into "The Church" (for those of you that don't know, that's the Southern Baptist Convention). The main recurring theme is that Calvinism is contrary to evangelism, and that a church will grow stagnant and eventually die if Calvinism is allowed to creep in unchecked.?

One of the most troubling of these articles was written by Bobby Welch, the current President of the Southern Baptist Convention. In his church's newsletter, Welch gives a lengthy excerpt from a paper by Dr. Steve W. Lemke, Provost and Professor ad New Orleans Baptist Theology Seminary. In this paper, Lemke addresses the question of, "How does Calvinism and great commission evangelism connect?"

Lemke's premise, like so many misguided Arminians before him, is that Calvinism pours water on the fires of evangelism. His route to proving this theory is an interesting one. He and a colleague "compared the baptism, worship attendance, and membership patterns" from 2004 in Southern Baptist churches that are endorsed by Founder's Fellowship. The study produced "startling results" in his opinion, though one should not be surprised that Lemke's study miraculously supported his ideology. Please feel free to read the entire article if you would like, but I will do my best to summarize his findings below. To be fair, I should also point out that Lemke was rather gracious to Calvinists in most sections of the full paper, with the exception of his handling of Calvinists and evangelism.

Here's a look at the data Lemke compiled. He found that not a single one of the Founders churches (FCs) had more than 40 baptisms, and 80% had fewer than 10. Their baptism-to-member ratio was 1:62, compared with 1:42 in "normal" Southern Baptist churches (nSBCs). Over 42% of the FCs had fewer than 100 members, compared to 24% of nSBCs. He also found that FCs were 10% more likely to be "plateaued or declining" than nSBCs. He then politely lists George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and D. James Kennedy as token Calvinist evangelists, though Spurgeon was peculiarly left off of the list (the Prince of Preachers happened to be Baptist AND a 5-point Calvinist). Lemke then urges us to "look at the hard evidence" when we try to judge Calvinism's impact on evangelism.

Man, based on such "hard evidence," what is a Calvinist to do? As for myself, I'm headed straight to CBD.com to grab a copy of Chosen But Free as fast as I can. Continue reading this post »