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Tom Ascol, SBC President Candidate, Worries Churches Have Lost Hold of the Bible

By Bob Smietana
tom ascol sbc
Tom Ascol waits near a mic during the SBC annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, June 15, 2021. (RNS Photo by Kit Doyle)

When he first felt called to be a pastor, Tom Ascol thought God was playing a joke on him.

Ascol grew up in a troubled family in a house owned by a Texas church where his dad was a deacon and Sunday school teacher. When the family couldn’t pay the rent, a pastor tried to kick them out until a deacon intervened.

The experience left him bitter toward pastors. Complicating his view of church, his dad led what amounted to a double life: one as a respected church leader and another as “a drunk and a womanizer and an abuser,” Ascol told Baptist Press, the official Southern Baptist news service, in a recent interview.

“We’re Baptists, and you know, my dad had no business being a church member, much less a deacon and a Sunday school teacher,” he said. “That created a lot of angst. Not just in me, but in the community.”

Once he accepted his own call, Ascol decided he did not want to be an ordinary pastor. Instead, he wanted to do things by the book, the way the Bible said things should be done.

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That approach to ministry has stuck with Ascol, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, and leading candidate for president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The theme of his candidacy can be summed up in four words: “We have a book.

But Ascol’s focus on the Bible has led him to become a vocal critic of the SBC in recent years. Liberalism, critical race theory and women preachers are leading the denomination away from Scripture, he believes. Ascol has long argued that Southern Baptists have been too eager to embrace pragmatic ideas on how to attract people to church and have been too accommodating to the broader culture.

In a recent essay for Founders Ministries, a Florida nonprofit that Ascol heads, he argued that Southern Baptists are “embarrassed of the teachings of the Scripture.”

His complaints arise from Southern Baptists who have urged the denomination to come to terms with its history, welcoming ideas drawn from academia about racism’s pervasiveness in society. Resolution 9, passed at the SBC’s 2019 annual meeting, referred to “critical race theory and intersectionality” as useful analytics tools. Ascol views the resolution as an intolerable distraction from biblical truth.

“Brothers and sisters, it should not be this way,” he wrote in his Founders Ministries essay. “The word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword and will not return void. But if we muzzle ourselves out of a misplaced desire to placate the culture, how can we expect the Word to have that effect?”

Resolution 9 and Ascol’s concerns about the liberal drift of the SBC are the subject of a documentary from Founders Ministries called “By What Standard,” which includes footage from the 2019 SBC meeting. The film’s trailer begins with Ascol saying, “We’ve been played.”

The film also captures part of a conversation between Ascol and Georgia Baptist pastor Josh Buice, in which they say that asking women to take a role in the church that “God did not intend” is abusive. Ascol has also argued that churches that have women preach during worship services have no place in the SBC.

Much of Ascol’s support comes from the so-called SBC pirates, a coalition of SBC-related groups that claim the denomination has drifted away from the Bible toward liberalism. Those groups include Founders Ministries, which promotes Calvinist beliefs; a Christian nationalist group called Sovereign Nations — founded by a cruise organizer who works closely with atheist hoaxer James Lindsay; and the Conservative Baptist Network, founded by allies of disgraced SBC legend Paige Patterson. Those groups all share concerns about CRT, social justice and conservative politics — Ascol himself has done interviews with a series of Trump-friendly podcasts and media outlets in the run-up to the election.

tom ascol SBC
Tom Ascol of Founders Ministries. (Video screen grab)

His positions, he says, are driven by a concern about the health of local SBC churches. In an interview last year, Tom Ascol told media that pragmatism has resulted in Southern Baptist churches being filled with people who think they are Christians but who really are not. It’s an alarm he has been sounding for decades, calling the SBC’s membership statistics a “sham” because so few church members actually show up in church.

While Southern Baptist churches claim 13.7 million members, actual attendance at church services — both in person and online — was closer to 5 million people in 2021. Ascol sees the discrepancy as a sign that Southern Baptists no longer practice “regenerate church membership” — the idea that only true believers who have been born again, been baptized and are active in the church, should be counted as members.

In 2008, he supported a resolution about regenerate church membership passed at the SBC annual meeting that called on churches to maintain accurate membership rolls and to discipline wayward members. Ascol told the Conservative Baptist Network in a recent interview that more work is needed in this area for the SBC to be healthy.

“I think if we were to practice regenerate church membership and church discipline more carefully than we have, our churches would look more like what the New Testament calls churches to be, and the message that we preach would be more commended by the way that we live,” he said.

If elected, Ascol would be the first SBC president in decades who is not a megachurch pastor: Grace Baptist has 224 members and an average worship attendance of 280 people, according to data from the congregation’s SBC profile.

He believes in the primacy of the local church in the polity of the SBC: It’s a message he stressed at a forum for SBC presidential candidates, saying that churches, rather than the convention, should lead any response to sexual abuse.

“It is hard, but it’s not complicated,” he said. “And we just need the faith and the humility to look to the Word of God and say, ‘This is what God tells us to do. We’re going to do it and we’re going to leave costs and consequences to him.’ And I believe if we were to do that, we would find ourselves caring very well, much better than we have in the past.”

Bob SmietanaBob Smietana is a national reporter for Religion News Service.

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14 Responses

  1. It will definitely be a different day in SBC life if Tom Ascol gets elected SBC President. I do not understand his concern about women pastors. How many women pastors are there of SBC churches? Calling a woman pastor will get you kicked out of the SBC.

  2. I agree with 90% of what Ascol is saying and think he’d be great for the job. Also, I think this line speaks volumes about where the SBC has headed in the last 30 years: “If elected, Ascol would be the first SBC president in decades who is not a megachurch pastor.”

  3. Tom Ascol’s presidency is the most promising thing that has come out of the SBC’s struggles in dealing with child abusers. Finally there is a man who is not afraid of accepting God’s Word, the Bible at face value and publicly proclaiming its teachings, namely that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), and is willing to apply it despite the culture around us. Tom Ascol obviously practices the Bible’s teachings about the character of God “righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne and faithfulness go before you” (Psalm 89:14). Tom will have the courage to hand over the evidence to law enforcement all child abusers and those that have been protecting them, including elders, pastors, and others who have been hiding behind “lawyer client privilege”.

    1. Steven, if the following excerpt is accurate, then I’m not sure your confidence in Mr Ascol’s willingness to turn over evidence of child abuse to law enforcement is properly placed.

      “He believes in the primacy of the local church in the polity of the SBC: It’s a message he stressed at a forum for SBC presidential candidates, saying that churches, rather than the convention, should lead any response to sexual abuse.”

      It clearly sounds like he’ll defer to the church’s judgement about what must be done.

      1. Thanks Bernard for your response. If we accept the Bible as our sole and exclusive source for Devine Truth, including church governance, than we must accept that the local church has the authority over its members and there is no one above the local church except the Lord Jesus Christ. There are no biblical authority for denominations. Christ is the head of his church. Christ has no middlemen. That’s what the Reformation was all about. The problem regarding child abusers hiding in local churches is due to the failure of elders to understand their Bibles and shifting responsibility upwards. God will not do for us what we must do for ourselves. The promised land had to be captured by the Israelites and its inhabitants wiped out. In the same way each local church must cleanse itself and hand child abusers over to law enforcement.

  4. While I agree that resolution nine really is misguided and does not understand the Marxist origins of these ideologies nor the destructive power of these forms of thinking, I am not convinced his form of fundamentalism is the answer. The SBC seems to have two choices this time around-A harsh form of Calvinistic fundamentalism which does not seem to show much sentiment towards those who have been abused or a softer organization that believes it’s OK to import anti-Christian ideologies that can lead to the wreckage of peoples faith. Admittedly, a generalized perception but where are the men who cannot only think spiritually and rationally about secular ideologies that seek to destroy the church while at the same time are Able to Love, preach, and protect the flock while eschewing sectarian, Calvinistic, authoritarian rule. I cannot remember seeing in any of the creeds that our Lord was a Calvinist or an arminian. And the Lord was definitely up for tying a brick around those who abused these little ones.

    1. Is CRT really more dangerous than whatever it is that’s keeping certain minority Christians from enjoying the same standards of living as others?

      I really don’t know if it’s the most helpful way to look at the issue, but I don’t trust anyone who tells me CRT is scarier than inequality.

  5. I was struck by this line: “Once he accepted his own call, Ascol decided he did not want to be an ordinary pastor. Instead, he wanted to do things by the book, the way the Bible said things should be done.” So the implication is — ordinary pastors don’t do things by the book, the way the Bible says things should be done? I mean, this is clearly a distressed denomination, but isn’t that painting with quite a broad brush?

    1. Especially when there is interpretation issues and ideological pre-conceptions that each pastor must contend with. Our interpretation is not infallible.

  6. “ Instead, he wanted to do things by the book, the way the Bible said things should be done.”
    “… ‘we were to practice regenerate church membership and church discipline more carefully than we have, our churches would look more like what the New Testament calls churches to be.’ ”

    Yes, there are long lists in the Bible of all the people in NT house churches that had been admitted by strict membership rolls: People who had been authorized — by humans — as members of the church to attend and participate. (Intentionally facetious)

  7. Last Century my pastor put forward a resolution the “Being a Mason was incompatible with being a Christian.” It did not pass because too many Southern Baptists pastors and deacons who were delegates to the Convention were Masons and voted it down.

  8. I am sure that Mr. Ascol loves the Lord but what concerns me is his hardline Calvinism. I believe in whosoever believes, not that I fully believe in Arminianism either but I need to believe that if my 90 year old mother dies without Christ, it was because of her choice and not that God predestined her for hell before she was born. I also believe that God loves everyone and not willing any should perish.

  9. This guy scares me. If he is elected I see more of the same head-in-the-sand, good old boy church leadership and a continual decline in our membership.

  10. I hope they review saddleback church continuation of being a member of the SBC. Us saddleback members haven’t had a good laugh in a long time. The hubris of SBC to think we at saddleback need the SBC and all it’s good ole white Southern hick boy hypocrisy to continue doing Gods work. Yeah I can hear the laughing now. Good luck with that.

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