Francis Schaeffer 'indispensable' to SBC

The late Francis Schaeffer was known to pick up the phone during the early years of the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative resurgence. Paige Patterson knew to expect a call from Schaeffer around Christmas with the question, "You're not growing weary in well-doing are you?"

Patterson, a leader in the movement to return the SBC to a high view of Scripture, would reply, "No, Dr. Schaeffer. I'm under fire, but I'm doing fine. And I'm trusting the Lord and proceeding on."

To some it may seem strange that an international Presbyterian apologist and analyst of pop culture would take such interest in a Baptist controversy over biblical inerrancy.

But to Schaeffer it made perfect sense.

He believed churches were acquiescing to the world, abandoning their belief that the Bible is without error in everything it said. A watered-down theology left the SBC with decreased power to battle cultural evils. To Schaeffer the convention was the last major American denomination with hope for reversing this "great evangelical disaster," as he put it. Read more

The only "conservative resurgence" in the Anglican Church in North America, if it can be called that, is not a return to the Scriptures as the canon or functioning rule of faith and life for Anglicans and to the Anglican confessional formularies as their doctrinal and worship standard, to which 2008 Global Future Conference called Anglicans, but a revival of what Douglas Bess, historian of the Continuing Anglican Movement, describes as "an extreme form of Anglo-Catholicism that seeks to reconstruct Anglicanism on the model of the pre-Great Schism period of the eleventh -century, undivided Church." Its adherents view this period, the early High Middle Ages, as the golden age of Christianity.