The LEO is the left-wing alternative weekly newspaper here in Louisville, Kentucky. The most recent issue is devoted to Election 2006, an election the LEO editors hope will result in “progressive” victories in metro Louisville, especially in the case of the newspaper’s former publisher who is running for United States Congress. I found the predictable political coverage to be much less interesting, however, than the way the newspaper views the two most significant evangelical presences in the city: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Southeast Christian Church.
Commentator Michael Lindenberger asserts the essentially liberal character of Louisville, but then notes:
“I can hear some readers’ questions now: If Louisville is so liberal, then why is it home to such conservative bulwarks as Southeast Christian Church and the Rev. Albert Mohler, one of the intellectual godfathers of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
This is how Lindenberger sums it up:
“Mohler’s administration at SBTS closed the Carver School of Social Work long ago and has brought to the city all those earnest Bible-toting seminarians you can see studying at the Frankfort Avenue coffeehouses. But he hasn’t managed to erase the memory and impact of decades of progressive Christian scholarship for which the seminary was once known across the world. Many who were lured here by the seminary in the 1970s and 1980s have left, but many others have stayed, enriching the city with their tolerant stew of love, faith and good works that was the hallmark of their training at the old seminary.”
To those earnest, Bible-toting seminarians, I say this: somebody’s watching you. That’s not a cause for paranoia. It’s a cause for joy, and for even more “earnestness.”
So keep studying, final exams are around the corner and your papers are soon due. And remember, even as you flip through Hebrew flash cards and memorize Chalcedonian definitions, to keep loving and sharing the gospel with those around you in the coffee shop, including the cynical reporter looking at you from across the room.
The LEO may be longing for the good old days when Southern Seminary provided “progressive” social workers and City Council members for the city of Louisville. But what they’re really longing for, and what all of us are afraid of until we’re transformed by the Gospel, is truth and love. They deeply want, and they deeply fear, pastors who will speak pleadingly and passionately with the authority of Christ, the truth in love about the things that matter.
That’s why the apostle Paul wrote: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20). And that’s why nothing is sweeter than seeing Southern Seminary students in a local coffee shop, walking a Muslim through a gospel tract, or bowing in prayer as a former citizen of the drug culture receives Christ.
Keep toting the Bibles. Keep studying in the coffee shops. Keep preaching the Scriptures. And keep loving the lost, even those who wish you would go away.
