After reading about biblical illiteracy it occurs to me that the theological diversity within the SBC is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing as it encourages our people to unify around the essentials without dividing over non-essentials. There do remain some matters not essential to salvation that nonetheless divide us from other denominations: ecclesiology, baptism, the ordination of women, etc. But there is also remarkable diversity allowed within SBC life. Calvinists work alongside non-Calvinists. Dispensationalists and amillennialists go to church together (okay, not often). The Baptist Faith and Message establishes what is considered the minimum level of acceptable belief. It presents the least common denominator of Baptist faith. And as it stands the BF&M is a good document. Everything it affirms is right and true. But many topics are left unaddressed, providing freedom for individual Baptists to follow diverse convictions on these issues.

The curse of our diversity is that we also try to over establish uniformity. From a least-common-denominator confession of faith we also have a least-common-denominator body of teaching material through Lifeway, once known as the Baptist Sunday School Board. Lifeway’s approach follows that of the Baptist Faith and Message: teach things held in common by all Southern Baptists without crossing into areas of disagreement. This is not an altogether bad approach. As a Calvinist, I would not be happy knowing my money to Lifeway helped pay for material specifically opposing Calvinism. I imagine my non-Calvinist brothers and sisters would be equally appalled if Lifeway started promoting Calvinism.

The problem is with the end result. We wind up with a denomination full of people who have never been trained to go beyond the basics, never trained to dive into Scripture and emerge with rich jewels of truth.

The Lifeway material is fine for what it does, but what it does is not sufficient for the week-in-week-out growth and edification of the people of God. Our people need to be led deeper and further into biblical truth, not dancing around issues where Southern Baptists disagree but confronting those issues head on and emerging with strong convictions about what the Bible says on every subject that it addresses. For Lifeway, the solution might be to offer a variety of material coming from different theological persuasions. Not really a good solution, but I’m not sure what else they could do. In the meantime, individual churches using Lifeway material will need to go places the material will not go, augmenting the weekly lesson with more time spent in the Bible and less time spent in the Sunday school book. In the end this is the best approach anyway, no matter what material is used.