Best of this week entry 1

Goes to Wade Burelson. Wade wrote on a hot topic among Southern Baptist bloggers this week, the apparent embellishment of the background of one Ergun Caner, the President of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, perhaps the most important non-SBC seminary among Southern Baptists. What I appreciated was that his focus was not so much on the exaggerations of Ergun Caner and his pretty offensive depictions of various racial minorities and people in the church, not to mention his creative historical revisionism of his own background to make it seem more interesting, it was instead on the cult of personality in the Southern Baptist Convention. This is a problem in the SBC as well as in much of the broader church. We love to go to conferences with the big name speakers, casually mention the book we are reading by the famous author. We love the celebrity culture as much as the world does, except that we justify our hero worship by couching it in religious words. Give Wade Burleson's When Will We Southern Baptists Turn from the Idol of Celebrity to the Gospel Itself? a read.