SBC leader says don’t talk to press

UNITED STATES
Associated Baptist Press

Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson says churches should settle disputes internally and not talk about them to the media.

By Bob Allen

There’s no room in the church for whistleblowers, a Southern Baptist seminary president said in a chapel sermon Oct. 15.

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson said the prohibition in First Corinthians 6 on church members suing one another in secular court means “we don’t take matters before unbelievers.”

“This also means that you don’t take matters to the press,” Patterson said. “What goes on in the church of God doesn’t go to the press.”

“If I had fifty dollars for every time that I have told somebody from the press: ‘I’m not going to comment on that because, frankly, it’s none of your business; it’s the church of God’ — if I had fifty dollars for every time I’ve done that, this would be a wealthy institution and you wouldn’t have to pay any tuition at all,” he said.

Patterson said that response is never popular. “‘Well, don’t you believe in a free press?’ Yes. ‘Don’t you believe in a free ministry?’”

“I’m not going to talk to the press about things that are matters internal to the church of the Living God,” Patterson said. “It is none of their business. And they can’t possibly get it right, and they don’t get it right, so why do you take it to the world of unbelief? Whether that be the court, whether that be the press? ‘Well there’s just no other way to handle it.’ Yes there is. Commit it to the Lord God Almighty.”

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