Do Separatist, Independent Baptist Churches Believe And Teach Jesus' Love Must Be Earned?

A known person raised in an separatist, unaffiliated Baptist church in the last few months wrote on social media the following ideas (representative of them with some exact wording), broad brushing these churches as embracing the following doctrine and characteristics.  He uses the word "communities" referring to churches.  He said in essence:

• Their children were made to believe by their leaders, who he says were abusing them physically, verbally, and emotionally in a traumatic way (how they were made), that Jesus' love and love in general came at the cost of earning an ever elusive acceptance.
• The people in these said communities have a tendency to take on the personality of their leaders, an unfortunate characteristic.
• It's difficult to sort through who are the good people and who are the bad people in these communities, but there are apparently a lot of good people, despite these above described conditions.
• These communities contrast with the ones who love people unconditionally and don't make the love of Jesus to be conditional.

Many of the people reading at his site would associate his comments with our church and he implies that without mentioning any names.  He intends for people to think about our church the way he describes, despite all the inherent internal contradictions in his statements.

I have never heard these charges about our church ever and we have had plenty of time for people to make or use them.  We would have enemies with many opportunities to say these were elements of our belief and practice, but I've never heard it.  They've said other things, but not this.  I've actually heard the opposite. We're a discipleship church that doesn't manipulate anyone, and we love and love and love.  I question the love of the one making the statement and would like to see his love credentials, how he loves his parents, his church people, the lost, those he's discipled, what he's actually done for them versus the multitudinous things that they have done for him.

Related to his charge of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse, an arbitrary and tenuous accusation, I haven't heard that once about our church.  No one has ever brought that against our church.  I've never heard it mentioned.  We have a school with an open enrollment up to sixth grade and no one from the school family has said anything.  Not even people who have left our church have said anything like that.  This is a first for me in thirty-two years.

One major event in the short history of our church was an investigation into our practice of child-rearing at a time when the state of California began a process in the state assembly to outlaw corporeal punishment for parents.  It did not succeed and our church had a major impact, which I'll recount one part.  We had a family in our church raising a foster child, remotely related to the family, so he was in our church and school.  The parents used spanking for discipline, which he definitely needed.  The state foster care program forbade corporeal punishment of its children and when the child ascertained this, he told the foster program.  They sent child protective services (CPS) to our school to question him.  They also looked over our school and this family with a fine tooth comb.  They found no abuse, even based on their eager scrutiny. They gave the option of continuing with the foster care but the family declined and the boy moved to another home.

CPS did not like the use of corporeal punishment by our parents and in our school.  However, they found zero evidence of abuse based on their strict interpretation of the law of California, which has no positive bias toward corporeal punishment.  The CPS agents were still angry because of a pamphlet on our premises, which exposes the biblical passages on child discipline, written by our principal.  Their investigators sent that to a newspaper reporter, hoping to incite opposition from the community to us.  They got the opposite.  We were supported.  Local television for the massive Bay Area here came out and interviewed us and they didn't find the wild eyed fanatics they hoped.  They found reasonable people, who could defend the biblical doctrine and practice in a calm, substantive way.  Many other parents in the region also wanted the availability of corporeal punishment as a tool for child-rearing.

We have not had one accusation of abuse in our church and school all thirty two years in any type of way.  This contrasts with the track record of the state schools.  As a personal example, we had a young man we tried to help and we didn't like his general body language and demeanor around children.  Then a mother called and reported that years before, he had molested a boy a few years younger than him, but that the family didn't prosecute.  We theretofore forbade him from proximity to children, which he refused, so we disciplined him for that lack of repentance.  I have not seen him since.

However, someone informed me some years later that he was teaching in the public school part time with one of his courses, elementary sex education.  Upon hearing this, I called the principal of that public elementary school.  Before I even told her his name, she knew who I was reporting.  It was obvious, but they had done nothing about it.  They still had him teaching that class with small children.  The public schools have had many incidents.  Anyone reading here knows Roman Catholicism has had too many to count.  Yet, we have had no charges for anything in our school or church for the entire 32 years.

The insinuation of abuse causing trauma is slanderous.  He uses very ambiguous deflective accusations that allow deniability.  About two months ago the boy, whom I described in foster care, now a twenty-something man, drove from a long distance on a Sunday to attend our church.  He sat right next to me in the Sunday School class.  He felt no fear being with our people.  He received hugs and acceptance.  This is the fruit of the worst possible example for us and this wasn't his first return visit.

I want to move to the other, I think, worse charge, and also deal with the substance of the other things he wrote.  He said that our church didn't just teach, but its leaders 'made children believe that Jesus' love had to be earned,' that it cost something, mixing that idea in with the concept that the children also had to earn the love of the leaders (with a sinister undertone to it).  We don't make people believe anything.  It's not our goal to coerce anyone.  We are very careful in our dealing with children and anyone with us knows that.  We don't pray prayers with them.  We don't force them into any decision.  Ever.  We don't use manipulative means.  I don't know of a church with which we fellowship that believes that either.  I don't accede to that idea at all.  Jesus paid it all.  No one earns the love of God.  Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone.

Our church celebrates the Lord's Table once a month.  We remember what Jesus did for each of us by eating the bread and drinking the cup.  We also examine ourselves.  I often mention the warning of 1 Corinthians 11, that some are sick and some are dead because they take unworthily.  There is a threat in that.  Is that saying that the love of Christ costs something?  Does Christ making us sick or killing us mean that His love costs something?  That is the discipline of Christ with which He wants the church to cooperate with church discipline.  If someone won't repent of sin, out of love for that person, we practice discipline.  Discipline is in fact the problem for these young people.  They don't want the expectation to live the Christian life, to be holy as God is holy.

Jesus makes people sick and die.  He expects church discipline, but He also directly intervenes in his own discipline, as seen in His letters to the seven churches (Revelations 2-3).  Does Jesus making sick and killing someone an extreme form of physical, verbal, or emotional abuse?  These are the types of internal contradictions for a false form of Christianity represented by this young man on social media.  It is rampant in evangelicalism today.

Salvation is free.  It is free, but it costs, as Jesus Himself taught, denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following Him.  Since you don't have anything spiritually to pay, because of your spiritual poverty (Matthew 5:3), you can't pay for it.  When we give up our all, when we sell all that we have for the pearl of great price or that treasure in the field, we are actually giving up nothing for everything.  It does cost us something though, which is why Jesus said, count the cost.  Jesus said that and it doesn't contradict salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

The accuser on the social media expanded further by saying that 'the beauty of Christianity is that we can't do anything to earn Jesus' love.'  He says that's the beauty of Christianity, that we can't earn the love of Jesus. That's an odd statement I've never heard from anyone in my life, so it would be very odd if it was in fact the beauty of Christianity.  We don't and can't earn the love of Jesus, is true. But that's not the beauty of Christianity.  Jesus earned it.  He paid it.  The beauty isn't that I can't.  I know I can't, which is why I mourn over my sin, and relinquish control to Jesus Christ.  The freedom the accuser explicates really is an apparent freedom to keep sinning against Jesus with no repercussions.

Young people such as this young man don't even want to relinquish control.  It doesn't cost anything, even giving up the sin that results in damnation.  They keep on sinning.  And they want to be accepted for continuing to live in sin.  Not accepting it, they denounce as trauma.  The Lord Jesus Christ doesn't accept their or anyone's sinning.  That's why he makes someone sick and dead, which is the unconditional love of Jesus, disciplining or chastening (cf. Hebrews 12).  To be consistent, he would call that, what Jesus does, physical abuse and causing trauma.

One more note on corporeal punishment.  Scripture teaches it.  Scripture is the Word of Christ (Colossians 3:16).  If we love Jesus, we obey Him (John 14:15, 20-21).  The biblical means of child-training is also love.  Children who do not receive biblical child-rearing are not being loved.  It's an advocacy for hatred of children.

He wrote that the people take on the "personality" of their leader.  I get the cult charge implied.  I don't know of one personality that has changed in our church because of me.  There are many that share the same love for lost souls and care greatly for their families.  2 Peter 1 calls it like precious faith.  I like people to keep their own personality.  I don't criticize people for their personality.  I like preaching that doesn't sound like someone else.  All four of my children have different personalities, and they have kept all of their own personalities.

I've visited, watched, or read the kind of "communities" with the unconditional love and there are lots of the same types of persons.  Sentimental.  Touchy feely.  Pandering.  Manipulative.  Sensual.  Worldly.  Being a real man means alcohol and salty language (profanity).  Everyone speaks freely about their entertainment and popular music.  They have the hand raising, the eye-clinching fake sincerity with the affected vocals. They're like goths, trying to be different, and yet they all still looking the same.  All of those churches look the same.  Casual is the dress code.  It must be.  Conformity all over the place.  They're like business franchises.  They are mass produced out of the same church growth manuals with identical websites in most cases with identical wording.

We have five different men who preach in our church, all five with different personalities, not even one of them is even that close to the same.  Who are the good ones?  Who are the bad ones?  The young man says these churches have good people and bad people.  The good people, I reckon, are those who might be more likely to overlook his sin and not admonish or rebuke him for it, that is, give him "unconditional love."  I'm assuming that the good people are those who don't drink the koolaid.  Paul wrote that in the great house there are vessels unto honor and vessels unto dishonor. For someone to judge, he must rely on scripture, with the goal of reconciliation to God and to others.  It's not arbitrarily picking out who is bad and who is good.

The communities who give "unconditional love," which theirs isn't even love, but sentimentalism, are the ones with the antinomian, heretical view of sanctification I've written a lot about here recently.  They accept numerous views on most doctrines and practices, treating the Bible like it is a book full of contradictions. The Southern Baptist Convention is replete with these churches.  I call it virtual sanctification.  You don't actually have to live righteous, because Jesus already did that for you.  It's what Paul called sinning that grace might abound (Romans 6:1-2).

Do separatist, unaffiliated Baptist churches like ours really believe that people have got to earn the love of Jesus?  Or is that a scurrilous lie?   Is it just that he misrepresents the love of Jesus and offers a placebo "love"?  He does not represent who we are or what we teach.  I wouldn't take him to court over it for liable and slander, but if I were given due process, which we are not, because this type of accuser lobs the hand grenades from afar, his charge would be thrown out with honest witnesses.  It is outright slander, like the accuser of the brethren, Satan himself would make about a true, godly church.  What is even more sad is that he leaves many, many of those in his audience and under his influence twice the children of Hell that they once were.