Josh the Baptist demands Big Brother discipline the Flock

From time to time, I like to look in on our old friend Josh the Baptist to see what Loki-like mischief he's spreading.

If you've been a reader of Burning Taper for very long, you'll probably remember Rev. Josh Buice, who first shot to fame by trashing Freemasonry last year. Masons from all over the world zeroed in on his anti-Masonic blog article, which eventually had more than 600 comments before he locked it down. He later threw some of the best postings down the Memory Hole by deleting, leaving the comment count at 528.

Another of Josh's anti-Masonic articles in which he shared a letter he wrote to the Southern Baptist Convention asking them to admonish Baptists who were Masons slipped by me recently. I guess I wasn't paying attention.

Josh is a fundamentalist evangelical, or an evangelical fundamentalist, it's hard to tell.

In his latest article, titled "Does Discipline Work?, Josh does what he does best: Stomp up and down and demand that people live like he says they should. We must, he writes, "guard the purity of the local churches and force disciplined individuals to face their discipline and repent!"

Apparently, Baptist churches today have some of the same problems Freemasonry does: "...[G]reedy... leaders who are more interested in numbers and money than they are about preserving the purity of the local assembly."

Josh bemoans the fact that there are so many Baptist churches, because that means a sinner who has been excommunicated from one church can just "ride in his B.M.W. down the road to the next Baptist church and obtain membership very easily!"

Oh, what to do, what to do!?

According to Josh, Big Brother should be watching. He would like the Mark of the Beast to be placed upon all who would join his church. He writes:

There are several possible solutions to this problem. First, with our technology today, a database could be established under the SBC website that would enable church leaders (pastors and elders) to provide information (name of individual, city, and church name) about all excommunicated individuals who never sought reconciliation and repentance. This data would only be available to the leadership of the church and not accessible by the general public. The data could be protected by a secure connection and available only through passwords given to SBC churches. When a person seeks membership status in a local SBC church, their name could be searched through the database of the system in a matter of seconds and it would provide information on them if they had been disciplined in another church and excommunicated from their fellowship. The major set back to this possible solution is the fact that other churches outside of the SBC would not have access to the database, and therefore, individuals who were disciplined in a church in another denomination would be able to bypass the database check.

Another solution to this problem would be to dismember any church from the SBC that does not make church discipline a priority in their church. If church discipline is an essential mark of a true church (as history verifies), the SBC should only accept churches into membership who meet the qualifications of a genuine church (discipline being one of the qualifications). Money should not be the driving force behind membership! It is not recognized as a qualification for membership into the local church, and it should not be the determining factor for membership in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Achtung, baby! There you go. Josh the Baptist saves the day. Excommunicate all members and all churches! Let God sort them out!

God save us from Your followers!

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