Learning More About J.D. Greear And Summit Church

There was an interesting news item this week.

J.D. Greear’s Summit Church was seeking to expand into Chatham County. It bought some land and sought a rezoning so that it could build a large church complex. But the county commissioners turned the project down.

The response from Summit Church? It is suing the county and charging discrimination. But note that it had done the same thing that David Couch did in Summerfield– i.e., it bought land with a certain zoning classification that would not permit its planned activity, and then expected that local government would rezone it.

But there was also a comprehensive article by Landon Douglas that outlines the major leftward shift in the Southern Baptist Convention during the last decade that Greear had a major part in facilitating. It also details his various actions and public statements over the last several years. I will excerpt heavily:

I never really paid attention to SBC politics growing up; granted, I was in grade school and high school during the final ripples of the Conservative Resurgence. I did, however, start paying attention in 2018 when J.D. Greear was elected SBC President. Based on what I witnessed from 2018 to now, there has been a horrendous liberal shift. I don’t think it was just a “drift;” it was a shift—it was intentional. This shift began with Greear’s presidency and continued under Ed Litton and Bart Barber’s presidential terms. From 2018 to 2024, these three presidents facilitated and promoted an increasingly progressive direction in the SBC.

I recently cataloged this liberal shift in a Twitter thread, which you can find here. The thread clearly struck a chord, so I wanted to turn it into an article that serves as both a one-stop summary and a longer-lasting reference point. What follows here tracks the same progression of my original thread and expands on it by providing examples of the theological, cultural, and political liberalism that gained a foothold in the SBC under Greear, Litton, and Barber.

Compromise on Transgender Pronouns

I first noticed the liberal shift during Greear’s presidency when he said everyone had to be charitable to the LGBTQ community and that the way to go about this was to use their preferred pronouns. He made his case by relying on the profoundly unbiblical teachings of Preston Sprinkle, who calls the idea “pronoun hospitality.” Regardless of how Greear and Sprinkle attempt to portray it, Christians should never practice “pronoun hospitality” because it is bearing false witness and is a clear violation of the Ninth Commandment (Exodus 20:16).

Now, roughly four years later, he somewhat retracted his words. However, he still hedges and caveats his argument, saying it was about his desire to “keep that conversation moving along” and that he would “use the [transgender] child’s self-referential pronouns.”

Ultimately, Greear’s “walk back” on his earlier statements wasn’t much of an apology. He didn’t repent for abusing his authority and leadership in the church and the SBC, nor did he reject Preston Sprinkle’s unbiblical teachings. Greear’s original teaching and his “clarification” are part of a larger pattern within his ministry: Greear appears far more apologetic to the LGBTQ community than to his brethren in Christ for his poor words. I do find it interesting that “comforting” the lost in their anti-Christian ideology was a common trend of Greear’s public commentary on numerous controversial topics during his presidency.

Worldly Positions on Abortion, Black Lives Matter, and CRT

Further evidence for Greear’s liberalizing direction is evidenced by his public commentary on both abortion and Black Lives Matter (BLM). These two issues make for an enlightening juxtaposition.

• Here is a clip where he states that abortion clinic workers are currently in his church and are welcome there.
• In 2020, Greear claimed in an SBC presidential address that “Black Lives Matter is a gospel issue.”

These statements beg the question: Why is Black Lives Matter a “gospel issue,” but the lives of the preborn are not? Or, even if Greear would say that abortion is a “gospel issue,” he uses a different degree of tone and urgency when addressing reluctant Black Lives Matter supporters than he does when addressing fully-committed baby butchers. Why don’t “Baby Lives Matter?” Babies’ lives, mind you, that those abortion workers they welcome into their church are guilty of actively murdering. On Sunday, these murderers come and watch a large production service, where Greear twists and turns every which way to make them feel welcome. Then, on Monday, those same workers lead women into rooms where abortionists rip their children limb from limb.

So again, how is supporting an anti-family, Marxist movement a gospel issue, but the murder of children is not? Should we assume it’s because God “whispers” about abortion?

Would Greear ever say, “I know we have members of the KKK here in our church…” and bend over backward to make them feel loved and understood? Would Greear speak in such a “winsome” welcoming way from the pulpit at Summit to members of the “Alt-Right” the same way he did to Planned Parenthood workers? You know the answer to that question as well as I do. He would never.

Why? Because he is “winsome” to the Left but “hostile” to the Right. In fact, Greear accused Southern Baptists of making “racists” and “neo confederates” more comfortable in our pews than “people of color” despite the fact he had no evidence to support this claim: “But we should mourn when closet racists and neo confederates feel more at home in our churches than do many of our people of color.”

In short, Greear wants abortion clinic workers to feel comfortable in the SBC but not racists. Which is odd, to say the least, because doesn’t everyone need the gospel? How does murder become less heinous than racism in Greear’s theological framework? Because Greear uses unequal weights and measures on social and political issues. His scales are not set by God’s Word but by the worldly zeitgeist.

After three years of Greear making DEI appointments across the SBC, the 2021 presidential election became a battle between a condemnation of CRT in the SBC versus a total embrace. Ed Litton, who was well-known for his “racial reconciliation” efforts, narrowly won in a runoff against Mike Stone after Stone was brutally slandered by men like Griffin Gulledge and others who amplified a lie about his interaction with an abuse survivor. The selection of Litton after Greear was an omen of how the SBC would continue to shift to the Left. It sent the message that we, as the SBC, wanted to continue to chase after a CRT-lite approach to racial issues rather than a biblical approach. 

Sure enough, Litton then brought forth efforts to push a “Christianized” version of CRT with Tony Evans, rebranding it as “Kingdom Race Theory” (KRT). This is problematic because Evans, arguably, only created KRT because he viewed CRT as filled with “bad actors.” Evans agreed with the principle of CRT but decided that it needed to be renamed and refocused. The problem, however, isn’t just the bad actors; it is the fact that it adds to the gospel we preach and makes the gospel of Jesus Christ not enough.

One enduring oddity from Litton’s presidency is his refusal to seek what is traditionally an all-but-guaranteed second presidential term. After the end of his first year, Litton announced he would not run again, as is customary, but rather step away to continue his focus on “racial reconciliation.” However, the whole story of his tenure as SBC President suggests his pursuit of racial reconciliation work was far from his sole motive. Why?

Because within the first few weeks of his presidency, he became the poster child of one of the biggest plagiarism scandals in the modern SBC. And who was right there with him in the thick of this scandal?

J.D. Greear.

Whispering about Homosexuality and Pulpit Plagiarism

Litton was elected on June 7, 2021. On June 21, it was discovered that “Ed Litton preached a sermon Romans 1 at the start of 2020, and in the sermon he said that the Bible ‘whispers’ about sexual sin. This is the same thing J.D. Greear had said to his church when he preached on Romans 1—a chapter of the Bible that very loudly condemns sexual immorality, especially homosexuality.”

During the sermon that Litton plagiarized, Greear used Jennifer Wilkin’s words to say we need to “whisper about what God whispers.”

I would share the link to Litton’s sermon; however, it has been deleted. Why? Because people began noticing that Litton plagiarized Greear’s sermon. After getting caught, Litton deleted over 140 sermons off his church website after the scandal was made public. You can read a detailed accounting of the depth of this disqualifying scandal here.

Did Litton apologize? No. He tried to brush it off as if it were no big deal. Is this really what the SBC stands for? Unapologetic and unrepentant pulpit plagiarism?

Sadly, it apparently does in many corners of the SBC mega-church world. As the news of the plagiarism unfolded, we learned that many prominent SBC church leaders used the software and sermon-writing service Docent.

While Litton never took responsibility for his underhanded plagiarism, his decision not to seek re-election was all but an admission. Still, at the 2022 SBC Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, each time a remark or a resolution on “pastoral integrity” or “plagiarism” was brought up, Litton would claim it was out of order and shut down the messenger.

Remarkably, the plagiarism wasn’t the worst part of the scandal. No, the more troubling aspect, and one that the cultured SBC elites want so desperately for us to overlook, is the egregious, unbiblical downplaying of the sin of homosexuality by both Greear and Litton.

The truth is that God doesn’t “whisper” about sin. And He certainly doesn’t whisper about homosexuality. Look more closely at Romans 1:24-27:

“Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen. For this reason God delivered them over to disgraceful passions. Their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. The men in the same way also left natural relations with women and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their persons the appropriate penalty for their error.”

This is not a “whisper” about sexual sin; this is a strong condemnation of rebellion against God. What does God say about the sexual perversion inherent in the LGBTQ community? Jude 1:7 makes it unmistakably clear: “Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns committed sexual immorality and perversions, and serve as an example by undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.”

That’s also not a whisper. It’s appropriate to use Greear’s words to say this is a “gospel issue.” This is far deeper than just even the plagiarism; Greear and Litton are deeply, biblically, in error on this subject and used their pulpits to push a Leftist narrative on LGBTQ sin and compromise. From Greear’s earlier statements about being “kind” for using preferred pronouns to now both Litton and Greear’s claims of “whispering” about these issues, it’s clear this was an intentional effort to liberalize the SBC on one of the most critical issues of our day. It reeks of a soft embrace of progressive Christianity, trying to make sin seem not as bad. In the same way that a woman has officiated every wedding on every sitcom for the past 25 years, it is a form of manipulation, and the real problem is that they are avoiding the sin of homosexuality… 

Not only was there plagiarism, theological liberalism, and coddling of the Spirit of the Age from Greear and Litton, but they didn’t even get the original category they were trying to apply (or misapply) right. But the bottom line is that they twisted God’s Word for their own liberalizing agenda. Or maybe it was for someone else’s agenda, one that had some decent money behind it (Megan Basham has a good book about this right now called Shepherds for Sale. Maybe you’ve heard of it).