Adrian Rogers Biography- American Southern Baptist Preacher and Author

Adrian Pierce Rogers was an American Southern Baptist preacher and author who died on November 15, 2005. He was born on September 12, 1931. He led the Southern Baptist Convention for three terms, from 1979 to 1980 and 1986 to 1988.[1] Rogers was born in the Florida city of West Palm Beach.

At the age of 19, he went into Christian preaching. He got his degrees from Florida’s Stetson University and the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Rogers was ordained by the Northwood Baptist Church in West Palm Beach, which later became The Village Baptist Church and is now called Family Church Village.

His first job as a senior minister was at a small church in Fellsmere, Florida, called Fellsmere Baptist Church. He was baptised for the first time in the C-54 Canal, which is near Fellsmere. Rogers talked about “Day Break,” a radio show he ran in the 1950s, in a speech called “The Final Judgement.”

From 1964 to 1972, he was the leader of the First Baptist Church in Merritt Island, Florida. He became the general pastor of Memphis, Tennessee’s Bellevue Baptist Church in 1972 and stayed there until March 2005.

During this time, the church went from having 9,000 members to having 29,000 members, and it moved into a new megachurch building.After Rogers retired in March 2005, he was given the title “pastor emeritus.”

Rogers helped start the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist denomination in the late 1970s. This is because he was chosen president of the denomination during a theological dispute within the denomination. He was the head of the group that changed the Baptist Faith and Message for the 2000 edition.

He wrote eighteen books, and his work is featured on the radio and TV show Love Worth Finding, which is heard all over the world and is aired in both English and Spanish. Rogers also started a school for pastors called the Adrian Rogers Pastor Training Institute. It is now run by his wife, two sons, and a granddaughter.

As a side effect of his treatment for colon cancer, Rogers got pneumonia in both lungs in November 2005. After a short time of mechanical breathing, he died at the age of 74.

President of the Southern Baptist Convention

Rogers was president of the Southern Baptist Convention three times. The Southern Baptist Convention has 16 million members and is the biggest Evangelical group in the United States. In 1979, he was the first conservative to be voted to this position. He ran on a platform of the inerrancy of the Bible, and the denomination began a ten-year process of moving to a more conservative theological position while he was in charge. (See Southern Baptist Convention’s return of conservatives.)

When conservatives finally took over all SBC seminaries and agencies, liberal and moderate seminary teachers were fired or replaced by theological conservatives because some of them were leaving anyway. All workers of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) seminaries and denominational agencies had to say they believed in the Baptist Faith and Message. Since Rogers was president, the church has stayed conservative.

Rogers was elected SBC president at the 1979 convention in Houston, Texas. This started the conservative resurgence in the church, which was led by the theologian Paige Patterson and the Houston judge Paul Pressler. In 2004, at a symposium at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Pressler said that it wasn’t he and Patterson who were the real forces behind the Conservative resurgence and the election of Rogers and the other presidents, but rather the independent-minded laypeople who came to the annual conventions for years to be heard.[4]

Politics and social problems

Rogers helped move a conservative political agenda forward in the United States, just like many other important conservative pastors. He said that Christians have a responsibility to take part in government.

Rogers had a lot of trouble with how his family worked. Most of his attention was on men he called “drop-out dads.” Rogers says that since the Bible puts a lot of emphasis on the father’s role in the family, the father should be the main teacher in the home.

He said that men who don’t do this are bad: “Today, we have dads who are interested in sports, business, and sex. They have forgotten that God gave them the Ten Commandments to teach.” He went on to say that fathers who don’t do this cause society problems, like gun violence, when they don’t.

On the subject of pastors endorsing political candidates, he wrote that it is a pastor’s duty to affect the political decisions of the people in the pastor’s congregation. A minister doesn’t have to support a particular candidate, though. In fact, if they do, a church could lose its tax-exempt status if they do. He wrote, “If [a pastor] has done his job right, his members will pray and use God’s Word as a standard to choose the right candidate.”

In May 2003, Rogers and twenty-four other religious leaders and influential people signed a letter to President George W. Bush from Gary Bauer’s right group American Values. In the letter, President Bush’s Road Map for Peace plan is criticised for being too easy on the Palestinians. In part, the letter says, “Mr. President, it would be morally wrong for the United States to be “fair” to both democratic Israel and the Palestinian infrastructure, which is full of terrorists.”

Cecil Sherman, who is the Coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group of liberal Baptists who left the Southern Baptist Convention,[5] writes in his autobiography that he once asked Rogers about biblical inerrancy, bringing up New Testament passages that seem to support slavery. Sherman says Rogers said, “I think slavery is unfairly criticised. If we still had slavery today, we wouldn’t have this welfare mess.” Later, Rogers signed a new version of the Baptist Faith and Message that said all races are equal in God’s eyes.

Rogers was a strong backer of the pro-life movement. He said that the death penalty is a spiritually ordained institution, and he and other Southern Baptists backed a boycott of Disney because the company promoted homosexuality.

As a traditional Baptist, he was against drinking and smoking. He often told stories to show how dangerous they were. One story is about a man whose daughter died while driving drunk. When he found out, he vowed to get even with whoever gave her the alcohol, only to find out that she had taken the bottle from his own liquor closet.

Rogers also told people that they shouldn’t gamble. In one of these messages, he talked about what he saw Muhammad Ali do in Paradise Island, Bahamas.

“You can’t make more money by splitting it up.”

This quote is often found on the Internet and is often wrongly credited to Rogers with the wrong year, 1931. In fact, the quote is part of a longer sermon by Rogers from 1984 called God’s Way to Health, Wealth, and Wisdom (CDA107), but it also appears as a passage in Rogers’ 1996 book Ten Secrets for a Successful Family, which says that “most of our young people don’t know either the importance or the value of honest work.”

Rogers didn’t come up with the quote. In fact, he didn’t say that he came up with it. Instead, he was quoting almost word-for-word anti-Soviet lies from magazines from the early 1960s. Before that, the quote was in the Congressional Record of 1958. U.S. Senator George Aiken of Vermont added it to the record.

Aiken took the words from Mississippi Senator James Eastland, who said them at the annual meeting of the Illinois Agricultural Association on November 13, 1957. Gerald L. K. Smith, who wrote them for his magazine The Cross and the Flag, has also been given credit for them. Since 2009, when the quote was first given to Rogers, it has always been attributed to him, even though Rogers was mostly quoting Eastland or Smith at the time.