On the eve of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s 60th anniversary, Hal Lane, its newly elected chairman of trustees, is as equally excited about how emerging technologies are enabling the Southern Baptist agency to place biblically based resources on today’s complex ethical and political issues literally at the fingertips of believers.
Hal Lane, newly elected trustee chairman of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is pastor of West Side Baptist Church in Greenwood.“If Southern Baptists will just go and look” at one of the commission’s three websites, and see all the information available, “they will want to visit these sites again and again,” said Lane, pastor of West Side Baptist Church, Greenwood, for the past 17 years.
Lane, a former president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, is a two-time chairman of the ERLC trustees. In the middle of his second term on the ERLC board, which runs from 2005-2009, Lane was a member of the search committee that brought the ERLC’s current executive, Richard Land, to the agency. He also served from 1986 to 1993 and filled an unexpired term from 2002-2005.
In South Carolina, Lane has been active on the state convention’s Christian Life and Public Affairs Committee and was recently named chairman of The Baptist Courier’s board of trustees, after having completed a term as its vice chair.
Pointing to three websites maintained by the ERLC – erlc.com, faithandfamily.com, and ivotevalues.com – Lane emphasizes the agency’s commitment to providing helpful resources for individuals and families on a variety of moral and political fronts.
On erlc.com, Baptists will find information about the commission’s mission statement and its personnel as well as current issues, such as pro-life, race relations, First Amendment freedoms and public policy, Lane noted. The site also provides links to “For Faith and Family,” one of the radio broadcasts in which Land is involved, and to “Richard Land Live,” a weekly, call-in radio program.
In addition, experts at the ERLC in the rapidly advancing, complex social arenas of biomedical ethics, the pro-life movement and public policy provide their insights “so that Christians can have something and someone to look to and ask, ‘Hey, is that right?’ ‘Is that true?’ ‘Is that something I should support?'” he added.
Faithandfamily.com offers pod casts and downloads about improving marriage relationships, parenting skills, homosexuality, drug addiction, sexual purity, alcohol abstinence, Internet pornography and online gambling, and other resources for Christian families that are facing difficult times in today’s culture, Lane continued.
“It is a good source of Christian-based information important to families that will help parents counter the culture and refute the arguments and other information being given to their kids through secular sources,” he noted.
The ivotevalues.com site focuses on the importance of Christian citizenship and voting according to one’s values, rather than by party affiliation, Lane emphasized. In particular, the website assists Southern Baptists in “finding candidates who support their values and electing them,” Lane explained.
The site’s content is also aimed at “impressing on those who are serving the issues that are important to us within the body of Christ, concerning impacting the culture through legislation that upholds traditional marriage, pro-life values, race relations, abstinence from alcohol, etc.,” he said.
Pastors, youth ministers, Sunday school teachers, discipleship group leaders and coordinators of church outreach ministries can all find helps for preparing messages and lessons, counseling tools and information about establishing ministry programs, Lane highlighted.
“A lot of people are used to going to American Family Association or to James Dobson’s organization for materials, and we are in that same realm” of now offering biblically based information on moral issues, he observed, adding that “Richard Land is also being recognized as a leading spokesman to the culture for Christian values.”
Although the ERLC is the smallest of the SBC’s agencies and, as such, receives “the smallest piece of the Cooperative Program pie,” Lane commented, “Even with the limited resources that we have, according to surveys we do concerning media impact, reports indicated that when everything was combined, we had put biblical information or truths out before more than 2.4 billion people last year.
“That’s an incredible bang for the buck that Southern Baptists are getting,” he said. Including interviews of Land on national broadcasts and in print media, “that’s over a third of the world’s population being impacted in some way with information getting out about biblical truths,” Lane stressed.
Pointing out that the ERLC maintains offices both in Nashville, Tenn., and Washington, D.C., Lane remarked, “We are making a difference in a lot of important issues.”
One of the ERLC’s key victories in the past year involved the passing of legislation dealing with stem cell research and prohibiting the destruction of embryos, he underscored. ERLC personnel also succeeded in helping legislation pass that stops partial-birth abortions, and they are hoping to have the new Supreme Court rule in its favor, he said.
“Our influence, our visibility, our presence in Washington, our recognition by the media as spokesmen for conservative Christian values – all of that is growing because of our staff,” Lane observed. “We are just excited and want Southern Baptists to know what is available to them, and to know that they can have Richard Land come and be a part of events and church services in their area, as his schedule permits,” he suggested.
“The ERLC is not on the front page often of even convention publications. We’re kind of the ‘best-kept secret’ sometimes,” Lane quipped. “We just want more people to know what we are doing, want them to be involved in what we are doing, and want them to be tapped into the resources that we have available.”