How the ERLC Research team supports our work in D.C.

The primary role of the ERLC research team is to provide a theological and ethical foundation for all the work that we do within the ERLC. We want to be able to communicate our Baptist convictions with our Christian convictions and our ethical frameworks as we address issues of public importance. Today on the ERLC podcast, we’re finishing our series focused on our work in Washington, D.C.

At the ERLC, our goal is to serve our Southern Baptist churches in the public square. As you have heard throughout this series about our work in Washington D.C., having a presence and a voice in our nation’s capital allows us to speak up, for, and from our Southern Baptist churches before various audiences. In previous episodes, we have broken down how that work covers all three branches of government and some of the specific ways we seek to engage those arenas. 

Today, our focus turns to the work of the ERLC’s Research team and how they support and undergird the work of the ERLC Policy team. Joining us is Rashan Frost. RaShan serves as the ERLC director of research and senior fellow focused on issues of human dignity. He is the teaching pastor of Centerpoint Church in North Charleston, South Carolina, and is an adjunct professor of Christian Studies at Charleston Southern University. 

Frost earned his doctor of philosophy in theology with a concentration in public theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is active in denominational leadership, serving with the Charleston Baptist Association of the South Carolina Baptist Convention.

Episode Transcript: How the ERLC Research team supports our work in D.C.

Narration:

Welcome to the ERLC podcast, where our goal is to help you think biblically about today’s cultural issues. I’m Lindsay Nicolet, and today we’re finishing our series focused on our work in Washington DC

Narration:

At the ERLC, our goal is to serve our Southern Baptist churches in the public square. As you’ve heard throughout this series about our work in Washington DC, having a presence and a voice in our nation’s capital allows us to speak up for and from our Southern Baptist churches before various audiences. In previous episodes, we’ve broken down how that work covers all three branches of government and some of the specific ways we seek to engage those arenas. Today, our focus turns to the work of the ERLC’s research team and how they support and undergird the work of the ERLC policy team.

Narration:

Joining us is RaShan Frost. RaShan serves as the ERLC Director of research and senior fellow focused on issues of human dignity. He’s the teaching pastor of Center Point Church in North Charleston, South Carolina, and is an adjunct professor of Christian Studies at Charleston Southern University. Frost earned his doctor of philosophy and theology with a concentration in public theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He’s active in denominational leadership serving with the Charleston Baptist Association of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Now let’s turn to Elizabeth Bristow’s conversation with RaShan Frost.

Elizabeth Bristow:

RaShan, thank you so much for being here with us today. Let’s start out by talking about the primary responsibilities of the ERLC research team.

RaShan Frost:

The primary role of the research team is to provide a theological and ethical foundation for all the work that we do within the ERLC. We want to be able to communicate our Baptist convictions with our Christian convictions and our ethical frameworks as we address issues of public importance.

Elizabeth Bristow:

Very good. So more specifically, what is the relationship between ERLC research and the policy work that we do in the DC office?

RaShan Frost:

That relationship is closely knit. I would almost say that it’s a symbiotic relationship where one feeds the other and vice versa. So for example, and I know we’ll probably talk about it in greater detail later, but our policy guides and our church guides and our white papers are all dealing with issues and the different convictions that we share as Southern Baptists as we address these various issues. And so one of the things that we do is we’re constantly in communication with one another, bouncing off ideas and thoughts in terms of if we have a particular ethical issue that we want to address, we ask, alright, what does it look like from a policy perspective and in the policy realm, if there’s a certain issue, how do we address it with our Baptist convictions? As well as how do we frame a theological and ethical framework by which we then pull out policy recommendations.

Elizabeth Bristow:

Give us an example of a recent white paper that you have worked on that has translated into a church guide or a policy guide. Walk the listener through the steps and the process of how you start maybe with a white paper and then break it down into these other guides so that they are able to serve our Southern Baptist churches.

RaShan Frost:

Yeah, Elizabeth, that’s great because we just actually finished one and we’re working on a couple of more. The one that I worked on prior to my role as director, I was doing it as a senior fellow, was the work on sports gambling. What we started with was a white paper, what is a biblical theological framework by how we look at sports betting, especially in our time and culture. It’s in the forefront of my mind thinking about it. We just had the Super Bowl and we want to be able to create a framework by how should we as Baptists think about this issue. How should we as Christians think about this issue. And because it’s on a lot of state initiatives, state ballots, and because it actually stemmed from a policy issue that went before the Supreme Court, we wanna be able to equip our churches on how to deal with it at the local level.

So even though it may have started through the Supreme Court and actually prior to that with the federal law, and then it went through various procedures and policies that ended up now being on the ballot of several states, one of the things we do is we created this white paper, the theological framework, the biblical framework, how have Southern Baptists talked about in the past. So we’re always drawing from the Baptist faith and Message 2000. We’re always drawing from past resolutions that Southern Baptists have addressed on particular issues. Then we take that and then we bring up a policy discussion in that as well. That’s where we work with our DC team, where we start off with these different frameworks and then we pull into, okay, what does it look like in the policy realm? So we start at the 30,000 foot view of the biblical framework of the theological framework.

Then we go to the 10,000 foot view of how we as Southern Baptists have talked about it, and then we bring it to the two foot view in terms of lived out policy-wise in the world around us. Then from that white paper, we build a church guide, and so the churches are dealing with these issues on a very personal level, pastoral level. I’m a pastor as well, so it’s great to have all this great stuff, but how does it help me fulfill the great commission in making disciples of Jesus Christ within the local church? And so we take those issues and make it in a framework that pastors and ministry leaders can take with it, work with it. And even if that means you have a member of your congregation as a part of state legislature, or you’ve got somebody that’s a part of your congregation that might be working on Capitol Hill, but they may come back to their church where that elected representative represents, we can speak into those issues that way.

And so, like I said, we’ve done one on sports gambling. We actually have done one what is called creating God’s image now that the Dobb’s decision in Roe v. Wade has been overturned. How do we address that in our churches and our congregations? How do we care for people and shepherd people through crisis pregnancies? And we talk about God’s Good Design was another church guide that we’ve just put out recently dealing with gender confusion. And it helps us think through some things, especially we’ve had executive orders that have been published that are addressing these issues directly. So as we shepherd our local churches, as we pastor our local churches, our role at the ERLC is to be a gap for Southern Baptists speaking to Washington. But also as things happen from Washington and our state houses, how do we pastor our churches as well? And so I like to say that we like to do stuff from the church, the voice of the church, but also provide resources for the church.

Elizabeth Bristow:

That’s great. For the listeners who may not understand the autonomy of the SBC and how we work, describe how resolutions from Southern Baptist Convention annual meetings inform the work of our research team.

RaShan Frost:

That’s a good question because all of our churches are autonomous churches, but when we come together, we’re saying this is our collective voice on an issue. We’re saying we have a shared belief on this particular issue. And so because we have a shared belief on a particular issue, we can speak collectively to certain issues. And so whenever we’re dealing with a policy issue, we want to address things based on what have we said in the past. And so it’s a unifying voice that, so that when we are saying something from the perspective of research, we’re not speaking independent of Southern Baptist churches, we’re just speaking to what Southern Baptist churches have already said. What have we said on this issue? And we’re driving that forward.

Elizabeth Bristow:

Have you received any encouraging feedback from local pastors who have used some of these guides that you just previously discussed?

RaShan Frost:

Absolutely. This one of the great things of being a pastor and we’re having those conversations about resources, we bring pastors to the table to discuss the issues. I think that’s really important that we understand that these are issues that pastors are addressing, have concerns about, and are speaking into as we push that information to the other churches and the larger body of churches. And so when we did one recently on sports betting, it was refreshing to hear how they’re dealing with it and how grateful they are that they could speak into these issues, but also sharpen one another. So this is the work of pastors sharpening one another. We’re just providing the conduit by which pastors can share and communicate, and other ministry leaders can share and communicate in ways that they may or not have otherwise have been able to do that. And so the feedback that we’ve gotten is just, from a lot, is really just a gratitude of having resources available that other pastors have wrestled through and worked through, but also providing lanes and categories by which to consider these issues pastorally.

Elizabeth Bristow:

That’s really helpful. Give our listeners just a snapshot of issues that you are looking to address on the horizon at the research level. What are you looking to talk about in the coming year?

RaShan Frost:

That’s a great question. There’s two in particular we’re working on. One is on assistive reproductive technologies, what we call ARTs. So this is the kind of a biomedical issue. But you know, we start talking about issues like in vitro fertilization. The way we think about that framework and the introduction of technology now that we’ve never had in previous generations, well, it brings out additional ethical questions and concerns. And so that’s one area that we’re working on right now is how do we address issues like in vitro fertilization and we’ve got so many great thinkers, even within our convention that we’re pulling from, this isn’t a one man or one women operation, or just a select group of people. You know, we have great thinkers throughout our churches, throughout our state, our seminaries, and so we’re bringing all these different voices to the table to work through this and think through some of these issues.

That’s one issue. The other issue we’ve got coming up pretty soon is just the issue of free church and free state religious liberty issues. And so we want to be able to speak to what are Baptist convictions regarding the relationship between the church and state, and what are the implications of that relationship as we move forward to other policy issues that might be going before the Supreme Court or what state legislatures might want to push out. And so we wanna be able to equip on that angle as well. Our hope is to provide resources in our four lanes within the SBC in general, but also specifically through the ERLC. So we talk about issues of life, marriage and family, human dignity, and religious liberty. Those are the lanes that we stay in, but the policy implications are broader and a lot of times they’ll even overlap. And so those are things that we’re working on as a group that we want to be able to, moving forward, that we want to be able to present to our churches.

Elizabeth Bristow:

We initially address a lot of issues at the federal level, but once the Supreme Court makes a decision, those decisions go back to the state. Tell our listeners how the research team seeks to assist states on these policy issues.

RaShan Frost:

For the research team, this is a very practical way for us to assist our state conventions, the local conventions within our larger state conventions, for example, with the gambling guide that we’re in the process of putting out the white papers already up, but for that gambling guide that is in direct response to state ballot initiatives to legalize sports betting. And so our churches and our state conventions were asking for resources to address sports betting, but also how to speak to our legislators, the state legislators about those issues. And so that’s what facilitated this issue to begin with. That’s what facilitated our work towards putting together this white paper and putting together a church guide is because our churches were asking for it. And so that’s why we took that approach and that’s why we did a sports betting guide. Another practical one that we’ve done is obviously post Dobbs win, the issue of abortion initiatives and abortion bouts were passed back to the states.

We’ve always been pro-life. We’re gonna always be pro-life. But now that these initiatives are moving down to the state, we can advocate with our Baptist convictions with a biblical and theological framework and a practical guide to be able to equip our churches who may be having state initiatives and state bouts on the ballots at the state level. And so we just wanna be a resource, not just on a national level, but also to our state conventions that may be addressing specific ethical issues. And most of the times, it’s kind of one of those things where I think about it as a, also having been a college professor, that you know when a student has a question, it’s usually not just them who has that question. There are several others in the classroom that have the question but may not want to ask the question or whatever.

It kind of goes the same way with these church guides is one state may raise their hand first and say, hey, we’ve got this issue. And then other states are saying, we have that same issue. How do you guys speak into that? And so that’s an opportunity for us to be able to resource as many of our churches as possible on a very local issue that’s important to people living in those communities, in those states. And we wanna be able to address them and equip those churches and those believers with the resources necessary to be able to speak into the legislatures.

Elizabeth Bristow:

And how can folks follow the work of the ERLC research team?

RaShan Frost:

The easiest way is through erlc.com. If you go to the website, there’s actually a tab that says research. And you can go as deep as you want to in terms of resources and material that we’ve put out there on a bevy of topics that we’ve thought through, worked through and things like that. So there is no shortage of resources. And if there is a topic that there’s a question, I know people always reach out to us and there are things that we might start thinking through or working through, or we say, hey, we’ve already got a resource on that. Take a look at this here. And so we’ve been doing a lot lately with biomedical issues only because of the advent of technology into that. And there’s more going down the line in terms of, you know, with AI coming out and the prevalence of that, there are gonna be more issues that we’re gonna have to address and we are addressing down the line. But if you go to erlc.com, that website will is a treasure trove of resources and information to help you think through a lot of different issues.

Narration:

Convictions matter. In an age of relativism and apathy regarding truth what undergirds those convictions is more important than ever. As you heard from RaShan, the ERLC’s research team provides the foundational groundwork that supports our ministry assignment, informing policy positions that are faithful to God’s word, consistent with a Christian ethic, and in line with the Baptist faith and Message and how Southern Baptists have spoken through resolutions. In all of our work, we stand for the issues that matter to you, seek to influence evangelical thinking, and give you confidence as you engage the public’s square with the truth of God’s word and the hope of the gospel.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the ERLC podcast. Join us next time for a special episode with Senator James Langford.