Wrecking Ball Blow #2: FBC Jax Helps Create the Ergun Caner Phenomenon

It was November 2001. America was still reeling from the September 11 terrorist attacks. Americans were scared, angry, confused and suddenly very interested in Islam. And into the pulpit of First Baptist Jacksonville walked a preacher with one heck of a testimony.

His name was Ergun Caner, and boy, did he have a story. Caner told the packed First Baptist auditorium that he had been raised in Europe, had been involved in "Islamic Youth Jihad," and had been "trained to do that which was done on 11 September." I was sitting there with my family listening to it, and I believed him. Talk about having the right testimony at exactly the right time. A former Muslim supposedly immersed in Islamic jihad, converted to Christianity and now able to explain the Muslim world to frightened American Christians? You couldn't have ordered a better speaker from Central Casting.

There was just one teeny-tiny problem: the dramatic biography Caner was presenting to us didn't hold up. And one of the churches that gave the emerging Ergun Caner phenomenon one heck of a launch into Southern Baptist stardom? You guessed it: First Baptist Church Jacksonville.

Before and After 9/11

Years later, I posted what I still think is one of the most remarkable visual summaries of the whole Caner affair: two photographs of Caner before and after 9/11. I called the post "Caner - Before and After 9/11 Shots."

See the two Caner photographs in my October 29, 2013 Watchdog post

Look at those two pictures. On the left was the pre-9/11 version, known as "Butch Caner" or "E. Michael Caner." As I wrote at the time, he was an obscure preacher who had grown up in Ohio from about the age of three. I certainly don't remember seeing the George Costanza-looking version of Caner making the megachurch circuit.

Then came 9/11, and just a few weeks later Jerry Vines brought a considerably more exotic version of Caner into First Baptist Jacksonville. Now we had "Ergun Mehmet Giovanni Caner." Same guy, much better marketing. Caner stood before thousands of us talking about Islamic Youth Jihad and being trained to do what had happened on September 11. He spoke with an accent, rolled his R's and talked about having difficulty speaking English as a teenager; except Caner had been living in Ohio since he was a small child.

When I wrote about those two photographs in 2013, I described what had happened to those of us sitting in that auditorium with two words: "We were tricked. Bamboozled."

Nine Years Later, I Got the Tape

In 2010, as questions about Caner's biography began circulating on the Internet, I remembered that sermon at First Baptist Jacksonville. I knew what I had heard that morning, but there was a problem: this was November 2001. There wasn't a convenient YouTube archive where I could type "Ergun Caner FBC Jax" and pull up the video.

Believe it or not, First Baptist still had something resembling the old church tape ministry.

And this is where the story gets interesting.

I had a friend who was still a member of First Baptist Jacksonville. Through the church's own resources, that person was able to get her hands on an audio recording of Caner's November 20, 2001 sermon and get it to me.

Think about the irony of that.

One of the most important pieces of evidence in the Ergun Caner controversy didn't come from some sophisticated investigative operation. It came from an old FBC Jax audio tape that had apparently been sitting in the church's own archives for nearly nine years.

I listened to it.

And what I heard was worse than I remembered.

Caner told us he had been "raised in Europe." He said that until age 15 he had been in "Islamic Youth Jihad." Then came the whopper: "until I came to America, until I found Jesus Christ as Lord, I was trained to do that which was done on 11 September."

I posted the audio on the Watchdog.

And I have to imagine there were some people who deeply regretted that the old FBC Jax tape ministry had been so diligent about preserving sermons.

Because as far as I have ever been able to determine, that FBC Jacksonville recording was the surviving record of the sermon where Caner was making some of the most extraordinary claims about his life at the very beginning of his post-9/11 rise. I was contacted by a trustee at Liberty University about that tape, and the recordings I had archived from an Ohio Free Will Baptists website where Caner told outlandish stories of learning about American culture as a teenager in Istanbul, Turkey. Total rubbish. 

Read my March 2010 Watchdog investigation of Caner's FBC Jax sermon

That recording is also why the Caner story became so personal to me. I wasn't investigating something that supposedly happened at somebody else's church. I was there, with my family. I remembered believing that we had just heard the testimony of essentially a former Islamic jihadist who had been saved by Jesus just in the nick of time before becoming one of the people we had watched flying airplanes into buildings. That was precisely why the story was so powerful in November 2001.

We Got the Testimony We Wanted

The really fascinating part is that Caner's actual testimony was already a perfectly good Christian testimony. He had been raised Muslim and converted to Christianity as a teenager. Isn't that enough?

Apparently not for the evangelical celebrity machine.

Regular Muslim kid growing up in Ohio converts to Christianity? Nice. But apparently that doesn't provide quite enough horsepower for the evangelical conference circuit. Former Islamic jihadist raised overseas, trained in terrorism, finds Jesus and arrives in your church immediately after September 11? 

Books, conferences, speaking engagements, seminary positions and packed auditoriums followed. Jerry Vines and other prominent Southern Baptist leaders gave Caner tremendous credibility. And when Caner stood in the First Baptist Jacksonville pulpit, he wasn't speaking at some storefront church next to a laundromat. He was speaking to thousands from one of the most influential pulpits in Southern Baptist life.

That platform mattered. If Jerry Vines had this guy standing in the FBC Jax pulpit telling us this incredible story, surely somebody had checked him out, right? 

Then the Bloggers Ruined Everything

Eventually the Caner controversy became too large to dismiss as pesky Internet bloggers tapping away in their mothers' basements, as Ergun Caner liked to say. I posted the FBC Jax recording so people could listen and judge for themselves, and by the end of 2010 I had written more than 20 articles about Caner. The Watchdog material became part of the larger investigation into the contradictions in Caner's public biography.

Liberty University eventually investigated Caner's public statements and concluded there were factual statements that were self-contradictory involving dates, names and places of residence. His appointment as seminary dean was not renewed.

But what bothered me almost as much as Caner's stories was the reaction from the evangelical establishment. Where were all the guardians of biblical truth? These were guys who could detect theological liberalism at 500 yards. Say the wrong thing about the creation story in Genesis and somebody would convene the discipline committee. Let a woman get within 25 feet of the pulpit and somebody would need smelling salts. (which reminds me of the time Ergun joked to the Ohio Free Will Baptists: "Do I believe in women behind the pulpit? You bet I do, how else do you expect them to vacuum back here if they can't get behind it?")

But when serious questions emerged about the autobiographical claims of a nationally prominent evangelical celebrity, suddenly everybody became very cautious: "Well, we don't know all the facts." Funny how that works.

And amazingly, Caner was back at the FBC Jax Pastors' Conference in January 2011. At the time I argued that putting him back on the program, surrounded again by major SBC personalities, effectively communicated that Caner was back in good standing with the evangelical preaching establishment.

Why This Was Another Swing of the Wrecking Ball

I'm not arguing that Ergun Caner caused First Baptist Jacksonville's attendance decline, and I'm certainly not claiming his 2001 sermon caused the financial problems that eventually resulted in the Main Auditorium being sold. That would be ridiculous.

Caner was a symptom. He showed what could happen when enormous evangelical platforms became fascinated with sensational testimonies, celebrity personalities and incredible stories while forgetting to ask boring little questions such as: Is this true? Did anybody verify it? Should this person really be standing in our pulpit? And when we discover that something isn't true, are we willing to admit publicly that we got fooled?

That's where institutions either correct themselves or begin deteriorating. First Baptist Jacksonville helped give Ergun Caner an enormous platform. The Southern Baptist celebrity machine helped turn him into a star. And when the story eventually unraveled, precious few of the people who helped create the phenomenon seemed particularly interested in standing up and saying, "We got this wrong."

Maybe that's because accountability is considerably more enjoyable when you're preaching it to the people sitting in the pews. It's a little less fun when the sermon on accountability is about you, the "man of God".

The Main Auditorium was still standing. The crowds were still coming, the conferences were still going, the celebrity preachers were still arriving, and everything looked fine.

But another swing had landed.

Wrecking Ball Blow #2.

The Wrecking Ball that Brought Down FBC Jax: Blow Number 1, Homer Died

Before going any further, let's be clear about something.

First Baptist Jacksonville is not dead. The church still exists, it still has a significant ministry, and under Heath Lambert it has made the painful decisions necessary to get itself back onto solid financial footing.

But let's not kid ourselves about what happened either.

The First Baptist Jacksonville of the 1980s and 1990s, the church that was once one of the largest and most influential churches in America is gone.

This was once a church that drew enormous crowds into downtown Jacksonville every Sunday. It hosted one of the premier pastors' conferences in the country. Its pastors were nationally known Southern Baptist leaders. Its downtown campus sprawled across city blocks, and in 1993 it opened an approximately 11,000-seat Main Auditorium because, amazingly enough, they actually needed the seats.

Today, First Baptist isn't even close to being the largest church in metropolitan Jacksonville, much less one of the largest churches in America.

And perhaps nothing illustrates that decline better than what is happening right now to the Main Auditorium.

They're tearing the thing down.

For those of us who were actually sitting inside that building when it opened in 1993, that's difficult to comprehend. This isn't some 120-year-old sanctuary with rotting floorboards and bats living in the steeple. The building is barely more than 30 years old.

The auditorium isn't being demolished because First Baptist Jacksonville ceased to exist.

It is being demolished because the First Baptist Jacksonville that needed an 11,000-seat auditorium ceased to exist.

That's an important distinction.

And that's what I mean when I say the wrecking ball came twice.

The literal wrecking ball is arriving now. The figurative wrecking ball began swinging years ago as the church lost thousands of members, financial resources, national influence and ultimately much of the downtown campus that generations of First Baptist members sacrificed to build.

Heath Lambert eventually inherited the aftermath. To his credit, Lambert made some extraordinarily difficult decisions. He sold property, dramatically reduced the church's footprint and put First Baptist on a sustainable financial course.

But by then, the old First Baptist Jacksonville empire had already been decimated.

So while we're watching the Main Auditorium come down, I thought it might be interesting to go back through nearly two decades of Watchdog history and ask a rather obvious question:

How in the world did we get here?

How does one of America's great megachurches go from needing an 11,000-seat auditorium to watching that same auditorium demolished barely three decades after opening it?

It wasn't one thing.

The wrecking ball swung several times.

I'm going to look at what I believe were the five biggest blows.

And here is blow number one.

Blow #1: Homer Died, and Nobody Was Looking Out for First Baptist Anymore

It would be tempting for me to rewrite history and claim that First Baptist's problems began when church leadership stopped listening to ordinary members.

But longtime First Baptist members would laugh at that one.

Let's be honest.

Homer Lindsay wasn't exactly running a congregational democracy.

Homer ran First Baptist Jax.

Jerry Vines, Homer's co-pastor beginning in the mid-1980s, was the magnificent preacher in the pulpit. But Homer was the guy running the church.

Homer didn't spend his time traveling around the country building the Homer Lindsay Ministries brand. He wasn't constantly looking for the next conference, book deal or opportunity to expand his national profile. Homer was in Jacksonville. He knew what was happening at First Baptist because First Baptist was his life.

And let's not romanticize the governance structure either. The trustees weren't exactly sitting around a mahogany conference table carefully exercising independent oversight over Homer Lindsay.

Homer made the decisions. The trustees knew Homer made the decisions. The congregation knew Homer made the decisions. And Homer knew everybody knew Homer made the decisions.

That was First Baptist Jacksonville.

And Homer didn't particularly care for critics either. Homer would have hated this blog.

Years later, after Homer had died, Vines had retired and the Watchdog was in full swing, Vines returned to preach at the Pastors' Conference. During his sermon he talked about what he did with anonymous critical letters, and therefore presumably anonymous blogs.

He threw them away.

And, as I remember it, he joked that he would spit on them first.

The crowd loved it and giggled and clapped. 

So spare me any revisionist history about the golden age of First Baptist leadership carefully considering anonymous criticism, distributing member surveys and holding listening sessions.

[Revision after posting: I have to be fair to Heath Lambert - one of the aspects of his leadership when he was leading the church through the massive restructuring: huge personnel cuts, selling properties, etc., was he actually held town hall meetings where members could step up to an open microphone and ask questions or air grievances. That was absolutely unheard of in FBC Jax history! Imagine ANY mega church having an open microphone session, live streamed online and posted to YouTube!!  So it certainly was a different day under Heath's leadership as he led them through the darkest period of the church's history]

That wasn't First Baptist Jacksonville.

But there was one enormous difference between the Homer era and what followed.

Homer loved that church.

Whatever you think about his leadership style - and there was plenty to criticize for sure - Homer had a vision for First Baptist Jacksonville. He believed that enormous downtown campus existed to build the church and fulfill what he believed was the Great Commission.

He wasn't building a personal brand.

He wasn't using First Baptist to sell Homer Lindsay books transcripted from his sermons.

He didn't negotiate the intellectual rights to his sermons.

He wasn't selling cruises like "Sail the Danube with the Lindsays" or "Holy Land with Homer" trips

First Baptist wasn't a platform for Homer Lindsay Enterprises, LLC.

It was First Baptist Church of Jacksonville.

Then Homer died.

And in hindsight, I believe that may have been the first swing of the wrecking ball.

As Heath Lambert himself chronicled years later in his podcast series "What Happened at FBC Jax," the decline in membership and attendance began around 2000. Interesting timing.

Because First Baptist's problem wasn't simply that enormous authority had been concentrated in a few hands.

Let's be more accurate.

It had been concentrated largely in one hand: Homer's.

The problem was what happened when Homer disappeared but the system didn't.

First Baptist still had a congregation conditioned to trust its senior leadership. It still had enormous financial resources. It still had tremendous institutional prestige. It still had trustees accustomed to deferring to the senior pastor.

What it didn't have anymore was Homer Lindsay standing there making sure that First Baptist Jacksonville came first.

And slowly, in my view, other interests began creeping in.

I wrote about events such as "A Time to Stand With Israel," which I believed had precious little to do with the actual mission of First Baptist Jacksonville and looked much more like a fundraising enterprise taking advantage of the church's enormous platform.

My criticism of that event apparently didn't win me any Christmas cards from the powerful layman who helped coordinate it. In fact, I have long believed my criticism of that event helped seal my fate when it came to the extraordinary efforts eventually undertaken to discover the identity of the anonymous Watchdog blogger.

Then there was the once-great Pastors' Conference.

I watched something that had been a genuine ministry of First Baptist Jacksonville increasingly resemble a Christian marketing convention.

Products. Promotions. Celebrity preachers. Cruises with the pastor. Holy Land trips.

Apparently the Great Commission needed a travel agent.

Somewhere along the way, it seemed to me that the question changed.

The old question was:

"How can First Baptist use its resources and the sacrificial giving of its members, to accomplish its mission?"

Increasingly, the question seemed to become:

"How can this enormous audience and platform be used to advance the interests and opportunities (and pocketbook) of the senior pastor?"

And that distinction matters.

Homer Lindsay could be controlling. He could be stubborn. He could run the church with an iron fist.

But I never doubted whose interests Homer believed he was protecting.

First Baptist Jacksonville's.

Once Homer was gone, the church retained all the vulnerabilities of the system he had created: concentrated authority, tremendous institutional prestige, trustees accustomed to deferring to the senior pastor, and a congregation conditioned for decades to blindly trust the man behind the pulpit.

What it no longer had was Homer.

And perhaps that was the first swing of the wrecking ball.

The one hitting the Main Auditorium today is just a lot easier to see.

Wrecking Ball Blow #1.

Stay tuned.

We've got four more swings to go.

The Wrecking Ball Came Twice...

...the real demolition of FBC Jax occurred years ago when the first wrecking ball arrived. But now the literal wrecking ball is taking down the main auditorium to make way for a Publix and 11 stories of condominiums. 

A few weeks ago I stopped by the old First Baptist Jacksonville auditorium, where demolition is underway. I've included some of my own photos from a few weeks ago, and some more recent ones that were in the newspaper this week after more demolition has occurred (credited to David Bauerlein and Florida Times Union)

I'll admit, it was a little emotional.

My young family and I were there when this building opened in 1993. At the time, it represented an exciting new chapter in the church's history, and over the next three decades countless worship services, concerts, weddings, funerals, and other significant moments took place inside its walls. For many of us, there are a lot of memories attached to this place.

That's why it's hard to see a building that's only about thirty years old already facing demolition.

The sad reality is that it didn't have to end this way. As downtown Jacksonville experiences a remarkable resurgence, with new residential development, major investment around the Jaguars stadium, and renewed interest in urban living; FBC Jax could have remained an important part of that story.

Instead, years of financial mismanagement, institutional arrogance, and pastors and their sycophants more interested in enriching themselves and their families, left the church with impossible decisions. By the time Heath Lambert became senior pastor, there really were no easy options left. Selling portions of the downtown campus, including this auditorium, wasn't a visionary choice as much as it was a necessary one to deal with the financial realities he inherited.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing some photos, memories, and reflections as this chapter in First Baptist Jacksonville's history comes to a close. Kudos to the current FBC Jax pastor, Heath Lambert, for doing what was necessary to save the church from the years of mismanagement that led to the arrival of the second wrecking ball.