David Platt and McLean Bible Church Are Victims of Conflict Entrepreneurs

Once they have been discredited, they should be ignored

OPINION–You’ve probably heard the expression, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

I’ve both heard and said that expression as part of the work we do here at MinistryWatch. In fact, this expression has often put us on the path to some of our most interesting stories.

So, five years ago, when I started seeing smoke come from the direction of McLean Bible Church in suburban Washington, I assumed I would find fire.

Five years and more than 20 stories later, I find I was, mostly, wrong. Instead, I found a few people with matches in their hands who couldn’t get the fire to do more than smolder. It produced a lot of smoke, but no heat or light.

If my metaphor has lost you, or needs a bit of context, let me explain.

The Rise of McLean Bible Church

McLean Bible Church is one of the great success stories of the past half-century. It began in the 1960s from a group of five families to a congregation with more than 10,000 people and multiple campuses in the Washington, D.C. area. It attracts politicians and business leaders. The size of the church means it can host big conferences and concerts. Longtime pastor Lon Solomon is a Jewish convert known for his Bible preaching, zeal for evangelism, and passion for serving children with special needs.

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But when he resigned from the church in 2017, he told his congregation that he was “tired.”

He continued: “Not tired of walking with Christ, not tired of praying and reading God’s Word, not tired of sharing Christ with people, and not tired of preaching the Word. I am tired of trying to run the demanding operations of our large and complex church. And I am concerned that, if I am too proud to admit and confront this, I will end up hurting the very church family that I love so much. MBC needs a Senior Pastor who can be fully engaged in every level of leading our church.”

The Rise of David Platt

David Platt has seen his own meteoric rise. After studying journalism at the University of Georgia, he earned three degrees – including a Ph.D. – from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He came to national prominence when he was senior pastor of Church at Brook Hills, a large church (4000 members at the time) in Birmingham, Ala. He was just 27 years old when he took over there. That made him the youngest megachurch pastor in the country.

While at Brook Hills, he wrote Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and it further elevated his celebrity status. In 2014, he took over as president of the International Missions Board, the foreign mission arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. While there, he ran into some of the first turbulence in his stratospheric rise.

His appointment was controversial from the beginning. He was young, just 36 when he took over at IMB, and he had no direct experience in the mission field. And the International Missions Board is arguably the SBC institution that had been the most resistant to change. The model for ministry was much as it had been in the 19^th century, what some call a “sending” model. American missionaries go overseas, supported by American churches. Such a model takes a hundred thousand dollars or more per year to keep a missionary in the field. Platt seemed open to new paradigms, such as training and supporting indigenous pastors and missionaries. Such thinking was a direct threat to the “sending” model.

But even without Platt, change needed to happen at the IMB. It was a financially troubled organization. By the time Platt arrived, the organization spent hundreds of millions of dollars more than it had taken in. In 2015, Platt made the unpopular announcement that the organization would cut 600 to 800 jobs, primarily through voluntary early retirement or financial packages that might encourage people to resign.

A Marriage of Convenience, A Clash of Cultures

In February 2017, while Platt was still the president of the Richmond-based International Missions Board, he began serving as interim teaching pastor at McLean Bible Church, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive from Richmond.

This appointment, like his previous appointments as president of the IMB and as the youngest megachurch pastor in the country, was controversial. McLean Bible Church was proudly, some might even say militantly, independent. The idea of bringing in a senior leader of the Southern Baptist Convention was anathema to some members of the church. Further complicating matters was Platt’s continued membership in the Southern Baptist Convention and leadership of the IMB. In those roles, he attended that year’s annual meeting of the SBC as a “messenger.” When Platt later asserted, accurately, that MBC had no formal affiliation with the SBC, some critics of Platt accused him of deception.

After a year in this dual role at both the IMB and MBC, Platt announced his resignation from the IMB, contingent on the denomination finding a successor. Meanwhile, at McLean Bible Church, accusations that Platt was secretly affiliating MBC with the SBC escalated. When Platt accurately denied these claims, he was accused of deceit and a lack of transparency. Lawsuits started to fly. When one would get dropped or dismissed, another would take its place. Finally, in December of 2024, nearly eight years after Platt first went to McLean Bible Church as an interim preaching pastor, the last of the lawsuits was dismissed.

In the past week, the church released a 35-page report telling its side of the story. I have read the entire report, and I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in this matter should do the same. If reading the entire report is more than you want, MinistryWatch has a summary here. So, I won’t go into much detail except to say that the accusations against David Platt and McLean Bible Church ranged from the nitpicky to the outlandish. Platt was accused, for example, of trying to sell one of MBC’s campuses so a Mosque could be built there. They lack all credibility.

Jeremiah Burke appears to be the primary “conflict entrepreneur” here. In emails, Jeremiah Burke addresses the MBC leadership as “oddballs,” “blockheads,” and “Board of Trolls.” He claims to represent 200 to 300 people, though that number is impossible to verify. Even if true, that number represents less than 3 percent of the 10,000 plus members of MBC.

The Bottom Line

I should be clear that there are aspects of David Platt’s ministry that I find off-putting. A ministry he founded in 2011, Radical, stopped releasing its Form 990s several years ago. For someone who has been accused of a lack of transparency, that decision was tone deaf. (The ministry is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, which lists Radical’s revenue at about $8 million.) In 2019 Platt made news – and generated controversy — when Donald Trump came to the church and Platt prayed for him on stage. Platt’s explanation (that he was caught by surprise by the president’s visit) may have been true but displayed a political naivete that is hard to explain in a town in which politics is the family business.

That said, and after looking closely at the so-called evidence against Platt and McLean Bible Church, I find the accusations against them to be spurious, the product of what I have come to call “conflict entrepreneurs,” people who stir up controversy for financial, political, or psychological gain.

If you are a regular reader of MinistryWatch, you know that we spend a lot of time telling the stories of the weak who have been tyrannized by the mighty. Victims of financial fraud. Sexual abuse survivors. We think an important part of our mission is to provide a voice for the voiceless.

Conflict entrepreneurs, however, have platforms and voices, and they are often loud and shrill. They do not need to be amplified. They are people who try to make smoke where there is no fire. Increasingly, they need to be confronted and rebutted.

And once they have been discredited, they need to be ignored.