Earlier this month in Dallas, SBC President Clint Pressley opened the meeting with a message titled “Hold Fast.” It was a call to conviction, clarity and resolve. Albert Mohler followed, reminding attendees that the gospel must be “thick on the ground”—firm, unbending and institutionally protected.
The tone was urgent and serious. The boundaries were clear. The road, they said, must be defended.
Meanwhile, in St. Louis, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship gathered this week under the theme “You Belong Here.” There, Melissa Hatfield preached an altogether different kind of sermon with the theme “Come to the Waters,”—an invitation to step in, to trust the current of grace, to be changed by the wideness of welcome.
It was less about defending and more about becoming. Less about what we must preserve, more about what we might yet become. The difference wasn’t just theological. It was existential.
And that’s where the poets come in.
It began the way Baptist gatherings often do—with hymns, handshakes and a familiar passage of scripture. But this summer, the SBC and CBF offered more than parallel events. They offered a parable. A picture of two paths. Two postures. Two witnesses standing at a fork in the road.
Where one pulpit drew the lines, the other opened the gates. Where one urged preservation, the other preached possibility.
You may remember Robert Frost’s famous lines:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both…”
We often misremember that poem as a celebration of bold individuality. But Frost wasn’t romanticizing rebellion. He was naming the ache of decision—that once you take a path, “way leads on to way,” and you rarely get to see where the other might have led. What haunts isn’t the trail—it’s the truth that choosing always leaves something behind.
This is what the SBC and CBF offered the world this month—not just a study in denominational difference, but a parable about how we live. Two ways of being church. Two ways of walking through the world.
One road calls for clarity, conviction, and control. The other opens space for ambiguity, curiosity and change. One says God is best served by our certainty. The other suggests God might be discovered in our surrender.
These aren’t just institutional postures. They’re spiritual ones. They show up in marriages and prayer groups, in boardrooms and bedrooms.
We know these roads. We’ve stood at that fork before. Some of us are standing there now.
And this is where timshel finds us.
In “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck lingers over a moment in the story of Cain and Abel, when God warns Cain that sin is crouching at the door. The Hebrew word in that warning—timshel—has been translated in many ways: “you must,” “you shall,” “you can.”
But Steinbeck chooses a different rendering: “Thou mayest.” Thou mayest opens the future. It doesn’t trap Cain in fate. It names the freedom and burden of human agency.
You are not doomed. You are not stuck. You may.
You may stay on the familiar road.
You may turn and walk another.
You may cling to what has always been.
You may risk becoming someone new.
That word now hovers over both conventions—and over all of us. It is the truth beneath all the sermons and motions, behind the platforms and praise songs: for all the differences, the one shared reality is this—each of us is always choosing: Whether to love or to guard. Whether to open or to retreat. Whether to grow or to dig in our heels.
This story isn’t just about two Baptist groups diverging in the denominational woods. It’s about us.
The daily forks in our own lives. The questions we carry into our homes and churches and hearts: Will we choose fear or faith? Preservation or transformation? Certainty or curiosity? Will we grasp for control or reach for the Spirit?
And here’s the paradox: we don’t get to walk both paths. Like Frost, we must choose. And like Steinbeck, we are free.
You may take the road that circles the wagons—or the one that sets more places at the table.
You may hold fast—or come to the waters.
You may stay where you are—or risk becoming something new.
You may.
Frost reminds us the road will change us. Steinbeck reminds us the choice is still ours.
So perhaps the point is not that all roads are equal. They are not. One narrows, the other widens. One defends its borders; the other opens its arms.
And while the path of welcome may cost us more, it also transforms us more deeply.
To stand at the fork, then, is no small thing. Every step—personal or institutional—is a holy risk.
And maybe, in the very act of choosing, something in us is set free. Because way still leads on to way.
And still, timshel.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
The Rev. Dr. Jason G. Edwards is a pastor and writer based in Liberty, Missouri, where he has served as Senior Pastor of Second Baptist Church for over sixteen years. His poetry, prose, and prayers appear regularly on his Substack at jasongedwards.substack.com.
