November 17, 1999
New BGCT president sees
little hope for reconcilation with SBC
___EL PASO--Saying he does not see any hope for reconciliation between the Baptist General Convention of Texas and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, newly elected BGCT President Clyde Glazener told members of the media Texas Baptists need to "move on to the Promised Land."
___"Many of us are saying: 'Let's go on. We have a mission. We have a task.' Our mission is not to try to go back and get fundamentalists to buy into our ideology or to try to get them to say, 'We're sorry for what we've done to you,'" Glazener said. "That's a fruitless task. It's not going to happen, and I don't even know that it's a beneficial effort."
CLYDE & KAYE GLAZENER
___Glazener, pastor of Gambrell Street Baptist Church in Fort Worth, was elected Nov. 8 to succeed Russell Dilday, who completed his second term as president. Messengers attending the 114th annual session of the BGCT elected Glazener by acclamation.
___Asked about changes in relationship between the SBC and BGCT, Glazener said: "Texas Baptists have never been married to the Southern Baptist Convention. We have voluntarily cooperated with them."
___Further, Texas Baptists send more money to fund the SBC than any other state and get relatively little in return, he said. "We do much more for them than they do for us."
___Yet Texas Baptists have been "vilified by the SBC because they defunded the Baptist Joint Committee and Texas Baptists decided to keep funding them," Glazener said.
___Regardless of such ideological differences, he predicted the BGCT will remain connected in some way with the SBC as long as churches and the convention choose to fund SBC ministries. "I would think they'll still take our money," he quipped.
___Glazener predicted further changes in BGCT Cooperative Program allocations to the SBC will happen slowly.
___"We're a people of tradition, and we are a people who have been in denial. It has been very difficult for me to come to the point that we really believed that this thing is over; that we can't join ourselves back to and become what the SBC was," Glazener said. "It is very difficult for us to come to that, and many of us have been whistling through the graveyard for a long period of time about that."
___Yet relationships truly are different, Glazener said.
___One example of that difference arose when a reporter asked Glazener about the relationship between his church and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which sit directly across the street from one another in Fort Worth.
___Glazener noted his congregation still includes some members with ties to the seminary and explained that he, too, has had "strong, strong ties" to the seminary.
___Yet the seminary, an institution of the SBC rather than the BGCT, now "is controlled by trustees who are obviously controlled by the fundamentalist movement," he said.
___"When I was a student there, the pastor of Gambrell Street preached there the first week of every semester. Since the change in administration, I've never been asked to preach there."
___Glazener also was asked his opinion of churches that have joined the breakaway Southern Baptists of Texas Convention but also remain aligned with the BGCT.
___He labeled this dual alignment "a bit ironic," explaining the new convention was created specifically by those who could not in good conscience support the BGCT.
___By Scott Collins of Buckner News Service with additional reporting by Managing Editor Mark Wingfield
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