Baptist Briefs
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Tennesseans reject school change. Baptists in Tennessee voted down a proposed bylaw that would have altered the way trustees are elected at a college and two universities affiliated with their state convention. The bylaw, which called for the Tennessee Baptist Convention to fill trustee vacancies with nominees acceptable both to the state convention and the particular school, fell 70 votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. The proposal grew out of a conflict over Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn. Last year, the school's trustees declared themselves a self-perpetuating board.
___ Alliance joins NCC. The 125-church Alliance of Baptists has been declared eligible to become the 36th member communion of the National Council of Churches. A Nov. 10 vote by the NCC General Assembly sets the stage for a final vote next year establishing formal membership and seating an Alliance delegation. The Alliance of Baptists, with an aggregate church membership of 60,000, was established in 1986 to protest actions of conservatives who at the time were gaining control of the Southern Baptist Convention.
___ Edgemon retires. Roy Edgemon, leader of Southern Baptists' discipleship training program for 22 years, has announced his retirement as director of the discipleship and family group of LifeWay Christian Resources, effective April 1. Edgemon, 65, joined the staff of the Sunday School Board in 1978 as director of the church training department.
___ Joe Smith dies. Joe Smith, 39, design editor of Woman's Missionary Union's "Dimension" magazine, died unexpectedly Nov. 19 following quadruple bypass surgery. Smith had worked for WMU since October 1996. Prior to working for WMU, he was on staff at Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, and two children, Jacob, 6, and Julie, 1.
___ "Death camps" need prayer. A Southern Baptist missionary has issued an urgent call to prayer for hundreds of thousands of people in Burundi trapped in squalid camps without food, shelter or sanitation. As many as 800,000 Hutu civilians have been forced into the detention camps outside the capital, Bujumbura. Burundi's Tutsi-dominated government hopes the strategy will stymie attacks by Hutu rebels entrenched around the city.
___Southern Baptist missionary David Brandon says many observers consider the settlements to be little more than death camps.
___ California convention won't change name. The largest Baptist state convention in the West will keep the word "Southern" in its name for at least one more year, after messengers rejected a bid to remove it at the 1999 annual meeting of the California Southern Baptist Convention. In addition to deciding the name change issue, messengers also affirmed the 1998 family amendment to the Baptist Faith & Message. Sixty percent of those voting on the proposal to change the convention name favored shortening it to California Baptist Convention. But that number was short of the two-thirds vote needed to enact the constitutional amendment.
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