December 8, 1999
1990-1999: Great gospel
strides made despite disunity
___By Toby Druin
___A cross-section of Texas Baptists, interviewed by the Baptist Standard as the decade of the 1990s dawned, shared their hopes for the period and predicted the issues the Baptist General Convention of Texas would face during the decade.
___They listed concern for winning Texans to faith in Christ, need for greater unity, responding to the ethnic challenge and involving more ethnics in leadership, reaching more senior adults and tapping their skills, and a need for more prayer and commitment.
___Certainly, some of those things have been accomplished. The decade of the '90s has been the most productive in the history of the convention in evangelism; yet as the 21st century approaches, the state has more non-Christian residents than ever--10 million.
___More ethnics and women are involved in the convention than ever. During the decade, a woman became vice chairman of the Executive Board, and more than 50 women now serve on the 231-member body. Hispanic pastor Rudy Sanchez is the new board chairman. More than 1,000 Hispanic congregations and several hundred African-American churches are now affiliated with the BGCT. Ethnic church starts easily outpace those for Anglo congregations. The face of Texas Baptists is becoming a mosaic.
___If growth is a measure of commitment, that goal has been achieved. During the '90s, thanks largely to a plan to start 1,400 new congregations during the last half of the decade, the total number of churches had grown from 4,300 to 4,817 by 1998 and the number of missions from 1,105 to 1,122. Total membership was up from 2.54 million to 2.69 million.
___Greater unity, however, was elusive. While Texas Baptists showed a remarkable dedication to the Great Commission during the decade, progress often has been achieved in spite of a lack of unity in the organizational life of the convention.
___The 1990s have been marked by a spate of changes in the BGCT, most of them prompted by discord rooted in the controversy that dominated the Southern Baptist Convention from 1979 to 1990, when conservatives gained control of all aspects of SBC life.
THIS PHOTO, carried on the front cover of the Baptist Standard's March 16, 1994, issue, incited outrage among thousands of Baptists statewide who were upset over the firing of Russell Dilday as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The Southern Baptist Convention-elected trustees who orchestrated Dilday's firing had ordered the locks on his seminary office be changed even as he was being terminated in a closed-door board meeting.
___The decade has been marked by two "bookends" that clearly demonstrate the changes that have occurred--a change in the relationship between the state convention and Baylor University at the outset of the '90s and the election of Charles Wade as the new executive director of the BGCT Executive Board as the decace comes to a close.
___The decade dawned with one of the most significant changes in the history of the convention. On Sept. 21, 1990, Baylor University trustees voted to change their charter to end the university's century-long relationship with the state convention, replacing the BGCT-elected trustees with a self-perpetuating board of regents. The rationale given was that "fundamentalists" had gained control of the SBC and its six seminaries and were moving to bring the same kind of change in state conventions. Baylor trustees acted to end that threat and keep the university in the hands of what they called mainstream Texas Baptists.
___Eventually--at the state convention in 1991, which, ironically, was held on the Baylor campus and set a registration record of 11,159 messengers--the convention approved a new relationship with the university, with the convention electing one-fourth of the board of regents, all of whom are Baptists.
___Other institutional changes have occurred, especially among health care agencies, several of which have new relationships with the convention, with only a portion of their trustees elected by the BGCT.
___Although it is autonomous from the BGCT, the formation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991 had an impact on the state convention. CBF was organized by individuals and churches opposed to the changes in the SBC, and many of the BGCT's elected leadership during the decade have been associated with CBF.
___Another organization, Texas Baptists Committed, also was born at the turn of the decade, with a stated purpose of keeping Texas Baptists true to their traditional moorings. The San Angelo-based organization successfully has supported candidates for BGCT office.
___Formation of Texas Baptists Committed led to the organization of an opposition group, the Texas Conservative Fellowship. They later would become Southern Baptists of Texas.
___The changing allegiances led to changes in the way Texas Baptists support missions. In 1991, responding to requests from churches wishing no longer to support some BGCT and SBC programs, the Executive Board approved a change that permitted churches to exclude up to five items from their missions gifts and still have them qualify as "Cooperative Program" contributions.
___In 1994-95 further changes were made in the Cooperative Program. This permitted churches to contribute to CBF and other worldwide Baptist ministries and still have those funds qualify as Cooperative Program contributions--a designation that before had been restricted to gifts to support the budgets of the BGCT and SBC.
___Two events in the same week in 1994 had great impact on the BGCT. The first, on March 11, was the approval by the Executive Board of a "vision statement" drafted over 18 months by a 74-member strategy council that has provided a blueprint for much of what the convention has tried to accomplish over the last half of the decade. The cornerstone of the statement was the goal of reaching every person in Texas with the gospel by the year 2000.
___The second event was the firing on March 12 of Russell Dilday as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. Though the seminary is an SBC institution, it has strong Texas Baptist ties, and Dilday had strong Texas Baptist support. His dismissal galvanized Texas Baptist opposition to the changes being wrought in the SBC. Dilday subsequently was named to the faculty of the new George W. Truett Seminary at Baylor University and in l997 was elected to the first of two terms as president of the BGCT.
___In 1997, after a year-long study regarding virtually every aspect of the convention's agencies and relationships, the BGCT approved the report of the Effectivness & Efficiency Committee. It included recommendations that Texas Baptists send out "lay envoy" mission workers, provide supplemental literature, magnify multicultural ministries, step up support for families, provide theological education for laypeople and change the way churches qualify to send messengers to the BGCT annual session. The report, approved overwhelmingly, acknowledged that some of the proposals were in response to changes in the SBC.
___In response to the E/E report's approval, Southern Baptists of Texas voted to form a separate convention and held its first annual meeting in 1998. Thus, the unity that had existed since 1886 when the BGCT was birthed was shattered.
___Toby Druin is an editor emeritus of the Baptist Standard
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