September 25, 2000
Directors of missions plead with SBC leaders for unity
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___FORT WORTH--Texas directors of associational missions pleaded with all 12 heads of the Southern Baptist Convention's agencies Sept. 21 to do something--anything--to bridge the chasm they said is developing between the SBC and the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
___ In reply, the SBCleaders affirmed the autonomy of the local association and encouraged the directors of missions to help them tell local churches about the good things happening in the SBC. But they offered no plan to rebuild damaged relations between the SBC and BGCT other than affirming a quickly written resolution pledging their willingness to cooperate with Texas churches.
KEN HEMPHILL, Morris Chapman & Jimmy Draper address a gathering of BGCT directors of missions at Southwestern Seminary.
___ The statement said: "We, the presidents of the entities of the Southern Baptist Convention, celebrate our partnership with Baptist churches in Texas and we affirm our eagerness to work with all Texas Baptists through our historic partnership."
___ The two hour meeting at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth was called by Morris Chapman, president of the SBC Executive Committee. No leaders of the BGCT were informed of the afternoon session or invited to attend.
___ About 35 directors of missions participated in the lively discussion, most of which was a question-and-answer time moderated by Chapman.
___ The first question, posed by Jack Nivens of Double Mountain Area in West Texas, started the discussion on the deteriorating relationship between the SBC and BGCT: "Are y'all talking to each other?"
___ Warren Hart of Red River Valley Baptist Association likened the disagreements between the SBC and the BGCT to church members "fussing about the color of the carpet" while bigger problems go unattended.
___ "We've got to hear from both the SBC and the BGCT that we're going to acknowledge our differences and work together," another director of missions said. "Could you do something that says we're going to work together?"
___ Chuck Kelley, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, told the group it is not the SBC that has caused the division but the leadership of the BGCT.
___ "The Southern Baptist Convention and its entities did not come to the BGCT and say, 'Let's have a showdown,'" he said.
___ Instead, Kelley insisted, "the BGCT is the one" that chosen to make the revised Baptist Faith & Message an issue of division.
___ Several BGCT leaders, and the Seminary Study Committee that recently recommended major changes in funding for the six SBC seminaries, repeatedly have pointed out that the revised Baptist Faith & Message contains elements profoundly disagreeable to some Baptists. Further, they have objected to a statement in the preamble to the faith statement that identifies it as "an instrument of doctrinal accountability."
___ These changes make the new Baptist Faith & Message a creed rather than a statement of faith, Texans and others have charged.
___ Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina and immediate past president of the SBC, agreed with Kelley, who also is his brother-in-law.
___ "At no point has any Southern Baptist leader to my knowledge said we would not playball with someone" who affirmed an earlier version of the Baptist Faith & Message, but not the 2000 version, Patterson said.
BOB RECORD, Jerry Rankin & Paige Patterson listen to questions from BGCT directors of missions.
___ "The problem is the other way," he said, suggesting that BGCT leaders will not "play ball" with those who affirm the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message.
___ Declining to affirm the 2000 version of the Baptist Faith & Message "is not going to be the point at which cooperation comes to an end" between the SBC and state conventions, Patterson insisted.
___ As an illustration, he even suggested that he personally would cooperate with BGCT Executive Director Charles Wade in a missions project if Wade were to approach him about it, even though they have different views on the Baptist Faith & Message.
___ However, the SBC has every right to require its seminary professors and agency employees to affirm the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message rather than any earlier version, Patterson added.
___ When asked by one director of missions whether any SBC agency would allow someone to work there who affirmed an earlier version of the Baptist Faith & Message but not the 2000 version, only Patterson answered. He anticipates his seminary's trustees will require adherence to the 2000 document, he said.
___ Patterson deflected criticisms that the revised Baptist Faith & Message has become a creed. "A creed is something a group endorses as a must statement," he explained. "I cannot imagine any Baptist doing that, because we have only one creed, and that's the Bible."
___ Kelley, who along with Mohler served on the Baptist Faith & Message revision committee, continued his assertion that Texas leaders have made more of an issue out of the document's revision than SBC leaders.
___ The six SBC seminary presidents met with Wade in July, Kelley said, and "were told if we required affirmation of the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message we would be defunded."
___ Wade, contacted for response to Kelley's statement, said that is not what he told the seminary presidents in July. The purpose of his meeting with them was to encourage their participation with the BGCT's Seminary Study Committee and to assure them that the outcome was not predetermined, he said.
___ In the course of that meeting, he pleaded with them to ask their trustee boards not to require faculty members to sign the revised Baptist Faith & Message, but he did not tell them their schools would be defunded, Wade said.
___ At another point in the meeting, Chapman made an assertion Wade also characterized as a misrepresentation.
___ Chapman said SBC leadership had invited three BGCT leaders--Wade, David Currie of Texas Baptists Committed and Jim Denison of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas--to debate Patterson, Mohler and Jimmy Draper of LifeWay Christian Resources that night, while everyone was still gathered from the director of missions meeting. However, the BGCT leaders never responded, Chapman said.
___ Ken Hemphill, president of Southwestern Seminary, corrected Chapman to say Wade had called him to say a letter was coming from Denison rejecting the offer.
___ Wade said in a later interview the offer was rejected because little could have been gained by it and because the invitation did not disclose the full agenda. It did not mention, for example, that the directors of missions had been invited to the seminary that day, he said.
___ Further, additional debate over the revisions in the Baptist Faith & Message would not have accomplished anything now that the vote already has been taken, Wade added.
___ Also during the afternoon session, Ron Horton of Creath-Brazos Baptist Association asked Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, about his personal theology.
___ "You are often accused of being a five-point Calvinist," he said. "I believe you are my brother in Christ. Do you personally subscribe to what is called five-point Calvinism?"
___ Mohler responded that he is a "Baptist evangelical by conviction" and asserted that he is "going to fly my colors boldly."
___"If you ask me if I'm a Calvinist, I'm going to have to answer yes," he said. "But that is not the first, second, third or even fourth term I would use."
___ Instead, he described his beliefs as in the Reformed tradition and in line with those of Southern Baptists at the time of the convention's founding in 1845.
___ When asking whether someone is a Calvinist, "we need to be clear about what the alternatives are," he said, explaining that the SBC could in no way be considered fully Arminian, the theology opposite of Calvinism.
___ He referred specifically to the doctrines of election and predestination, the two most controversial tenets of Calvinism that together assert that God decided before creation who would be saved and who would be damned.
___ "Every Christian, every Baptist has to believe in predestination," he said at one point. Later, he added: "There's not a person in this room who doesn't believe in limited atonement"--as opposed to universalism, which he said is the alternative.
___ "The difference is in how it is limited," Mohler declared.
___ A director of missions asked Patterson what the revised Baptist Faith & Message said about Christ's atonement and whether he believed Mohler's theology would fit within those parameters.
___ The Baptist Faith & Message says that "Christ died for all" and affirms Christ's substitutionary atonement on the cross, Patterson responded.
___ Patterson said he and Mohler hold opposing views on the doctrines of election and predestination and that he in fact finds no biblical basis for the position Mohler embraces. However, Calvinists strongly affirm the authority of the Bible, and that's a greater point of agreement than the two points of disagreement, Patterson said.
___ "I'd rather have Dr. Mohler hanging around my seminary than someone who had doubts about the Scriptures," he said.
___ Mohler did not explain how he reconciles his views with the Baptist Faith & Message, but he offered that "the Baptist Faith & Message has been carefully crafted to embrace all that has been said in this room."
___ Paul Saylors of Smith Baptist Association asked the SBC leaders why "few or no individuals who are sympathetic to the BGCT are serving on boards and agencies of the SBC.
___ Chapman pondered for a minute, then said any answer he could give to that question would be "insufficient." Those decisions are made by the convention's committee on nominations, he said.
___ Kyle Cox of Galveston Association told his colleagues he was tired of hearing accusations such as this. He serves as a trustee of the SBC's International Mission Board and remains loyal to the BGCT at the same time, he said.
___ "I am very much in support of the BGCT," he said. "But I feel like BGCT supporters--not the BGCT--are pushing me away. … Please don't assume that because someone is a Southern Baptist they cannot be a Texas Baptist."
___ Patterson then spoke about his appointments during his two terms as SBC president to say he did not purposely exclude anyone from the BGCT. However, his nominations were limited by a commitment that he "would not knowingly appoint anybody to anything who had any doubts about Scripture."
___ "In Texas, I was very, very careful, because I was trying to be sensitive to that concern," Patterson said.
___ He and other recent SBC presidents "have tried to be as fair as we could," he said, but were limited by a commitment that the only people to be placed on SBC boards and agencies should be "people who affirm every syllable of the Bible to be true."
___ Several directors of missions said the reason cooperation between the BGCT and the SBC has broken down is because there is a lack of trust.
___ "I believe the Cooperative Program I was taught and promoted no longer exists," said Mike Smith of Dogwood Trails Area in East Texas.
___ "Cooperation is spelled 'trust,'" Horton added. "The reason the situation we're in has come about is because trust has eroded."
___ Horton alluded to the earlier discussion about Texas representation on SBC governing boards and committees. "It would be very naïve" to say this group doesn't know the answer to that question, he asserted. "All of us know that over the last 20 years the appointment process has been used to put people in power."
___ This has made some Texas Baptists mad, and Texas controls of large portion of the money flowing to the SBC, Horton explained.
___ For the BGCT to withhold funding from the SBC is "very unkind and un-Christian, but it's happened because there's a lack of trust," Horton said.
___ Some level of trust could be regained if SBC leadership would allow greater latitude on the Baptist Faith & Message, said Hart of Red River Valley Association.
___ He asked: "Why can we not say there is disagreement in certain areas" and still work together regardless of which version of the Baptist Faith & Message one affirms?
___ Hart compared the various factions within the SBC to General Motors. What's happening is like Buick saying to Oldsmobile, "Since you're not a Buick you can't be part of General Motors anymore," he suggested.
___ "Why does the Baptist Faith & Message have to be such a criteria?"
___ Patterson responded that what has transpired in the SBC over the last 21 years was necessary. "Some things kill," he said, referring to the perception of Southern Baptist conservatives that SBC agencies and seminaries had become too liberal in their teaching.
___ "What did constitute the beginning of all this … was a recognition of the fact that there are some things that unless two are agreed they cannot walk together," he said.
___ To illustrate, Patterson talked about how two people might leave the meeting room and agree to meet in Dallas, which is about 30 miles east of Fort Worth. "There are several ways to get to Dallas, but north, south and west are not acceptable ways to get there.
___ "Some fights you have to have, or you end up looking like the American Baptist Churches" and other mainline Protestant denominations, Patterson asserted. "It is myopic to think there are not subjects about which we have to be contentious."
___ Go ahead and fight, said Larry Johnson of Ellis Baptist Association, but the result will be declining interest among churches and pastors.
___ "My younger pastors are mad, but they're mad at everybody," he said. "We're getting ready to see churches make some severe changes to the way they do business (that) … may not include the SBC, BGCT or SBTC.
___ "If we stay fighting, they may cut us off," he concluded. "It may Habitat for Humanity getting some of the money. It may be Campus Crusade. … If we can't get it together, you can write it off."
___ The bottom line, suggested Olin Boles of Gulf Coast Baptist Association, is this: "Are the differences that divide us greater than the ministries that unite us?"
___ The lack of trust and changing funding mechanisms will force churches into a time of greater scrutiny about where they send all their mission money, he agreed.
___ "For many years our churches gave (to the Cooperative Program) out of convenience. Now we're going to give out of conviction."
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