February 11, 2002

What's in a name for Missouri Baptists?
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.--The quest to start a new Baptist convention in Missouri has sparked a linguistic battle of Shakespearean proportions.
___What's in a name?
___Among some Missouri Baptists, quite a bit of emotion.
___At a Jan. 17 meeting in Sedalia, Mo., 350 Missouri Baptists representing 104 churches gathered to consider starting a new state Baptist convention. A new convention is needed, they contend, because fundamentalists have captured control of the historic Missouri Baptist Convention and changed its rules and character.
___At that meeting, organizers announced their intent to constitute a new group to be called the Baptist Convention of Missouri.
___They made the announcement without filing papers with the Missouri secretary of state, however.
___Enter Cindy Province, a lay leader in Project 1000, the group that battled for and won control of the Missouri Baptist Convention.
___Less than a week after the new group's announcement, Province, who lives in the St. Louis area, went to the secretary of state's office in Jefferson City and filed papers to incorporate a non-profit entity to be called Baptist Convention of Missouri.
___"My primary purpose in doing that is not really hard to figure out," she said when asked why she had done it. "I simply wanted to protect the name.
___"What this new convention is trying to do is deliberately deceptive in getting a name that is so close to Missouri Baptist Convention," she said. "Just rearranging the name, Missouri and Baptist and Convention and adding a two-letter preposition" is "not very honest."
___So she paid a $25 filing fee and took the name out of circulation Jan. 23, even though she has no intention of using the incorporated name.
___"I'm a fourth-generation Missouri Baptist and took the steps that I felt needed to be taken personally to protect the Missouri Baptist Convention," she said.
___Although she is a member of the Missouri Baptist Convention's Executive Board, she took the action on her own, she said. "No one on the Executive Board had any knowledge of what I was doing."
___Upon learning that their preferred name had been scooped up from under them, organizers of the new convention announced they would call themselves the Baptist General Convention of Missouri.
___And this time, they took precautions to protect their name. W.B. Tichenor, an attorney working with the organizers, filed papers with the secretary of state Jan. 24 to reserve that name.
___While bothersome, the trouble with naming the new convention really is much ado about nothing, suggested Jim Hill, who last year resigned as executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention. He quit because he no longer would work with the fundamentalist leadership placed on the Executive Board, he explained.
___Contrary to Province's accusation, Hill said, the new group was not attempting to be deceptive in choosing a name.
___"We wanted a simple approach," he said. "Any word you add makes it a word you have to explain. We're not trying to be something we haven't already been."
___The irony, he noted, is that organizers of the new convention could have incorporated under the name Missouri Baptist Convention. Although that name has been in use by the existing convention since 1958, it never has been incorporated, he said.
___But organizers of the new convention didn't want to be that petty, he said. "The name wasn't the most important issue to us. We did not want to argue with this group about a name."
___So, as Shakespeare might have said, all's well that ends well.

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