September 16, 2002
SBC leaders critique BGCT's missions and budget plans
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___Key leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have criticized the report and recommendations of a Baptist General Convention of Texas mission study committee, even though the report calls for no change in relationship to the SBC.
___Related budget proposals for the BGCT offer both a carrot and a stick for the SBC, removing a funding cap on the SBC's six seminaries and restoring funding to two other SBC entities cut out two years ago while also suggesting a reduction in the percentage of undesignated Cooperative Program dollars leaving Texas for the SBC.
___The report of the BGCT's Missions Review & Initiatives Committee was released Aug. 30, as were budget recommendations for 2003 drafted by the BGCT's Administrative Committee.
___The missions committee's report calls for creation of a BGCT world missions network, intended to link churches to partner churches and agencies, including SBC mission boards. The report also noted several areas of concern with the SBC's International Mission Board and North American Mission Board, but did not call for any change in relationship with the two boards.
___The Administrative Committee's budget proposal would encourage Texas churches to divide Cooperative Program unified budget gifts so that 79 percent stays in Texas for a variety of ministries and 21 percent is forwarded to worldwide missions causes. Previously, churches had been encouraged to send 72 percent for Texas causes and 28 percent for worldwide causes.
___"Worldwide" causes is defined by the BGCT as funding for the SBC, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship or a select group of BGCT missions initiatives.
___"It is obvious BGCT leaders are moving the state convention even farther away from a healthy relationship with the SBC," charged Morris Chapman, president of the SBC Executive Committee.
___SBC President Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, warned Texas Baptists to be wary of the BGCT's proposal. Graham's church is dually aligned with the BGCT and the rival Southern Baptists of Texas Convention but gives most all its missions money through the SBTC rather than the BGCT.
___"Every Southern Baptist church in Texas should evaluate this latest move and prayerfully consider an action that would support SBC missions," Graham said. "I think more and more of our churches in Texas will change their giving profile to make sure that SBC missions are funded."
___Others criticizing the BGCT report and proposals included Richard Land, president of the SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which previously had been defunded by the BGCT for engaging in partisan politics; Jerry Rankin, president of the SBC's International Mission Board; and Bob Reccord, president of the SBC's North American Mission Board.
___Land said the SBC and BGCT remind him of a farmer and his wife traveling to town in the family truck. "The farmer's wife is sitting all the way on the other side of the truck cab, as far as possible from her husband," Land explained. "She says, 'We don't sit as close as we used to.' The farmer, from behind the steering wheel, replies, 'I haven't moved.'
___"The Southern Baptist Convention hasn't moved," Land said. "The BGCT has moved away from our historic Southern Baptist Convention's Cooperative Program. As a Southern Baptist and a Texan, I encourage them to slide back on over where they belong."
___BGCT officials for years have insisted the BGCT has not moved in its beliefs and practices. The SBC, under the new leadership of fundamentalists, has moved dramatically in its beliefs, practices and requirements for cooperation, the BGCT has insisted.
___Land encouraged Texas Baptist churches to support the rival SBTC rather than the BGCT because the SBTC will send 52 percent of undesignated Cooperative Program gifts to the SBC next year.
___BGCT leaders have declared more missions money is needed in Texas to meet the overwhelming demands of Texas as a mission field with a burgeoning unchurched population.
___Rankin, meanwhile, claimed the BGCT's proposed world missions network would duplicate services already performed by the IMB.
___"Rather than diverting missions gifts to create and maintain a new institution that duplicates work already being done by other entities, we encourage Southern Baptists in Texas to stand by their missionaries and press forward with them in taking the good news of salvation to a lost world," Rankin said.
___"Southern Baptists in Texas already have--in the International Mission Board--an excellent network for personalized involvement," Rankin said. "The IMB's role is to facilitate churches, associations and state conventions in their efforts to be obedient to the Great Commission."
___The IMB also requires all its missionaries to sign an affirmation of the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message, a document BGCT leaders have called a non-Baptist creed bordering on theological heresy.
___Reccord added that the only network for missions Southern Baptists need was established in 1845 with formation of the SBC. For the BGCT to offer another missions network for churches constitutes a duplication of services, he charged.
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