Blogger Burleson resigns from International Mission Board

Posted: 1/31/08

Blogger Burleson resigns
from International Mission Board

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (ABP)— Wade Burleson, the pastor/blogger who railed against what he saw as an excessive narrowing of parameters within the Southern Baptist Convention, has resigned from his position as a trustee of the SBC’s International Mission Board.

Burleson, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla., said he also plans to write a book “to tell everything that has not been told” about recent disputes in the denomination. He said he hopes to have it published before the SBC annual meeting in June.

His resignation came after a Jan. 29 plenary session at the board’s meeting in Gainesville, Fla. At the meeting, Burleson read a letter he had originally sent to IMB Chairman John Floyd in December. The letter was an apology for violating a rule against board members publicly criticizing IMB policies.

Burleson said the letter was a “good-faith effort” to “apologize for people being offended” and to “live at peace with everyone.” But, he said, it became clear during the meeting that the apology would not work, and he quit on the spot.

“I am resigning because I am a distraction to the work of the IMB board,” he said Jan. 30. “It was the work of last night’s letter to the IMB board to [allow me to] stop being a distraction, and it was not accepted. But I will not go away. I will continue to work to effect change in the Southern Baptist Convention.”

The resignation was not planned long in advance, Burleson said, was prompted by the events of the meeting. Soon after receiving the letter last December, Burleson said, Floyd told him it was an insufficient apology, but board leaders would present it to the full panel at the Gainesville meeting.

When the IMB executive committee did not report the letter during the Jan. 29 session, Burleson requested and was allowed to read it to the full board.

“I do admit that I have in the past intentionally violated our newly revised internal standards of conduct,” Burleson said in the letter.

“In particular, I publicly disagreed with certain actions taken by this board, rather than speaking in supportive terms or staying silent on matters about which I disagreed. … I want you to know that I never expressed my dissent out of a desire to harm the work of the IMB or any of you, my fellow trustees and brothers and sisters in Christ. Instead, I did so out of an exercise of my conscience.”

Burleson said in the letter that he wanted to get along with trustees and would “no longer violate, intentionally or otherwise, our new trustee standards of conduct. If I find myself in disagreement with a policy or proposed policy of the board, I will express my disagreement using the channels that are available—for example, plenary-forum sessions, trustee-forum sessions, and private communication with fellow trustees—but will not take my disagreement outside of those confines to the blogosphere or world at large.”

Burleson has long clashed with some of his colleagues on the board. In 2005, IMB trustees decided voted not to appoint missionary candidates who said they practice “private prayer language” or who have not received “biblical baptism.” Burleson protested, saying the board should not create doctrinal requirements for missionaries narrower than the strictures in the SBC’s Baptist Faith & Message doctrinal statement. He also wrote on his blog that some trustees should not conduct secret meetings to plan the board’s formal sessions.

Then, in January of 2006, several trustees requested that Burleson be removed from the mission board. They later rescinded their motion but placed limitations on his involvement with the board, effectively barring him from executive sessions and committee meetings. Other trustees complained Burleson had broken confidentiality agreements by blogging about IMB business.

Burleson said in the December letter that if the apology was accepted, he would shut down his blog, and if he disagreed with an IMB policy in the future, he would resign.

After allowing Burleson to read the letter Jan. 29, Burleson said, Floyd told the group the executive committee did not accept the apology. He then dismissed all non-board members to enter a closed session.

Floyd reportedly then told the board the apology was insufficient because Burleson did not apologize for violating the newer standards of trustee conduct that prohibited any public dissent of board-approved actions. Those standards were adopted in 2006, and Burleson has said he intentionally violated them by blogging about his disapproval of the new restrictions on missionaries.

“I intentionally violated that policy for a higher moral good. It is a matter of conscience for me,” he said. “I said, ‘I will always apologize for people being offended— I want to be at peace with everyone—but I cannot apologize for breaking that policy.’”

It was “the worst policy in the history of the SBC,” he added.

“The narrowing of these doctrinal parameters of cooperative mission work is dangerous to our convention and threatens our belief in the historic Baptist principles of the sufficiency of Scripture, cooperative missions, and religious liberty,” he said in his resignation letter, posted on his blog (kerussocharis.blogspot.com).

“Worse, the 2006 revised trustee standard of conduct that prohibits public dissent is unconscionable, unbaptistic, and will one day be viewed by Baptist historians as a tragic mistake.”

Burleson said he plans to spend the time he’ll gain from not participating as an IMB trustee by documenting other missteps by convention leaders.

“The point of the book is not a tell-all of the IMB, though there will be illustrations from the dangerous effects of stifling dissent, moving beyond the (Baptist Faith & Message) on doctrinal policy and attacking people who disagree,” he said. “It is a wake-up call to Southern Baptists that we better start cooperating despite our differences, or we will dry up and shrivel away as a convention.”

Burleson said he plans to tell the stories of Dwight McKissic, a Texas pastor who was censored after telling students at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in a chapel sermon that he used a “private prayer language,” and Sheri Klouda, a former Southwestern Hebrew professor who is suing the seminary for firing her because of her gender. He said he will highlight other “anecdotes, personal histories and narratives of how many people are affected by the actions of the trustees at our largest agency,” the IMB.

Burleson said he looks forward to having “a platform where I am not continually placed in a position of having to defend myself.”

“I feel really good about what happened,” he said. “It’s just the next step.”

An IMB spokesperson said on the afternoon of Jan. 30 that Floyd and other board leaders were preparing for a missionary-appointment ceremony and would not be available for comment.

Robert Marus contributed to this story.