Posted: 3/14/08
Some Southern Baptists decry
timidity on environmental issues
By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service
WASHINGTON (RNS)—A group of Southern Baptists has launched a new initiative on the environment, saying that their denomination’s past declarations on the issue have been “too timid.”
“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,” the initiative’s statement reads. “The time for timidity regarding God’s creation is no more.”
Though Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page is among the initiative’s 45 signatories, officials at the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission have not signed the statement.
Baptist Press, information service of the SBC Executive Committee, issued a release saying, “The so-called ‘Southern Baptist’ statement is not an initiative of the Southern Baptist Convention, which voiced its views on global warming last summer in a resolution, ‘On Global Warming.’”
The four-page document says despite “justified disagreement” about the global warming issue among Christians, there is a biblical mandate for churches to be actively involved in preaching and practicing care for creation.
The Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative has been spearheaded by Jonathan Merritt, a seminary student and the 25-year-old son of former Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt.
The younger Merritt said he was moved to act after hearing his professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., compare destroying creation to ripping out a page of the Bible.
He is encouraging additional Southern Baptists to sign the statement on the initiative’s website, baptistcreationcare.org.
Barrett Duke, vice president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said the commission discussed the document with Jonathan Merritt but was not comfortable with its final version.
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