The “Controversy” in the Southern Baptist Convention: PART I
I didn’t grow up in a Southern Baptist Church and before I was 17 years old I had nothing to do with the SBC. After I was saved I became involved in a Southern Baptist Denomination and I have since become a student of one of the SBC seminaries and the youth pastor of a SBC church. That has only been since about 1997 and so like most Southern Baptist Church members I really didn’t know very much about the Southern Baptist Convention in itself. As I have become more active in the Missouri Baptist Convention I have learned a little more about the things that have went on in the past. The thing that sparked my interest the most is when the controversy about the 5 agencies that became “self perpetuating” came into play. Being a part of one of those agencies myself forced me to dig into the issues and sparked a fire in me to understand what has been going on in both the Missouri Baptist Convention and the national Southern Baptist Convention as well. I did come in on the tail end of the conservative take over in the Missouri Baptist Convention, but my interest goes back even further. In fact to truly understand the major SBC “Controversy” I must take you all the way back to the year I was born, 1979.
In 1979, the SBC entered into a time of intense controversy. It was a common belief of the Conservative Southern Baptists that the “moderate” leadership of the SBC had opened the doors of the denomination’s agencies and entities to blatant theological liberalism. The conservatives continued to argue that the SBC’s six seminaries were being flooded with this theological liberalism and the next generation of pastors were being influenced by “higher criticism.” I have discussed this with several people who were at the seminaries when this was taking place. Many of the professors in that time period openly denied the deity of Christ, the physical resurrection, the authority of scripture, and many other doctrinal issues that are essential.
This is the battle that continued to take place from 1979 to 1991. But year after year there were conservative presidents elected which gradually began to move the SBC back towards its conservative theological roots, and by 1991 the battle settled. Several big things happened that year in the convention. It is plain to see that if a conservative president is elected every year for a certain period of time then throughout that time period most of the boards and agencies of the SBC would continue to be filled with conservatives until eventually those boards and agencies would be under the majority of conservative leadership, which is exactly what happened in 1991 when the conservatives gained the majority. Also in 1991 the messengers to the annual SBC meeting voted to de-fund the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs (BJCPA) which was a church/state organization controlled by the moderates that was made up of various Baptist denominations. The BJCPA created a deep theological problem that infected the convention according to conservatives. One of the biggest and most important things that happened in 1991 was when the moderate/liberal factions of the SBC split off and formed a splinter group called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF).
The CBF didn’t completely remove itself from the convention but instead it continued to operate within the SBC. Many of the state conventions became controlled predominately by anti-SBC/pro-CBF moderates and they focused their time and energy on recruiting churches and individuals from within the various state conventions. Within a few years it became quite obvious that the political strategy of the CBF leaders was to undo the “conservative resurgence” at the state convention level. Why would they try to take over from the state level? It is because they rightly understood that most of the money coming into the SBC was coming first from the states. This also led to the CBF re-defining “Cooperative Program” giving at the state level in order to include money designated to CBF so that any church giving to the cooperative program would also be supporting the moderate/liberal organization.
By the year 1998, the year I became a Southern Baptist, two of the state conventions split. Texas and Virginia, both controlled by the moderates and both major contributors to CBF lost many of their brothers and sisters as the conservatives decided to abandon the moderate-controlled conventions to form new, conservative, pro-SBC state conventions. Essentially this has happened in the Missouri Baptist Convention as well, only the other way around. It is predominantly controlled by conservatives and the moderate/liberals have split to form a new state convention.
In the year 2000, one and a half years before I began attending an SBC seminary, the anti-SBC/pro-CBF leadership of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) decided to completely de-fund the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and virtually de-fund the SBC Executive Committee and the SBC’s six seminaries. The executive director of the BGCT, Dr. Charles Wade, led the way in severing ties with the Southern Baptist Convention.
However, churches across Texas and across the SBC have increasingly been asking the questions:
“What is the controversy in the SBC really about?”
“Is the battle about power and politics, or is it something much deeper?”
“What are the significant differences between the SBC and CBF?”
These are the questions I will seek to answer in Part II of The “Controversy” in the Southern Baptist Convention. Stay tuned…
Pressed
NOTE: I must give credit where credit is due! Most of this information is from the Missouri Baptist Laymen’s Association. They have given me written permission to simply copy the information but I chose to re-write most of it in my own words as I understand it.
