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Sole Membership: For it or Against it?

June 27, 2005

I made a post about sole membership a few days ago, but never gave my opinion on the whole issue. To be honest I had some major reservations about much of what Dr. Kelly had to say in regards to sole membership of NOBTS. I wrote a comment about this on Locust and Wild Honey which I am including here:

Well I fear I am the odd duck in the pond here but I would have to say that I was not convinced at all by Kelly and his presentation. I heard his side of the story both last year and this year. I have several very serious key issues with the way Kelly handled the situation. Both last year and this year Kelly said he wanted to come up with an alternate plan, but did he? Where is this plan? The convention has been working on this for 10 years and Kelly continually said sole membership is bad for NOBTS but never offered an alternate solution. They had no problem printing thousands of pages of information about sole membership and why it is wrong for NOBTS, why didn’t they also take that opportunity to print some alternatives? Don’t just say you are going to come up with alternatives; come up with them, show them to us, and get the ball rolling to change the issue instead of just standing up to say no to the SBC proposed plan. If NOBTS could come up with a valid alternative I think the convention would have seriously considered it.

It also seemed fishy to me that NOBTS sited a couple other entities that did not adopt sole membership due to legal council in Louisiana and the SBC lawyers pointed out that after first hand discussion with that council they found out that they didn’t adopt sole membership because they were not a legal corporation, not because of the law NOBTS is worried about. Kelly tried to compare apples and oranges all the while accusing the SBC of doing the same.

I would also disagree with Kelly’s assessment of the MoBap entities being an “apples to oranges” comparison. Being a staff member of a church in the MoBap convention and being someone who has witnessed the entities being taken over in our convention first hand, one of them being the school that I am an Alumni from, you can well imagine my reservations about this whole issue in the first place. While a huge chunk of NOBTS operating budget depends upon cooperative program dollars, I personally don’t think it is that far fetched to believe that they could still survive without it. Using private donations and raised tuition, just like MoBap University did, I think the seminary could survive and thrive. There are plenty of conventions that have split from the SBC that would jump in to its aid as well, such as the General Baptist Convention of Missouri that split from the Missouri Baptist Convention. I think NOBTS would in fact survive outside of SBC funding. In Missouri we thought it to be impossible and within a year we lost five agencies due to rouge trustees elected by our convention. I say it’s a smart move to recognize what could happen.

You mention the SBC using scare tactics, but what about the scare tactics Kelly used? Making the claim that the SBC executive committee is making a step towards centralized hierarchy is a big time scare tactic used by Kelly. Let us not forget who elects the president of the convention and who has ultimate control. This whole notion of taking a step towards a centralized power is a bit unfounded and if we are seriously worried about this then we need to change the way we elect and control the executive committee, not just say no to sole membership and expect that to protect us. Seriously, if the issue is really centralized control then why don’t we deal with that issue instead of just not voting for sole membership to “protect” our entities?

Some other things that I have found to be quite fishy on the part of NOBTS and Kelly's arguments is first off the fact that over the past several years their opposition has changed. The reasons that they are declaring now are not the same reasons they started off with when rejecting the notion of sole membership for NOBTS. I personally think if NOBTS could have come up with a real clear reason to not do this and if it could be backed up by Louisiana law undoubtedly then the convention and the executive committee would have most definitely done something different.

They also pulled the liability card, which was the number one stated reason for all of the Missouri Baptist Convention agencies to pull out. They didn't want the SBC to be sued and fund to be taken from the cooperative program. While this is a valid concern, the SBC lawyers have confirmed that the charter helps to protect the Convention instead of opening it up to liability. You can get further explanation of this on baptist2baptist.net.

I also find it fishy that there is a lack of written legal opinions coming from the seminary dealing with this issue. We hear only what Kelly says his legal council says and see very little of actual data or facts written by the legal council. The SBC has numerous written documents and data coming from legal council in and out of Louisiana.

I also think this whole centralized control thing is just an alarm to sound in order to make SBC messengers shudder in fear. I believe that the SBC consists of churches who elect messengers who attend the convention and make the votes. The Executive Committee has no power beyond what we as messengers give them. The executive committee is planning to also make itself a sole member of the Southern Baptist Convention, the same thing they ask of NOBTS.

You can get some more information about this issue and a response to these reservations about sole membership from baptist2baptist.net.

In a nutshell I found Dr. Kelly and the arguments given by NOBTS to be insufficient and full of unanswered questions that made me uneasy about their end game. Call me crazy, but I trust the president and the executive committee and the lawyers the convention has in place. I believe they have spent the last 10 years dealing with these very issues and that they are making the right decisions.

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