WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE SOUTHERN BAPTISTS?

At its national meeting in June the Southern Baptist Convention will decide whether or not to accept its executive committee's recommendation that it withdraw from the international Baptist World Alliance.

The Rev. Gary Smith, pastor of Fielder Road Baptist Church in Arlington and chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, said acceptance of the moderate fellowship was only one action indicating the liberal drift in the Baptist World Alliance.

"Increasingly the BWA is representative of Baptist bodies around the world that are very liberal in their view of Scripture," Smith said. "Increasingly conservative evangelical Baptist bodies are dissatisfied with BWA and are looking to [Southern Baptists] for leadership."

Now when I was growing up in a Southern Baptist home where we attended church "every time the doors were open," one of the things I loved about our denomination is that it was so inclusive of all Christians. In fact, the Baptist Faith and Message, the Southern Baptist's "creed," explicitly stated that Southern Baptists ascribe to only two doctrines: (1) the lordship of Jesus Christ; and (2) the priesthood of the believer. Now, if you don't believe the former, you probably ought to reconsider whether or not you are truly a Christian. And as to the latter, this merely refers to the New Testament teaching that Christ created a "priesthood of believers," i.e., there is no need for an earthly intercessor with God the Father (such as priests in the Catholic model), since Christ Himself is our intercessor with the Father. It also explicitly states that each believer is empowered by the Holy Spirit to interpret the scriptures themselves. Now maybe this makes for a theological controversy between Catholics and evangelicals, but it should not be viewed as sufficient to disqualify Catholics from their claim as Christians, since the source (i.e., The Bible) quotes Jesus as requiring only a recognition of Him as the Son of God and a surrender to His lordship as a qualifier as "Christian." I also loved that it was a cardinal tenet of the Convention that each individual church was independent and under no compulsion to conform other than to accept the basic tenets of the Baptist Faith & Message that I have just outlined.

Now the Southern Baptist Convention has changed radically in the past 20 years. Paige Patterson, now President of Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary (the world's largest seminary) and retired Houston judge Paul Pressler spearheaded an effort beginning in the 1970's to remove "liberal" seminary professors and others from the Southern Baptist environs. "Liberal" may be interpreted as opposing traditional evangelical values (such as women not speaking in church). It may also be interpreted as opposing Republican Party values, since it began distancing itself from the traditional Southern Baptist position in favor of separation of church and state.

My husband attended that very same seminary that Patterson now heads. Many wonderful and dedicated Christian administrators and professors have been removed in order to deliver total control to the conservative movement.

Now the Southern Baptists are expected to withdraw from the Baptist World Alliance, which Southern Baptists founded, because the BWA accepted as members a denomination the Southern Baptists consider a "dissident" faction of the SBC. It saddens me greatly to see the lack of love and conciliation between Christian brethren when we have been so clearly bidden to focus on what unites us (love and devotion to Christ) rather than what divides us (e.g., acceptance or nonacceptance of homosexuals, abortion rights, separation of church and state, the "hard sayings" of Christ).