Debate focuses on regenerate church membership, public schools

During debate on resolutions, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) turned back efforts to encourage Christians to remove their children from public schools and asked Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.

Also among the nine resolutions Southern Baptists passed June 11 at their annual meeting in Indianapolis was one that could shrink church membership rolls significantly.

A resolution calling on churches to lovingly correct "wayward church members" to secure regenerate church membership was toughened with two amendments that encourage tighter definitions of "member."

Resolutions are simply statements that reflect the sentiment of messengers gathered at a particular annual meeting and have no weight of law for Southern Baptists.

As Resolutions Committee chair Darrell Orman, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, Stuart, Fla., said, however, when introducing the resolutions, these statements "speak to the nation."

The resolution on regenerate church membership drew two amendments that encouraged churches to tighten membership definitions.

The original resolution called for "churches to maintain a regenerate membership by acknowledging the necessity of spiritual regeneration and Christ’s lordship for all members" and urged churches to "maintain accurate membership rolls for the purpose of fostering ministry and accountability."

It also urged churches to "restore wayward church members."

After much discussion, messengers adopted two amendments. The first, offered by Malcolm Yarnell, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, added to the definition of New Testament church.

The original included the definition "composed only of those who have been born again by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Word, becoming disciples of Jesus Christ, the local church’s only Lord, by grace through faith."

The amendment added as further definition: "which church practices believers’-only baptism by immersion (Matt. 28:16–20), and the Lord’s Supper (Matt. 26:26–30)."

Messengers adopted an amendment by Tom Ascol, prominent in the Calvinist Founder’s movement in the SBC, urging the churches of the SBC to "repent of the failure among us to live up to our professed commitment to regenerate church membership and any failure to obey Jesus Christ in (the practice of) lovingly correcting wayward church members."

The amendment encouraged "denominational servants to support and encourage any churches that begin to teach church disciplines … even if such efforts result in a reduction in the number of members that are recorded in those churches."

Some messengers tried vigorously to amend a resolution against same-sex "marriage" to include admonition to withdraw children from public schools.

Ron Wilson from Thousand Oaks, Calif., said if the convention was going to pass a resolution opposing same-sex "marriage," then it ought to encourage families to remove their children from public schools, "which are the main training grounds for the teaching of same sex ‘marriage.’"