Faith Statement

Apparently yielding to pressure, Dr. Jerry Rankin, president of the International Mission Board, revealed in his recent letter to our missionaries around the world the sickened state that we as Southern Baptists face. Our mission­aries who have left family and home to faithfully follow the call of God to share Christ with a lost world are being asked (i.e., required) to sign the Baptist Faith and Message so they may avoid being charged with heresy. He assures those who hesitate or those who have questions that regional leaders stand ready to give counseling as to the advantages of signing.

Who are these people who are threatening our missionaries with “charges of heresy?” IMB administrators? IMB trustees? Other important weight- throwing SBC denominational-type leaders? Some over-zealous pastors and even lay leaders?

We Baptists have not had the practice nor the requirement of compelling believers to sign doctrinal confessions until this creeping creedalism of the last few years. The exigencies of truth are real but only authentic when they are left in God’s hands. In human hands, such demands are strained and adulterated. I am so glad that our heavenly Father gave us His Word and has preserved it for us across the centuries without requiring any of His children to sign or verbally submit to any one of the very laudable doctrinal statements by Christians in the past. Such freedom and voluntary faith, rather than the control of Baptist hierarchy, form the only legitimate way to respond to God’s Word and truth.

Just as faith to be true faith must spring voluntarily from the individual heart and spirit, so must the true doctrinal unity of any church or denominational group. To oblige anyone to sign a condensation of God’s Word in order to be doctrinally acceptable is a denial of the principles of new birth and the nature of the church. The Bible teaches us that to be a Christian you must be born again. It does not teach us that we must sign the Baptist Faith and Message.

All of my life I have been a cooperative Baptist but I refuse to be a co-opted Baptist. Neither do I wish to see our missionaries tied to the stake of misguided orthodoxy, victims of Southern Baptist Convention power politics. I appeal to everyone: Let’s support our missionaries, rule out heresy hunters and stick to the authority of grace freely given and freely received.

Robert F. Crider
Brent, Ala.