Baptist General Convention of Missouri launched as alternate state convention

Dissatisfied with the direction their 168-year-old convention has taken in recent years, several hundred Missouri Baptists broke away from the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) and organized an alternative state convention.

The group gathered April 19–20 at First Free Baptist Church, the oldest Southern Baptist church in the state, in suburban St. Louis. The new Baptist General Convention of Missouri (BGCM) registered about 350 voting members and guests at its first meeting.

Leaders of the BGCM say the new convention is committed to funding all Missouri Baptist institutions. That had become a sticking point as the battle for who controlled the MBC was waged.

Last fall Jim Hill, state executive director, resigned and the MBC escrowed more than $2 million earmarked for agencies such as Missouri Baptist College, the convention newspaper and three other missions agencies. Their money was escrowed after the five organizations chose to elect their own boards of trustees. The MBC is currently threatening to sue the agencies if they don’t come back under convention control.

‘Courage exhibited’

“I think we’ll see a lot of courage exhibited, a lot of commitment, people with vision willing to take risk,” said H.K. Neely, one of the BGCM’s incorporators and dean of the Redford College of Theology and Church Vocations at Southwest Baptist University in Missouri. “We’re not out to fight anybody. We don’t need any enemies. We’re not out to call names or fight. If anyone builds the fence, they’ll build it, we won’t,” he added.

Bob Curtis, president of the Missouri Baptist Convention, refered to the new group as a “splinter,” not a split.  At last count the MBC had 1,951 churches and about 624,000 members.

Churches in the new convention plan to remain loyal to the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But they’ll have to do extra work to make that happen. The SBC has declined to cooperate with the new group.

Based on initial interest expressed by members of more than 100 MBC churches, the BGCM ratified a basic program budget of $4 million. That’s the money that’s distributed by a state convention among state missions and national SBC causes. Churches will be asked to send gifts for national causes directly to the SBC.         

(RNS)