Challenging NAMB

As an Alabama-born-and-raised, ordained Southern Baptist minister who has served as an active duty Navy chaplain for the past 23 years, I read with appreciation your March 6 editorial, “Questions About Women Chaplains and NAMB.” I thank you for introducing many Alabama Baptists to an issue of profound concern to many Southern Baptist military chaplains: the NAMBs decision to endorse unordained individuals for service as chaplains in the Armed Forces. I share your concern about this policy and would like to address several additional implications of it.

Your recognition of chaplains as fulfilling the functions of pastors is appreciated, but I would go further to say that we military chaplains are pastors. We have responded to the call of God to come out of our local church pastorates to serve our Southern Baptist men and women in uniform as their Southern Baptist pastors in uniform, providing Southern Baptist ministry they might not have access to otherwise as the requirements of military service take them far from their home churches, and sometimes restrict their access to any Southern Baptist church at all. Military chaplains preach the gospel, perform baptisms, provide communion, lead worship, teach the Word, conduct weddings and funerals, visit in hospitals and jails, around the world, at sea and in the field, in peacetime and in war. We are the ordained pastors of your military people. An official NAMB justification of this new policy provided to chaplains late last year stated that ordination has not been required or considered in the endorsement of chaplains in the past. The most charitable interpretation of that assertion is to call it inaccurate. Every Southern Baptist military chaplain knows that ordination has always been a basic, unwaverable requirement for endorsement by the Home Mission Board (formerly) and, up until now, by the NAMB.

To endorse anyone who has not been ordained is to proclaim the ordination of all Southern Baptist military chaplains to be unnecessary and irrelevant. It is to change our identity, in a stroke, from pastoral leader to religiously oriented social worker

Is this what Southern Baptists in uniform expect or church members throughout the convention desire? Shouldn’t policies be guided more by the spiritual needs of our people than by a concern for maintaining employment opportunities for religious workers? This policy, if allowed to continue, would reverse a 90-year-old SBC tradition and remove Southern Baptist chaplains from the ranks of all other mainstream Christian denominations to align us squarely alongside Christian Scientists and Mormons, two religious groups that do not require ordination for endorsement for military chaplaincy (in both cases, because they have no ordained clergy at all).

Last week, I forwarded your editorial, via e-mail, to all 134 of the active duty Navy chaplains endorsed by NAMB. And though we chaplains are all somewhat preoccupied at the moment with ministry to military personnel and their families in the midst of war, several dozen chaplains responded. Many of them were surprised to learn that such a policy existed, and all of them were strongly opposed to it. This mirrors the consensus expressed by the 11 senior Southern Baptist Navy chaplains who met with NAMB representatives at Alpharetta in January of this year. We were unanimous in our vigorous opposition to this policy, which we expressed to the representatives. We also expressed our disappointment that active duty military chaplains were not invited to participate in the development of this policy, or even provided an opportunity to comment on it prior to its publication. Even at this late date, we hope that Southern Baptists throughout the convention will join us in asking the NAMB leadership to reinstate ordination as a prerequisite for service as a military chaplain.

Captain Al Hill