Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meeting defeated an attempt to unseal written and audio records of Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) Task Force proceedings.
The GCR Task Force recently announced it would seal the records for 15 years at the Southern Baptist Historical Library & Archives in Nashville.
Jay Adkins of First Baptist Church, Westwego, La., introduced a motion to makethe records available “in the spirit of openness and transparency” for review by any interested Southern Baptist.
In debate on his motion, the only one scheduled by the SBC Committee on Order Business, Adkins said Southern Baptists would benefit from “seeing the process” of the task force. “What better way could we as a body come together?”
But task force members argued against the effort to open the records immediately, saying it would require them to break promises of confidentiality they made with Southern Baptists they consulted with in their deliberations.
“This recommendation would require this task force to break its word,” said task force member Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
It would also “rob us of our own historical record” and have a chilling effect on future committees, he said. “The consequence of this motion is no future convention committees could record their proceedings because they would be compromised from the beginning.”
Greg Wills, a church history professor at Southern Seminary, suggested 15 years “is an entirely reasonable, brief period” for sealing such records. Opening the records now “may serve a short-term political agenda, but we will lose the history of our committees at the most critical time,” he said.
An effort by Doug Hibbard of Calvary Baptist Church, Monticello, Ark., to amend the motion so selected portions of the proceedings could be released also failed.
Twenty-nine other motions were referred to boards and committees or were rejected. (Editor’s Network)
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