Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders intent on severing ties with Baptist World Alliance (BWA) took a major step in that direction Feb. 17.
Despite pleas from Baptist leaders worldwide and some Southern Baptists not to leave BWA, the SBC Executive Committee voted 62–10 to approve a recommendation to withdraw SBC membership and funding from BWA, the 99-year-old fellowship of 211 Baptist bodies worldwide. Executive Committee members said protecting the SBC’s theological identity is more important than preserving worldwide Baptist unity.
The proposal will go to messengers of the SBC in June for final approval. The action would take effect Oct. 1, deleting the final $300,000 of annual SBC support for BWA, which has an annual budget of $1.7 million.
The SBC, with 16 million members, is the largest member body and biggest contributor to the BWA, which represents 43 million Baptists. But the conservative leaders of the SBC say the organization has become too liberal, a charge Baptist leaders worldwide deny.
The hour-long debate was limited to Executive Committee members only. BWA General Secretary Denton Lotz was present but was not invited to speak in the debate.
“We are, of course, very sad,” Lotz told Associated Baptist Press after the vote. “Any time there is a breach in fellowship, it is sad. … We’re going out sad, but we’re going out with love for Southern Baptists.”
SBC Executive Committee President Morris Chapman presented the two-page report and recommendation calling for the SBC to withdraw from the global Baptist organization.
He described an earlier report released in December as an interim report that serves as background to the committee’s final recommendation. The initial report complained that the BWA sanctions theological positions contrary to Southern Baptists’ conservative views and has ignored the SBC’s complaints.
“Continuing to allow presentations that call into question the truthfulness of Holy Scripture, refusing to support openly the idea that all who are saved must come to the salvation through conscious faith in Jesus Christ, and promoting women as preachers and pastors are among the issues that make it impossible to endorse the BWA as a genuinely representative organization of world Baptists,” the study committee said.
The BWA, as well as its member groups, has consistently denied those charges. When the SBC announced its plan to withdraw last December, Baptist leaders from around the world voiced strong support for BWA and dismay at the charges of liberalism.
“The BWA rejects categorically this false accusation of liberalism,” Lotz said in December. “Of course, there is a spectrum of theological thought in all of our conventions, just as in local churches, but we belong to one another because we belong to Christ.”
Because debate was limited to committee members only, the committee did not hear from Florida retired pastor and physician Bob Casey, who staged a weeklong fast and daily prayer-walk around the SBC headquarters building in a Joshua-like attempt to change the committee’s mind.
Some SBC leaders, including study committee member Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, said the proposal is partly based on the BWA’s decision last year to admit the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship into BWA. Southern Baptist leaders oppose the fellowship formed by Southern Baptists dissatisfied with the denomination’s fundamentalist direction.
While “much has been made about the inclusion of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship into the BWA as having been the cause of our present recommendation to withdraw from the organization,” the final report said, “one soaked by a rain need not blame the last raindrop. The decision of the BWA to include the CBF merely served as a confirmation that we must, as a convention, allow the world to see us without having to look through a BWA lens — a lens which for us has become too cloudy.”
The plan approved by the Executive Committee calls for SBC leaders to study how the convention “may establish an even closer bond of fellowship with conservative evangelical Christians around the world” and earmarks the deleted BWA allocation for that effort.
“We believe we can take the money being contributed to the Baptist World Alliance and begin to build strong bridges with conservative evangelical Christian Baptists in all parts of the world,” Chapman explained. While “we do not intend to organize a fellowship body similar to the Baptist World Alliance,” he said committee members believe international networking efforts will produce “a much stronger contribution to our witness to the world.” (ABP)
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