Ninety-year-old James Sullivan, an elder statesman in the Southern Baptist Convention, says he is grieved by controversy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination but has purposely avoided taking sides.
In recent years, the former SBC president and agency head who wrote Baptist classics including “Rope of Sand with Strength of Steel” and “Baptist Polity As I See It,” has attended annual meetings of the convention but has not registered as a messenger in order to sidestep divisive issues.
Still, in an interview with the Tennessee newspaper “Baptist and Reflector,” Sullivan shared some distinct views on topics that are in major focus in Southern Baptist life today.
-On being conservative: “I have always said Baptists are 98 percent conservative,” Sullivan said. The problem, he added, is that the definition of “conservative” has changed.
Being conservative once meant belief in the atonement, salvation by grace, eternal security and heavenly reward, he said. Today, however, there is a concept that all Baptists ought to believe everything alike, he noted.
“We forget there is diversity in every individual church,” he said. “You can’t have a unified concept with 41,000-plus churches when you can’t have unity in one church.”
-Statements of faith: “One problem we face today is many people misunderstand that a statement of faith becomes a creed when it becomes mandatory,” Sullivan said. He said there is nothing wrong with a statement of faith, because it tells where a group stands. There’s nothing wrong with a statement of faith as long as there is not enforced implementation on individuals and churches.
“When you make the creed the standard, you replace the Bible,” he said.
-The Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ unified budget that supports both the various state conventions and the SBC: “I think it is the greatest system of denominational financing ever developed by any denomination, Protestant or Catholic,” he said.
Though illness has weakened him in recent years, Sullivan said his mind is still sharp. “I don’t preach as much as I would like or used to, but I keep up with everything,” he said.
Asked if he had his life to live over again, would he still be a Southern Baptist, Sullivan responded emphatically: “No question. We still have the best system (of any denomination). We’re responsible for our decisions to God.” (ABP)
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