Three North American Mission Board (NAMB) employees have reportedly left the agency in Alpharetta, Ga., over a requirement that workers affirm in 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.
NAMB spokesman Martin King said Gerry Hutchinson, Donoso Escobar and George Pickle “Have left the board because they said they could not do their ministries in accordance with” the official faith statement of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Hutchinson was head of church-and-community-ministries evangelism for NAMB. Escobar was an associate in that department. Pickle was a chaplaincy evangelism associate.
Hutchinson resigned effective July 31. Escobar and Pickle took early retirement.
Kind said NAMB’s professional and management employees, which make up about half the agency’s 425 workers, were given a copy of the newly revised faith statement to review in late May or early June.
The employees were then given a two-part document, he said.
The first part contained a statement that the employee had read and agreed with the Baptist Faith and Message. If the employee said “No” to this, he or she had to explain why.
The employees were asked to sign the second part of the document promising to carry out their responsibilities “in accordance with and not contrary to” the current edition of the Baptist Faith and Message statement.
Two-part document
Kind said it was possible for employees to say “No” on the first part, as long as their differences with the statement were minor, and they signed the second part.
Hutchinson, Escobar and Pickle would not sign the second part, King said.
“They said they couldn’t work according to the guidelines of the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said.
The Baptist Faith and Message, first approved in 1925 and revised in 1963, underwent a second major revision last year.
While the statement is non-binding on local churches, agencies of the convention use it as a guide for hiring.
Some of the current document’s 18 articles are controversial. Some Baptists criticize removal of a phrase from the previous version describing Jesus as the criterion for interpreting the Bible as diminishing the Lordship of Christ.
And while few Southern Baptists have women pastors, some differ with an added pronouncement that the Scripture limits the office of pastor to men, saying it is up to the local church to choose its own leaders and not the denomination.
King called the three men “good employees, brothers in Christ.”
“It’s sad for us that they’ve left, but they’re the ones that made the determination that they couldn’t conduct their ministries in accordance with guidelines set down by the owners of the agency, the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said.
(ABP)
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