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SAN ANTONIO–As the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting approaches, some messengers are considering making a motion that would prohibit SBC entities from adopting doctrinal policies that speak more specifically than the language of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.
But several members of the committee that revised the BF&M in 2000 caution that such a motion is unnecessary and would inhibit entities from carrying out their work.
“It would severely hamstring us,” Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and a member of the BF&M Study Committee, said of the potential motion. “It would basically leave us (the ERLC) in limbo if an issue comes up between that meeting and the next convention as to whether we could address it.
“There are lots of issues that are not explicitly settled in the Baptist Faith and Message and that we haven’t had resolutions on yet that come up that we need to deal with. It seems to me that it’s a violation of the trustee process. We elect trustees to provide that kind of oversight.”
The idea for a motion limiting policies to the language of the BF&M initially came up at last year’s SBC annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C., where Texas messenger Boyd Luter made a motion calling for a vote by the full convention on any “doctrinal position or practical policy” adopted by an SBC entity “which goes beyond, or seeks to explain the explicit wording of the duly constituted authoritative language of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.”
Luter’s motion was referred to the SBC Executive Committee, which issued a one-paragraph statement at its February meeting characterizing the BF&M as a sufficient guide for trustees of SBC entities.
The Executive Committee stated that it “acknowledges the Baptist Faith and Message is not a creed, or a complete statement of our faith, nor final or infallible, nevertheless we further acknowledge that it is the only consensus statement of doctrinal beliefs approved by the Southern Baptist Convention and as such is sufficient in its current form to guide trustees in their establishment of policies and practices of entities of the Convention.”
C.J. Bordeaux, chairman of the Executive Committee’s administrative sub-committee, told the TEXAN that the statement does not tell entities what to do and affirms that each SBC entity is autonomous.
“We cannot tell the entities what they can do,” Bordeaux said. “…When we came to this thing about the BF&M, there was the realization that we can’t make them do what we want them to do They’re their own private entity, and that has to be up to the individual entity to determine.”
He added that the BF&M is not a specific “battle plan” but merely a “great guide” and a general statement of what Southern Baptists stand for.
Luter, pastor of Comal Country Church in New Braunfels, told the TEXAN in an e-mail he is “gratified with the action of the Executive Committee” but that he has lost respect for the trustees of three entities that have taken doctrinal stands outside the bounds of the BF&M.
“I have lost even more respect for the trustees of the three entities that now have in place de facto doctrinal additions to BFM 2000: NAMB, IMB and SWBTS,” Luter wrote. “Each of these three boards has met at least once since the Executive Committee decision in February, which effectively counseled these trustees that BFM 2000, as it is currently worded (i.e., not being stretched to bear a narrow interpretation well beyond the actual wording), is ‘sufficient’ to inform all entity ‘policies and practices.'”
Luter expressed disappointment that none of the three boards publicly acknowledged the EC recommendation, nor did they “bring their own previous actions beyond BF&M 2000 back into line with the only consensus statement of doctrinal beliefs approved by the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Though Luter is not planning personally to introduce a follow-up motion in San Antonio, he said he has seen drafts of several potential motions that seek to “bring home more effectively to these trustees their proper expected accountability to the Convention at large in keeping faith with BFM 2000.”
One possible source of such a motion is the participants in a roundtable in December dubbed by host
Dwight McKissic as the Sandy Creek-Charlestonian Convergence, named for two 18th-century traditions out of which Southern Baptists rose. Roundtable participants signed a letter asking the International Mission Board, the North American Mission Board and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to reconsider policies and statements concerning private prayer language, and to provide a response at the SBC meeting in San Antonio.
Concerned that “restrictive policies and statements have now introduced conflict and disharmony within a convention that has labored diligently to preserve our common bond of missions and evangelism within the Baptist Faith and Message,” the letter said that task is too great to begin excluding people from service based on “interpretive variances and disciplines of personal devotion.”
Wade Burleson, a participant in the roundtable, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla., and an IMB trustee, has also criticized the IMB for adopting a baptism policy he said goes beyond the parameters of the BF&M.
The IMB’s baptism guideline, adopted in May, states that baptism “must take place under the authority of a local church that practices believer’s baptism alone, embraces the doctrine of the security of a believer’s salvation and does not view baptism as sacramental, regenerative or essential to salvation. A candidate who has not been baptized under the authority of a local church, which meets the standards listed above, is expected to request baptism in his or her Southern Baptist church.”
Roger Spradlin, a member of the committee that drafted the 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message and pastor of Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield, Calif., said that while he understands the concern of those considering a motion in San Antonio, trustee boards need to retain the right to speak more specifically than the BF&M at times.
“I understand the motivation for such a motion because it’s difficult for an entity to pass policies that the whole convention doesn’t necessarily buy into or agree with,” said Spradlin, who is a member of the Executive Committee and former trustee at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “But on the flip side of that, it’s just about as dangerous to try to have a confession of faith that is so broad that it covers every possibility for separate entities. For instance, our seminaries should have a right to ask questions of a professor and to set guidelines that aren’t necessarily specified in the Baptist Faith and Message.”
Though he personally disagrees with the IMB baptism policy, Spradlin said trustees are in a better position than the full convention to debate detailed theological issues and set policy for their entities on such issues as baptism, prayer languages and the gender of professors.
“I think it’s appropriate that they not contradict the Baptist Faith and Message,” he said of entity policies, “but to say that we can’t go beyond that I think is unrealistic.”
Heather Moore, also a member of the BF&M Study Committee, agreed with Spradlin’s assessment, saying Southern Baptists’ confession is a general statement and that entities should be permitted to deal with issues that arise, which are not specifically addressed in the BF&M.
“The committee was given the responsibility to review the Baptist Faith and Message statement and to clarify and to clearly communicate the commonly held doctrinal beliefs by Baptists,” Moore said. “The Baptist Faith and Message is not a complete statement of faith; it is not considered infallible.”
“For issues that arise, not addressed in the Baptist Faith and Message, we must allow each SBC trustee board to fulfill the role for which they are elected and to work with their respective agency head and other staff to implement policy in accordance to biblical standards.”
Simon Tsoi of Phoenix was also a part of the BF&M Study Committee and now is on the IMB trustee board where he served on the ad hoc subcommittee that reviewed the baptism guideline.
“We were just doing what we were expected to do as a trustee board to help work together with our administration. We prayed and we discussed this for quite a while,” he said of the review.
Tsoi said he disagrees with the charge that the board went beyond the expectations of messengers who entrusted the board with authority to establish IMB policy.
Land noted that even without a motion requiring entities to adopt policy only within the parameters of the BF&M, the convention has plenty of ways to hold trustees accountable if they take actions that it finds objectionable.
Messengers “could write to the trustees and communicate with the trustees, and they could seek to change the board of trustees through a process of attrition or otherwise. The point being made in the controversy (the Conservative Resurgence) was that these entities are accountable to the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptist Convention can change the trustee boards.”
Messengers should not think that trustees are out to thwart the will of the convention, Land said, adding that the trustees he has spoken with are very sensitive to the convention’s desires.
“I find trustees overwhelmingly to be very conscientious and very much understanding that they are holding their post in trusteeship for the wider convention. But you can’t have 16.4 million Southern Baptists’ elected messengers trying to, in a two-day convention, provide oversight and review the decision-making authority and the decision-making practices of a dozen entity boards. That’s why you have trustee boards in the first place.”
