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SAN ANTONIO?Southern Baptists meeting in San Antonio June 12-13 elected by acclamation South Carolina pastor Frank Page for a second term as president and passed a motion declaring the SBC’s doctrinal confession, the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M), a “sufficient” policy guide for convention agencies.
The BF&M motion on June 12 fueled the longest floor debate of the meeting and prompted further discussion in hallways and from the podium during SBC entity reports the next day over how entities should apply the motion.
The convention approved eight resolutions on topics ranging from global warming to child abuse, while refusing a resolution offered from the floor on integrity in church membership (See related stories, page 10).
Messengers also approved an operating budget of $200.6 million for the next fiscal year, which funds the SBC’s six seminaries, its two mission boards, its ethics agency, and the administrative operations of the convention, which claims more than 16 million members.
Bush addresses SBC
President Bush addressed messengers during the morning session June 13, praising Southern Baptists for their work in disaster relief and the alleviation of world hunger and poverty, AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, and, the president added, “you’ve spread the gospel.”
Bush acknowledged a previous meeting with Page, during which the two prayed together, Bush recalled.
Bush thanked Southern Baptists for supporting his judicial appointments, “and I will continue to nominate good judges who will interpret the law and not legislate from the bench.” Southern Baptists are committed to a culture of life, Bush said, noting his refusal to fund abortions with tax dollars and promising to veto “any bill that Congress sends me that violates the sanctity of human life.”
Lauding Southern Baptists’ human rights efforts in the Darfur region of Sudan, Bush said, “For too long the people of Darfur have suffered” by a government guilty of rape, murder and genocide. He added, “You’re rising to meet the challenge of broken souls in a broken world” with compassion.
Bush also praised the True Love Waits abstinence program, started by Southern Baptists and used in Ugandan schools. Bush noted that six more African nations will begin using the program soon.
Page re-elected unopposed
Page, pastor of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., was elected unopposed to a customary second one-year term, calling on messengers in his presidential address to take responsibility for personal sins.
Preaching from Psalm 51, David’s prayer for restoration after committing adultery and murder, Page said the SBC is at an “irrecoverable moment ? in which the Lord wants to speak to our hearts.”
But because of a lack of heart integrity, Page said: “We find faults in everyone else and we develop a pattern of dishonesty and we will not deal with what the problem is.”
Page compared the SBC’s unfounded confidence in itself to France’s “Maginot Line,” a system of forts and defense points the French wrongly thought for years was impenetrable until the Germans marched through it in 1940, taking the entire country captive in one month.
Page said he feared “we have built our own Maginot Line.”
Praising those who fought for doctrinal correction in the SBC two decades ago, Page said churches would be empty if equal passion is not given toward God and others, especially the lost.
“The early church had little influence but much power,” Page reminded. “The modern church?much influence but little power.”
The following day, messengers unanimously passed a resolution calling on Southern Baptists to “humble ourselves in individual and corporate repentance” and urging the denomination “to embrace a spirit of repentance, pursue face-to-face reconciliation where necessary, and enter into a time of fasting and prayer for the lost.”
BF&M motion stirs debate
Seven years after convention messengers adopted a revised Baptist Faith and Message, the confessional statement that was criticized by theological moderates for alleged “bibliotry” was prominent in San Antonio, where messengers affirmed the confession as “sufficient” and a “guide” for SBC entities.
From entity reports to informal discussions in the convention center lobby the following day, messengers were debating the implications of the motion by Rick Garner, pastor of Liberty Heights Church in Liberty Township, Ohio: Does the BF&M 2000 represent a set of maximal parameters for trustee boards, or does the confessional statement represent a minimal baseline from which trustee boards may begin in implementing policies?
Garner’s motion, approved by 57.7 percent of voting messengers, called for adoption of an Executive Committee statement pronouncing the BF&M as “sufficient in its current form to guide trustees in their establishment of policies and practices of entities of the convention” and the convention’s “only consensus statement of doctrinal beliefs.”
Although the motion did not specifically direct SBC agencies and trustee boards, floor debate centered over the motion’s intent. Many suspected the motion to put undue pressure on the internal work of SBC entities, and some entity heads utilized time during their convention reports to address these purported implications.
The sharpest contrast came from Executive Committee President Morris Chapman, who urged adherence to the BF&M for SBC policies, and Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr., who seemingly responded to Chapman and to messengers the following day, emphasizing the statement’s exhortation to guide entities such as Southern, not restricting them.
Before the motion passed, Chapman in his report to messengers June 12 said any practice an SBC entity institutes that has the “force of doctrine” should be in accordance with Baptists’ confessional statement.
Policies enacted by trustee boards “should not exceed its boundaries unless and until it has been approved by the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said.
“If an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention adopts a confession of faith separate and distinct from the Baptist Faith and Message and it includes a doctrine unsupported by our confessional statement, the entity should request approval from the convention prior to including the doctrine in its confession,” he said.
Chapman insisted such a procedure would not infringe on trustees’ responsibility to govern entities, nor the allegiance of students enrolled in SBC seminaries.
Acknowledging the division surrounding the BF&M motion, Chapman called on Southern Baptists to unite over core beliefs and the common task of world evangelization, calling disputes over what he term “secondary and tertiary” doctrines as “destructive distractions.”
Page made similar statements at his press conference, stating his preference that entities not exceed the faith statement in defining doctrinal parameters.
But not all SBC leaders agreed.
“We gladly receive that advisement,” Mohler said of the vote affirming the BF&M as a sufficient guide, adding that messengers surely did not intend for schools to be restricted from inquiring of potential staff “on what they believe on every conceivable issue.”
Noting that 38 years passed between the 1925 BF&M and its 1963 revision, and another 37 years between the 1963 and 2000 revision, Mohler said trustees must make calls on a host of doctrinal issues not explicitly covered in the BF&M.
To insist that no board may exceed the BF&M?what Mohler called a “summary of things believed”?”makes no sense whatsoever if you are hiring a seminary professor.”
Midwestern Seminary President Phil
