04293
June 16, 2004

Baptists cut ties with global group, elect new president 

by Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service

INDIANAPOLIS — Southern Baptists voted overwhelmingly Tuesday (June 15) to cut their almost 100-year-old ties with the Baptist World Alliance, a global group that conservative leaders accused of having a “leftward drift.”

      The vote, which had been anticipated for months, removed their denomination’s $300,000 in funding and official membership from the global group, leaving it with 210 members.

      Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Denton Lotz responded to the decision with sadness.

      “For us, it’s a break in the body of Christ,” he told reporters after the vote. “The motto of the Baptist World Alliance has always been ‘One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism.’ We belong together because we belong to Christ and Southern Baptists have been there right from the beginning.”

      In another expected action on the first day of a two-day meeting, the more than 5,000 delegates, or messengers, elected the Rev. Bobby Welch of Daytona Beach, FL, as the next president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Welch was unexpectedly contested for the presidency when a North Carolina messenger nominated Al Jarrell, pastor of Riverside Baptist Church in Merry Hill, NC, for the post. Welch won with almost 80 percent of the vote.

      The Baptists also heard from President Bush via live satellite. They gave him several standing ovations and loud cheers on issues on which they tend to agree about faith and politics.

      “I understand as you do that freedom is not America’s gift to the world,” he said in his 10-minute address. “Freedom is the almighty God’s gift to every man and woman who lives in this world.”

      They rose to their feet when he spoke against abortion and in favor of a constitutional amendment declaring marriage as the union between a man and a woman.

      As of Oct. 1, the Baptist World Alliance will have lost its largest member, which Lotz compared to the United States withdrawing from the United Nations. He expects churches and associations will make up the difference in lost funds from the 16.3 million-member denomination.

      “For us, it was not a question of finances,” said Lotz, whose Falls Church, VA-based alliance will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. “Right from the start, it was always a question of schism, division and the unity of the body of Christ. We believe the Scripture is very much calling us to unity and therefore any division in the body is a sign to the secular world that we’re not really practicing what we preach.”

      When the Baptist World Alliance accepted the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as a member last year, both Southern Baptist and alliance leaders expected it would lead to a separation. But Paige Patterson, a member of an Executive Committee study committee, cited other reasons on the convention podium, including what he believes is the alliance’s lack of focus on the Bible as being without error — a key concern of conservative leaders — and the inclusion of some gay-friendly churches in another member body, the American Baptist Churches USA.

      “What you give your money and name to, remember, you give your tacit approval to,” Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in his committee’s report urging withdrawal from the alliance.

      American Baptist leaders said that their Evergreen Baptist Association in Seattle has two “welcoming and affirming” congregations among 31 churches but the association does not identify itself as gay-friendly.

      Patterson’s picking out her association as an example for leaving the alliance was “wrong,” the Rev. Marcia Patton, executive minister of the Seattle-based association, said in an interview. “I don’t think God is honored by that.”

      Larry Walker, a messenger from the First Baptist Church of Dallas, was the sole person to speak from the convention floor against withdrawing from the alliance after 99 years.

      “We may not need them, but they desperately need us,” said Walker, drawing some applause. “Is there something we can do to resolve and reconcile this relationship?”

      But Wiley Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist of Buena Park, CA, said, “We try to love everybody, but there comes a point where you have to do something out of love.”

      Lotz disagreed with those who think the alliance is leaning left.

      “We are not leftward drifting,” he said. “That is ridiculous. In the Third World — the Africans, the Asians, the Latin Americans, the Eastern Europeans — they are conservative evangelicals. They are more conservative than most Americans would be.”

      In February, the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention voted 62-10 to recommend that the denomination withdraw its membership and funding from the alliance. That vote came after a study committee reported that it was time “to politely withdraw from an organization that, at least for us, no longer efficiently communicates to the unsaved a crystal clear gospel message that our Lord Jesus Christ is solely sufficient for salvation.”

      Lotz called that analysis a “misrepresentation of the truth.”

      Instead of linking the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and 210 other Baptist conventions around the world, Southern Baptist leaders are moving forward with plans to work globally in other ways.

      The approved recommendation calls for Southern Baptist officials to use contributions previously sent to the Baptist World Alliance for a strategy to build relationships with “conservative evangelical Christians” across the globe.

      The separation between the bodies had begun with ongoing discussions and reduced funding. Last June, Southern Baptists voted to reduce annual funding of the alliance from $425,000 to $300,000.