08191
March 11, 2008

Southern Baptists launch initiative on creation care

by Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON — A group of Southern Baptist leaders has launched a new initiative on the environment, saying that their denomination’s past declarations on the issue have been “too timid.”
   
“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,” reads the initiative’s statement, which was released March 10. “The time for timidity regarding God’s creation is no more.”
   
Though SBC President Frank Page is among the initiative’s 45 signatories, officials at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist entity that addresses environmental matters, have not signed the statement.
   
The four-page document says despite “justified disagreement” about the issue among Christians, there is a biblical mandate for churches to be actively involved in preaching and practicing care for creation.
   
The Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative has been spearheaded by Jonathan Merritt, a seminary student and the 25-year-old son of former Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt.
   
The younger Merritt said he was moved to act after hearing his professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, compare destroying creation to ripping out a page of the Bible.
   
He said the new statement is not meant to contradict a nonbinding resolution passed at last year’s meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which questioned findings that global warming is primarily human-induced.
  
“Rather, it is a unique voice that advances our stand on the issue beyond where they’ve been in the past,” he said.
   
He is encouraging additional Southern Baptists to sign the statement on the initiative’s Web site, baptistcreationcare.org.
   
Barrett Duke, vice president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said the commission discussed the document with Jonathan Merritt but was not comfortable with its final version.
   
“We didn’t feel that it was appropriate for us to tell Southern Baptists what we thought about how they expressed their opinions,” he said.