HAMPTON, Va. — Virginia Baptists prepared for their future Nov. 9-10 by affirming a proposal to expand their local, national and international relationships, while at the same time adopting a dramatically reduced budget to fund their ministries.
At its annual meeting in this port city, the Baptist General Association of Virginia also affirmed the importance of separation of church and state in American history, expressed support for immigration reform and opposed privatization of the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control department.
Messengers at the meeting, which drew about 1,100 people, also elected Richmond layman Bob Bass, a retired construction executive, to serve as president for the coming year.
About 1,100 Virginia Baptists attended their annual meeting at the Hampton Roads Convention Center in Hampton, Va. (Photo by Alice Rusher)
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In adopting recommendations of their Affinity Study Committee, Virginia Baptists committed themselves to “proactively seek out and invite our faith kin with shared missions-and-freedom callings to join us in affinity relationships” and to “expand our missions-and-freedom ministries deliberately and immediately, obediently and humbly.”
They also promised to “expand our missions-and-freedom research, identify our most creative affinities and embrace God’s surprises.” They acknowledged that will involve developing “even more agile and entrepreneurial leaders,” designing an “even more missions-oriented and flexible budget with quick access to funds for unanticipated mission-and-freedom opportunities” and developing governing structures that are “affinity-based and future-focused.”
The Affinity Study Committee was formed two years ago to develop a comprehensive response to the growing number of congregations from outside Virginia joining the BGAV. Many congregations are drawn by Virginia Baptists’ more moderate and flexible approach to missions and ministry in a process often described as affiliation by affinity, rather than by geography.
A handful of churches in adjacent West Virginia and North Carolina have long maintained BGAV affiliations. In the past 10 years, others from Georgia, South Carolina and Minnesota have joined them. Among the seven members of the study committee was a pastor of a BGAV-affiliated church in Hilton Head, S.C.
“One of the Affinity Study Committee’s early discoveries was that many of our beyond-Virginia members of the General Association aligned with us because of the quality and flexibility of our mission ministries,” the committee said in its report. That drove the committee to identify those characteristics which define Virginia Baptists, said Bob Dale, the retired Virginia Baptist Mission Board staffer who chaired the panel.
“What we found is that we are a missions-and-freedom people,” Dale told the Religious Herald in an interview last August. “We have a terrific legacy in both missions and freedom. If that’s our DNA then our future lies in finding others missions-and-freedom partners and working with them. So what you get in this report is a foundation — missions and freedom — and a future — the affinity that comes from the convergence of missions-and-freedom people.”
Virginia Baptists will “look for affinity partners at every crossroads of divine calling,” the committee report said. “We will channel our efforts specifically on missions and evangelism, church planting and congregational growth, disaster recovery and compassion ministries, and leadership development for God’s new world.”
“We will walk and work with others who are on the same mission from God …,” the report continues. “[W]hen callings converge, we can only follow God’s leadership with our ministry partners, our institutions, our shared ministries, other faith groups, human service groups, and non-governmental organizations, as we have long done in disaster response.”
Messengers adopted the report Nov. 10 without discussion or apparent opposition. At a breakout session the day before attended by about 50 people, comments were largely supportive.
Reduced budget
Expansion of BGAV ministries, however, may be stymied by the nation’s slow economic recovery, which has diminished financial contributions from Virginia Baptist churches. In response messengers adopted a 2011 budget of $13,350,000 — $650,000 less than the current $14 million budget.
“I’m presenting this budget on behalf of the budget committee with concern that churches need to understand the need to contribute as generously as possible in these difficult circumstances,” said budget committee chair Jim Slatton, a retired Richmond pastor.
BGAV treasurer Eddie Stratton has said he anticipates contributions from affiliated churches this year to fall far short of the $14 million goal. Total contributions likely will be anywhere from $12.8 million to $13 million, he said, and receipts in 2011 will be about the same.
Though the 2011 budget is 4.6 percent less than 2010’s, allocations for most Virginia ministries actually will be reduced by about 10.8 percent, due to the way the budget is divided among state, national and international causes.
The 2011 budget allocates $9,612,000 to Virginia missions and ministries and $3,738,000 to world mission causes. It continues to offer churches three pre-set giving tracks and a fourth customized option, all of which divide funds between Virginia ministries and national and international causes.
The percentage divisions in the pre-set giving tracks remain unchanged:
• The World Missions 1 track provides 66 percent for Virginia ministries and 34 percent for Southern Baptist Convention ministries.
• The World Missions 2 track provides 72 percent for Virginia ministries and 28 percent for a combination of Virginia, SBC and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship ministries.
• The World Missions 3 track provides 72 percent for Virginia ministries and 28 percent for CBF ministries.
The customized plan allows churches to select or delete any item in WM1, WM2 or WM3 and adjust percentages to reflect their own priorities.
While most Virginia allocations in the proposed budget were reduced proportionately, there were exceptions. Among them:
• The Virginia Baptist Foundation is reduced by 49 percent above its 10.8 percent reduction, from $91,000 to $41,094, due in part to its ability to find other revenue streams, Slatton said.
• The Virginia Baptist Mission Board is reduced by 2.4 percent, from $6,698,508 to $6,538,074. The Mission Board has taken many of the heaviest budget cuts in recent years, Slatton said, and the lower percentage reduction was an effort to protect it.
• Funds for subscriptions to the Religious Herald for pastors and other key church leaders were reduced from $40,000 to $15,000 and limited to pastors.
Percentage allocations in the world mission giving tracks remain the same, with two exceptions, both in World Mission 2 — the percentage for Ministering to Ministers, an agency which works closely with ministers who have been fired by churches, was increased from 2 to 3; and the Baptist Center for Ethics, a Nashville-based advocacy group, was reduced from 3 to 2.
No challenges
Though some observers had expected reductions to Woman’s Missionary Union of Virginia’s allocation to be challenged, no opposition materialized.
In its original proposal unveiled in October, WMUV’s allocation was reduced by the same 10.8 percent applied to most Virginia ministries, dropping WMUV’s allocation from $510,000 to $454,485.
WMUV president Ann Brown said that was at odds with “covenants and verbal agreements” which commit the BGAV to providing 100 percent of WMUV’s operating expenses.
Brown was referring to decades-old agreements which transferred the Alma Hunt Offering for State Missions — created and initially administered by WMUV — to shared administration with the BGAV. In return for WMUV’s reduced role in determining offering allocations — which had included funding for WMUV’s operational expenses as well as its projects and ministries — the BGAV agreed to provide funding for operations.
Budget committee members said they affirmed all BGAV-WMUV agreements, but maintained the documents did not guarantee WMUV would always receive 100 percent of its budget request. But the Virginia Baptist Mission Board — which, while it doesn’t approve the BGAV budget, may offer advice to the budget committee — took the unusual step in October of asking the committee to increase WMUV’s allocation by $55,000, returning it to the 2010 level.
In response, the budget committee increased its overall budget proposal by $50,000. Based on the formula that distributes funds among state, national and international ministries, that provided an additional $34,000 to WMUV.
Affirming separation of church and state
Virginia Baptists’ warning against versions of American history which minimize or deny separation of church and state was one of several resolutions adopted during the annual meeting.
It was the only one to draw significant opposition, however, and sparked a lively debate before being adopted on a hand vote by a wide margin.
Virginia Baptists should “regard it as a threat to the flourishing of religious liberty when any version of our nation’s history minimizes or denies the historical basis” of separation of church state, the resolution says, and “be diligent in resisting and correcting any such mistaken version of our history.”
Rob James of Richmond, who chairs the BGAV’s religious liberty committee, said the resolution was prompted in part by recent attempts by a conservative Christian majority on the Texas State Board of Education to amend the state’s social studies textbooks, which they say are hostile to Christianity and traditional values.
“One of the things that frightened us [the committee] was that the next 10 years of social studies textbooks would raise questions about the founding of this country and to what extent, if at all, the idea of separation of church and state is part of our national commitment,” said James, a retired professor of religion at the University of Richmond.
“It appeared to us that what was going on amounted to a change of our historical memory,” he added. “If we as individuals are robbed of our memory we can no longer be the same person and can’t be faithful to the same principles. The same is true of a collective body. Its memory can be tampered with.”
Several messengers spoke against the resolution, including Joseph Giles, pastor of James Square Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Va., who challenged the religious liberty committee’s terminology.
“The definition of separation of church and state today is not what the man who coined the phrase meant by it,” Giles said, referring to Thomas Jefferson, who first used the words in a letter to Baptists in Danbury, Conn. Whereas Jefferson understood the concept to mean that government could not coerce belief, many today take it to mean that religious faith should be excluded from public life, said Giles.
“The notion [of separation of church and state] held by people today is the real revisionism,” he said.
Giles added that advocates such as conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education “are not revisionists but reclaimers of our heritage.”
Alan Wilder, pastor of Sunny Hills Baptist Church in Wytheville, Va., said he generally supported the resolution but was uncomfortable with its references to authors he had not read. Wilder offered an amendment striking a paragraph which cited David Barton, W. Cleon Skousen and “some Reconstructionist authors” who the committee said engaged in “systematic efforts” to revise American history.
Wilder’s amendment failed but James said he and the committee would consent to removing the authors’ names while leaving the rest of the paragraph intact.
The modified resolution passed.
Immigration reform and more
Another resolution urged Congress “to address seriously and realistically the immigration crisis in a way that will restore trust among all persons in our society.”
“… [W]e urge Christian citizens to follow the biblical principle of caring for the foreigners among us (Deuteronomy 24:17-22) and the command of Christ to be a neighbor to those in need of assistance (Luke 10:30-37), regardless of their racial or ethnic background, country of origin, or legal status; and … we encourage all Virginia Baptists to make the most of the tremendous opportunity for evangelism and join in the mission to seek and to save those who are lost among the immigrant population,” the resolution says.
It also encourages “all Christian churches to act redemptively and reach out to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of all immigrants, to start English classes on a massive scale, and to encourage and assist them on the path toward legal status and citizenship.”
In opposing the privatization of liquor sales, Virginia Baptists have weighed in on an issue that has roiled statewide politics since Gov. Bob McDonnell introduced it earlier this year. Since the end of Prohibition, beer and wine may be sold in private stores in Virginia, but liquor and spirits can be bought only in government operated outlets.
McDonnell says selling the Alcohol Beverage Control commission would provide revenue for the state’s burgeoning transportation needs. His critics say it will relinquish an important source of funding.
Virginia Baptists’ resolution noted that “past studies of similar proposals to privatize ABC stores have shown privatization provides fewer dollars for the state general fund and local services.” They also maintained “the abuse of alcohol constitutes one of our Commonwealth’s greatest social ills, bringing tragedy to families, robbing industry of productivity and saddling taxpayers with the burden of funding redemptive programs.”
They expressed their “belief that the current ABC concept is an acceptable and valid way of controlling liquor sales in the Commonwealth of Virginia and should not be privatized” and urged the state’s Baptists “to express their concern to their local legislators.”
Another resolution expressed Virginia Baptists’ concern for a “silent crisis” among church leaders, which “often creates spiritual lethargy, impedes church leadership, and causes some to explore vocations outside of ministry” and “is intensified by our difficult economic and turbulent cultural times.”
They encouraged Virginia Baptist pastors to consider participating in 21-C, an annual evangelism conference sponsored by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board and to “discover other means of encouraging their longevity in ministry.”
They also urged churches to “express greater appreciation and care for those who work steadily on their behalf.”
New leadership
BGAV officers for 2011 are (from left) Mark Croston, first vice president; Allen Jessee, second vice president; Fred Anderson, clerk; and Bob Bass, president. (Photo by Alice Rusher)
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Bass, a member of Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond who had been serving as the BGAV’s first vice president, was unchallenged for the one-year, non-renewable position. His election continues a more than 50-year-old BGAV tradition of alternating its president between ministers and laypersons, and a more recent practice of elevating the first vice president to the presidency.
He succeeds Tim Madison, a Mechanicsville, Va., pastor.
Messengers also elected Mark Croston, pastor of East End Baptist Church in Suffolk, Va., as first vice president, and Allen Jessee, pastor of Community Heights Church in Cedar Bluff, Va., as second vice president.
If the pattern of electing the first vice president as president continues next year, Croston would become the BGAV’s first African-American president.
Croston was unopposed for the position. Jessee was elected by 321 votes to 109 in a contest with Larry Coleman, pastor of Churchland Baptist Church in Chesapeake, Va.
Robert Dilday is managing editor of the Religious Herald.