Conflicting reports raise question about IMB’s intent

The controversial prayer practice, related to glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, had previously been practiced by the IMB’s own president, Jerry Rankin.

Wade Burleson, an IMB trustee from Oklahoma and former president of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma who opposed the policy change, said the tongues policy puts the missionary-sending agency “in the absurd position of having the president of our International Mission Board not qualified to serve as a field missionary. This does not make sense.”

Burleson issued an “open letter to the SBC” opposing the tongues policy, as well as a new set of guidelines for missionary candidates regarding what qualifies as an acceptable baptism. Conservative Baptist bloggers went further, suggesting the trustees’ vote was a “nefarious” attempt to embarrass and get rid of Rankin.

The Southern Baptist Convention agency already excludes people who speak in tongues in public worship from serving as missionaries. But IMB trustees voted Nov. 15 to amend its list of missionary qualifications to exclude those who use a “prayer language” in private.

The vote count reported by ABP originally came from a Nov. 30 posting on the IMB’s own website. As of Dec. 9, that story had been altered to remove the vote tally.

The vote was taken on a show of hands, rather than a ballot or roll call. IMB spokesman Michael Chute, who was seated in the back of the room, and another IMB spokesperson said they determined there was “no official count” of the vote, and that is why the original posting on IMB’s website was changed, they said.

However, the operators of several Baptist weblogs have seized on the discrepancy to illuminate what they say are deeper controversies at the IMB.

Marty Duren, a pastor from Georgia and proprietor of the SBC Outpost blog (sbcoutpost.blogspot. com), said he believed the tongues vote was the result more of a vendetta against Rankin on the part of the Texas trustees than any doctrinal concern.

“It seems that this had less to do with missionary guidelines and more to do with insulting Jerry Rankin,” Duren wrote. “If you truly believe that this is an unbiblical practice, you should have fired him outright rather than this nefarious, insolent move. It is a shame that a vocal minority of trustees, representing an even smaller section of the country, who have a personal dislike for Dr. Rankin would stoop to such a level of using an obviously confusing charismatic practice to further their disdain for the president of the board.”

Duren said he had interviewed several trustees who agreed with that assessment. He quoted one. “Trustee Johnny Nantz of Las Vegas was willing to go on record, saying, ‘The issue is not doctrinal, the issue is the removal of Jerry Rankin. This is being used to end his tenure,’ ” Duren wrote in a Dec. 5 post.

Writing in his own blog, Burleson posted a lengthy essay called “Crusading Conservatives vs. Cooperating Conservatives: The War for the Future of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

In the post, Burleson details his own conservative credentials, including support of and participation in the 25-year movement that swept moderates from leadership positions and solidified the SBC as a staunchly conservative convention.

“I am glad and I rejoice over the conservative resurgance. I am a conservative,” he says.

But, Burleson goes on to say, “a new war has begun,” one “initiated by fellow conservatives.”

“Conservatives who loved the battles of decades past have fallen victim to a crusading mentality of bloodthirst,” he says. “Since all the liberals are gone, conservative cruasaders are now killing fellow conservatives.”

Burleson cites the IMB conflict as a prime example of conservatives turning on each other. “I have been told by an authority in the crusading effort that there are some trustees who will settle for nothing less than Dr. Rankin’s ‘head on a platter,’ ” he wrote.

Burleson expresses concern that a generation of younger pastors will be turned off by the conflict and thus lost to the SBC.

Despite his own allegiance to inerrancy, Burleson expresses loathing for legalism.

“Our convention hated liberalism twenty years ago and we expelled it from our midst,” he said, “but at this hour we better hate legalism and Fundamentalism as much as we did the former liberalism or we will find ourselves so fractured and fragmented that we no longer have the ability to cooperate about anything, including missions.”

Burleson prays that God will raise up "men and women in the SBC who are more concerned about conservative cooperation than we are conservative conformity …"

In a phone call, Burleson told Tony Cartledge, editor of North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder, he received more than 500 e-mails in response to the blog, about 95 percent of them supporting his call for a sheathing of swords.

In a telephone conversation with Jim White, editor of the Religious Herald, Thomas Hatley, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Rogers, Ark., and IMB trustee board chairman, denied that animosity toward Rankin had anything to do with their recent action, however. “The trustees took that action because Dr. Rankin requested it,” Hatley affirmed.

Chute also said he didn’t perceive any animosity toward Rankin in the tongues vote. “I don’t think there’s any truth to that,” he said. “That wasn’t discussed” during debate of the policy, he said.