ATLANTA (ABP) — Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board will ask the agency's trustees to rescind an action that asked for the removal of one of their fellow trustees.
But the controversy surrounding the trustee in question, Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson, may be far from over.
Tom Hatley, chairman of the IMB, confirmed to Associated Baptist Press Feb. 15 that the board's executive committee will recommend the reversal at a March 20-21 meeting in Florida. Hatley is pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Rogers, Ark.
In January, the board voted to recommend the removal of Burleson, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla. In a press release following the action, IMB officials charged Burleson with “broken trust and resistance to accountability” because of an Internet weblog, or “blog,” that he has maintained.
On the blog, Burleson has been highly critical of previous board actions placing theological restrictions on missionary appointees that he — and other Southern Baptists — have said go far beyond SBC doctrinal consensus.
The IMB press release said the trustees did not take the action because of Burleson's opposition to the new policies, but because of the way he had conducted his dissent. Because trustees of Southern Baptist agencies are elected by SBC messengers, they can only be removed by action of the full convention. It meets in June in Greensboro, N.C.
In a statement following the January meeting, Hatley said, “This difficult measure was not taken without due deliberation and exploration of other ways to handle an impasse between Wade Burleson and the board…. The trustees consider this a rare and grievous action but one that was absolutely necessary for the board to move forward in its duties as prescribed by the SBC.”
But, asked to explain IMB leaders' change of heart Feb. 15, Hatley directed an Associated Baptist Press reporter to a statement he said the IMB would issue Feb. 16 explaining the situation further. “It's mainly [that] we discovered more options for handling trustee relationships than we thought we had,” he said.
The statement, released late on the afternoon of Feb. 16, read, in part, “As chairman of the International Mission Board, it is my intention to ask our board of trustees to reverse our action in January recommending to the Southern Baptist Convention in June that Wade Burleson be removed from office as an IMB trustee.
“We have determined that we have the ability to seek management of these issues through internal processes that were not known during our January meeting. We have never reached this stage of conflict before and did not know of all our options until recently.”
A Feb. 14 story released through Baptist Press, the SBC's official news agency, reported the IMB executive committee's decision to reverse was made at a Feb. 10 meeting in Atlanta. The body is made up of the IMB's trustee officers and the chairpersons of its major standing committees.
Burleson, in a Feb. 16 entry in his blog (kerussocharis.blogspot.com), said he had spoken with Hatley about his continuing concerns over the situation — in particular, the perception the story created — that the IMB trustees had “determined that the matter of disciplining a trustee can be handled internally.”
Hatley told ABP that the line was not a direct quote, but the author's characterization of what he had said. Hatley also said the term “disciplining” was not directed specifically at Burleson, but intended more generally to refer to conflicts among trustees.
“It would be more than 'discipline' — it would be any conflict; it would be [dealing with] interpersonal relationships” needing repair, he said. “I'm hoping that cool heads and smart people can get together and pray and love each other and find ways to get things done for the Kingdom.”
It may not be that easy, however.
The trustees' original attempt to oust Burleson has set off a firestorm of controversy among Southern Baptist bloggers and chatrooms elsewhere on the Internet. Many of them have vowed to turn out in large numbers at the SBC meeting to vote against the recommendation to remove Burleson. Some have cast the conflict in generational terms, with the old guard of conservatives who led the SBC's rightward shift during the 1980s butting heads with a cadre of younger leaders who, while also conservative, want more power-sharing in the denomination.
Bloggers have also speculated that the conflict involved disagreements among powerful SBC officials over the leadership of Jerry Rankin, IMB's president and chief executive officer.
In addition, Burleson has disputed the accuracy of the IMB press release that followed the board's decision to recommend his ouster. It said the board had voted to ask for his removal because of “broken trust and resistance to accountability” on Burleson's part.
But Burleson, who said there were no members of the media present during the session in which trustees approved the motion, said those weren't the words the motion used.
“[T]he recommendation for my removal was [accusations of] 'gossip and slander,'” he said Feb. 16. “I stand by everything I have written. It is public, it has never violated confidentiality policies, and it is written with the sole intent of making the IMB better, and I can back up everything I have said with documentation.
On Feb. 12, he said IMB trustees had asked him to stop blogging, but that he wouldn't unless the board established a formal policy prohibiting all trustees from doing so. “I have been asked to prayerfully consider shutting down this blog,” he wrote. “Let me be clear. I have said, from the beginning, if I can be shown where my blog violates any policy or procedure of the IMB I will cease blogging immediately.”
The Feb. 14 BP story also said Hatley wanted to separate the continuing disputes over the policy changes that initially prompted Burleson's critical blogging from the question of the appropriateness of Burleson's actions.
But at least one other SBC blogger covering the controversy said that was not possible.
“Our attention will not be divided,” wrote Marty Duren, operator of the SBC Outpost blog (sbcoutpost.blogspot.com). “[A]t issue is the narrowing of the parameters of cooperation, which is glaringly shown in these two policies. At issue is the silencing of principled dissent through tactics of intimidation as in the Burleson case.”
He continued: “Only a great fool would believe that this issue with Wade Burleson is a 'tempest in a teapot that will soon pass,' and only a blind man would think that taking this issue off the front burner is going to distract the exponential groundswell of faithful, conservative, cooperating, Southern Baptists who have seen enough lives ruined and time wasted by equating fleshly ambitions with scriptural fidelity.”
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