ARLINGTON, Texas — Reforming bloggers who have challenged the Southern Baptist Convention establishment for the past two years are consolidating their efforts to create a new Internet presence they say will be the “premier site for Southern Baptist news and commentary.”
Benjamin Cole, Marty Duren and other prominent bloggers — whose call to open the closely-held power structure of the SBC prompted angry reactions from the denomination's leaders — announced last month they would reduce the focus on SBC issues on their individual blogs.
But at a meeting during the annual SBC meeting in San Antonio in June, the bloggers agreed to collaborate, continuing their calls for reform on a single blog — www.sbcoutpost.com, a groundbreaking weblog that had been administered only by Duren, a Buford, Ga., pastor. Duren could not be reached for comment, but a June 27 news release said the site will “provide a forum for ministry ideas, missionary support, church revitalization and denominational reform.”
“I think most bloggers are stepping back to let the convention rest,” both for personal and strategic reasons, said Cole, a pastor in Arlington, Texas. “You can't maintain a full offense for an undetermined period of time.”
At the same time, the conversation about SBC issues continues forward, he said. And he hopes to increase participation in the blogs.
“The new SBCoutpost is an effort to get the conversation in one place,” he said, adding that in the two weeks following the press release announcing the new strategy, some 50,000 people visited the site.
In addition to Cole and Duren, other SBCoutpost contributors are Alan Cross, a Montgomery, Ala., pastor; Art Rogers, a Tulsa, Okla., pastor; Darren Casper, director of missions for the St. Louis (Mo.) Metro Baptist Association; John Stickley, a layman from St. Joseph, Mo; Micah Fries, a St. Joseph, Mo., pastor; Paul Littleton, a Sapulpa, Okla., pastor; Sam Storms, an evangelist in Kansas City, Mo.; Tim Sweatman, a Bowling Green, Ky., minister; and Todd Littleton, a Tuttle, Okla., pastor.
Cross, who operates the blog www.downshoredrift.com, said that even before the bloggers' announcement, he had made a vow to discontinue SBC-related discussions on his personal blog after this year's annual meeting. Less than a third of his blog involved convention matters anyway, he said, and he found himself “almost apologizing every time I wrote about the SBC.”
“I had said back in February that I was going to quit,” he said. “It wasn't because of any protest. I want to write about better things than this. I'm not a denominational groupie, I guess.”
One prominent blogger will not be closely associated with the new collaboration — Wade Burleson, the Oklahoma pastor whose writings about the SBC International Mission Board trustees brought blogging to the attention of many Southern Baptists.
“I may every now and then contribute to the Outpost, but I like the immediacy of having your own blog,” Burleson said.
The exact nature of SBCoutpost — whether blog or news service or some combination of both — is still undetermined. “I think it has not yet been revealed what it shall be,” Cole said.
The bloggers' press release noted that “the day has passed for monopolies in news and information.” But at least initially, the site is less likely to generate and distribute news stories than to offer a broader forum to discuss them, although Cole noted that blogs are favorably positioned to break news. It was Duren, he said, who first reported a move by Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, to transfer $90 million of the school's invested funds from a Baptist foundation to “in-house” financial advisors hired by the Fort Worth, Texas, school.
When Duren reported that Patterson, a vocal critic of alcohol consumption, was about to invest the money in a corporation with major alcohol and tobacco holdings, seminary trustees delayed the investment. “That money is still with the Baptist foundation,” said Cole.
Even so, Cole said SBCoutpost won't replace existing news services like the independent Associated Baptist Press, based in Jacksonville, Fla.; the SBC-owned Baptist Press in Nashville, Tenn.; or EthicsDaily.com, operated by the Nashville-based Baptist Center for Ethics.
“We're not aspiring to supplant those reliable sources,” he said. But, he maintained, “neither ABP nor BP are completely balanced [in their news coverage]. They balance each other and somewhere in the middle between them is balance.”
One blog feature Cole said he expects SBCoutpost to continue is the distribution of “primary sources.”
“Largely, blogging has been providing documentation that has never been seen before,” Cole said. “This is different in that a whole document or a whole letter has been provided, rather than an edited version in a news story.”
Organizers also hope to widen the range of contributors to SBCoutpost. Cole has invited denominational executives, chairs of boards of trustees, megachurch pastors, laywomen and editorial writers to join the conversation. “Some have said they might do it, and others have been totally opposed,” he said.
There's no guarantee all the contributors will agree with each other, either. Cross said their core beliefs unite them, but they certainly don't walk “lockstep” together on every opinion piece.
“Each of us is our own person,” he said. “We disagree often. And we'll agree to disagree publicly.”
And Cole acknowledged the complaint, “which to some extent is warranted,” that blogs practice “sloppy journalism.”
“It can become an electronic rumor mill,” he said. “But more often than not, there's fire where there's smoke. Blogging creates a lot of smoke, but at the heart of it, there's fire.”
Still, bridging the “diverse constituencies” in Southern Baptist life remains a goal of SBCoutpost, as well as providing an “outlet” for staying active in convention life.
Ultimately, it should “bring together denominational executives with rural pastors and church planters, missional pastors with traditional pastors, seminary theologians with Sunday school teachers, and field missionaries with their prayer partners,” the press release said.
Cross and Cole, like the other bloggers, plan to continue their own blogs, though Cole said he expects that visits to his (baptistblog.wordpress.com) and the other sites will diminish. “We all took the perspective of John the Baptist,” he said. “Sbcoutpost must increase and we must decrease.”
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— Hannah Elliott contributed to this article.