Ministers and laity in the southwestern part of Virginia will benefit from a new theological training center approved last week by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board, as part of an agreement with Averett University.
By Robert Dilday
A proposal by Averett University to provide practical church training and theological education to ministers and laity in Southwest Virginia won the support of the Virginia Baptist Mission Board during its Nov. 30-Dec. 1 meeting.
The approval ensures that Virginia Baptists will fund Averett in their 2005 budget and that funds earmarked for the school last year but later escrowed will be released.
The Mission Board's approval of Averett's proposal presumably ends a 15-month long disagreement between the school and the Baptist General Association of Virginia over homosexuality and biblical authority and opens the way for the BGAV to maintain its 145-year-old ties to the Danville school.
The new educational entity, tentatively called the Southwest Virginia Leader Education Initiative, will offer practical and theological training for bivocational and full-time ministers and laypeople in the sweeping mountainous region west of Roanoke. Classes could start as early as this spring.
In presenting the proposal, Gary Chapman, a Roanoke minister retained by Averett to develop the initiative, told the board, “This will offer ministers in Southwest Virginia what they desperately want and what they desperately need.”
Chapman, formerly minister to adults at First Baptist Church in Roanoke for more than 12 years, is a teacher in church history, hermeneutics and Bible survey at Faith Christian School in Roanoke. He will serve as the new education initiative's first director.
The initiative will be housed in a still-to-be-determined site in Roanoke, though it will provide some courses in cities and towns across Southwest Virginia and eventually develop online distance learning opportunities.
According to a fact sheet distributed by Chapman, courses will include Bible surveys and Bible book studies; doctrinal studies; theological classes, such as church history, apologetics and development of a biblical worldview; leadership training; the “how-to's” of ministry, such as administering ordinances, performing weddings and funerals, church administration and preaching; personal spiritual growth and renewal; and counseling.
Faculty will be drawn primarily from leaders and laypersons in Baptist church life, and not from Averett's religion department, whose chairman was at the heart of the dispute with the BGAV. John C. H. Laughlin drew the ire of some Virginia Baptists last spring when he wrote an article in the Danville newspaper endorsing the ordination of an openly gay Episcopal bishop. At about the same time, John Shelby Spong, a controversial retired Episcopal bishop, delivered two lectures on campus, where he reportedly said that the God revealed in a literal reading of the Bible is “immoral” and “unbelievable.”
In response, the BGAV escrowed the more than $350,000 it would have allocated to the school in 2004 until relations between it and Averett had been clarified. It later released $180,000 of that amount to fulfill its scholarship obligations at Averett, leaving $170,000 in the escrow account.
Last month, messengers at the annual BGAV meeting allocated an additional $150,000 to Averett for 2005 but escrowed that amount as well. They authorized the Mission Board to release all escrowed monies only when it believed a satisfactory relationship with the school had been arranged. The approval of the educational initiative satisfies that requirement.
Averett will provide operational oversight of the new education initiative, whose director will report directly to Averett's president.
But the initiative's policies and procedures will be developed by a local steering committee, a loosely-formed group that includes Bob Hetherington, director of missions for the Roanoke Valley Baptist Association, and eight Roanoke-area pastors: Bill Booth of Vinton Baptist Church, Donna Hopkins Britt of Calvary Baptist Church, Brian Clingenpeel of Villa Heights Baptist Church, Darryl Crim of North Roanoke Baptist Church, Ken Gray of Big Spring Baptist Church, Nelson Harris of Virginia Heights Baptist Church, Everett Kier of Salem Baptist Church and Bob Moore of Bonsack Baptist Church.
Moore, who has served as informal chair of the steering committee, told the Mission Board that the group of pastors already had been exploring the possibility of a “learning center” in the Roanoke area.
“This plan is a striking example of what all our ministry partners need to support Kingdom Advance [Virginia Baptists' mission effort],” said Moore.
He said that other ministers and laypersons would be invited to join. At least some of those are likely to be from the region further west of Roanoke, following an extended discussion by Mission Board members about the location of the “real” Southwest Virginia.
“There's still another five hours of driving between Roanoke and the end of Southwest Virginia,” said Wayne Harrison, a Hampton pastor who formerly served in Norton.
Both Chapman and Moore acknowledged that the steering committee membership will need to be broadened as the educational initiative develops.
Chapman estimated that costs for the initiative in 2005 will be about $187,500, very close to the $170,000 of Averett's 2004 escrowed funds, which will be released immediately. The $150,000 allocated to Averett in 2005 will be distributed monthly on a pro rata basis as church contributions to the budget are received by the Mission Board's treasurer.
None of the funds allocated to Averett are specifically designated toward the educational initiative. Darrell Foster, chair of the BGAV's budget committee, said Virginia Baptists have never specified in a budget how its allocations must be used. “If we designated the money [for a specific use], we would set a new precedent,” he said.
However, he said that in dialog with each ministry, the BGAV's concerns and interests are clearly stated and that there is a high degree of accountability, which ensures that the money goes where the BGAV intends it to go. There is no question the BGAV's allocation to Averett will be used only for the new educational initiative, he said.
In other action at the Mission Board meeting, members:
• Approved allocations for a variety of mission projects including $9,000 to help the Lebanese Bible Society purchase picture Bibles for children in Sudan and Iraq; $6,000 to fund two Impact Virginia! projects in the Bahamas; $20,000 for ministry to the Romany people in Romania and Uzbekistan; $10,000 to reconstruct a Baptist church in Belgium; $2,500 for repairs for a Baptist church in Moldova; and $5,000 to purchase a station wagon for the prison ministry of the Lebanese Baptist Union.
• Approved $106,688 in start-up grants to three churches and $97,000 in ministerial staff salary assistance to 14 churches.
• Learned that new BGAV president Richard Smith has named Darrell Foster to a second term as chair of the BGAV's budget committee. Foster is a Virginia Beach attorney and member of King's Grant Baptist Church in Virginia Beach.
Robert Dilday is interim editor of the Religious Herald.