By Ken Camp and Greg Warner
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship July 1 affirmed a long-awaited proposal for how the moderate group relates to its “partner” institutions and organizations-one of several key actions taken during the Fellowship's annual general assembly in Grapevine, Texas.
Nineteen missionaries were appointed and CBF officers were elected. A total budget of $21.6 million was adopted for the next 12 months. A new offering for religious liberty and human rights brought in about $45,000. Participants received training and inspiration in 91 workshops. And CBF coordinator Daniel Vestal challenged the Fellowship to respond to global poverty and suffering.
The assembly-which drew 2,823 registered participants and about 400 others-overwhelmingly affirmed the report from a committee studying the CBF's “partner” relationships, despite concern the plan favors the strongest partners and harms the most vulnerable. “We've adopted what seems to be a survival-of-the-fittest mentality,” said David Hinson, pastor of First Baptist Church in Frankfort, Ky., in an interview after the vote July 1.
Rather than owning its own agencies and institutions, the CBF channels local church and individual contributions to support the ministry of more than 100 organizations, including 14 theological schools.
Charles Cantrell of Mountain View, Mo., chair of the study committee, said the approved guidelines are “only the beginning of a process” that will include changes and flexibility, as well as input from partners and others.
The new plan caps funding for partners at 25 percent of an organization's previous year's receipts, and it establishes a three-tiered approach to relationships with theological schools-identity partners, leadership partners and global partners.
Current CBF partners-excluding educational institutions-include Associated Baptist Press, the Baptist Center for Ethics, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Baptists Today news journal and the Baptist World Alliance. Of those partners, Cantrell said, Associated Baptist Press and the Baptist Center for Ethics will lose money to the funding cap, which will be phased in over three years.
Based on 2003 receipts of $306,888-the last year for which definitive figures are available-the 25 percent cap would mean the Baptist Center for Ethics would lose $4,830 if applied to the current CBF allocation. Based on 2004 receipts of $455,528, Associated Baptist Press would lose $18,237 if applied to the current CBF allocation.
One day earlier, the CBF Coordinating Council approved amendments to the partner proposal that raised the funding cap from 20 percent to 25 percent and increased the maximum number of “identity” theological schools from five to six. Another amendment affirmed the Fellowship's commitment to a free press, noting the CBF “in no way expects” organizations it supports to violate journalistic standards in reporting on the Fellowship.
Theological schools in all three categories will be eligible for scholarships, collaborative funding and non-monetary resources. But only identity partners will be eligible for continuing institutional funding. No more than six of the 14 theological-education partner schools can be designated as identity partners, but the report does not specify them.
“Criteria for defining of these institutions will include factors such as enrollment, the number of graduates in congregational ministry, level of support for the CBF, geographic location, willingness to self-identify as a CBF-affiliated school and historical connection to the CBF,” the report stated.
Critics claimed that by setting up loyalty to the CBF as a criteria for institutional funding, the Fellowship was establishing the same kind of conformity moderates had criticized in the Southern Baptist Convention.
“We're on the verge of going the wrong way in theological education,” said Charles Yarbrough of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, who asserted divinity schools at non-Baptist universities will be disproportionately affected. “Only those who do what we want done and say what we want said get funding.”
In a breakout session devoted to discussing the partner proposal, Hinson commented a day earlier: “I believe there are 12 stipulations for identity partners to fulfill. We're asking them to do everything except sing a CBF song at graduation.”
The CBF has partnerships with four free-standing seminaries-Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Central Baptist Theological Seminary, in Kansas City, Kan., and International Baptist Seminary, in Prague, the Czech Republic-and six schools of theology or divinity schools associated with Baptist universities or schools with Baptist roots-Campbell University Divinity School, Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University, McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, Wake Forest Divinity School and White School of Divinity at Gardner-Webb University.
The Fellowship also partners with one theological university-Baptist University of the Americas in San Antonio-and with Baptist studies programs at three non-Baptist schools
-Texas Christian University's Brite Divinity School, Emory University's Candler School of Theology, and Duke Divinity School.
Several of the schools are expected to lose some CBF funding once the three-tier system is in place.
At the breakout session about the partner proposal, former Virginia Baptist pastor Mark Olson, now of Fayetteville, N.C., pointed out the much-larger Southern Baptist Convention financially supports only six seminaries, while the CBF has 14 partner schools. The Fellowship, with its limited financial resources, runs the risk of “slicing the pie thinner and thinner” and losing the ability to make a substantive difference to any of its partners, he said.
The moderate Baptist group also approved revisions to its constitution and bylaws, but only after some unexpected debate. Among a host of other changes, the revision amended the purpose statement from, in part, “to bring together Baptists who desire to call out God's gifts in each person in order that the gospel of Jesus Christ will be spread throughout the world in glad obedience to the Great Commission” to, in part, “to serve Christians and churches as they discover and fulfill their God-given mission.”
The concern of some was that since the revision does not include the name “Jesus Christ,” critics of the CBF might miscontrue the intent of the amended wording to say that the CBF was moving away from evangelism and the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ as the only means of salvation.
Bob DeFoor of Harrodsburg, Ky., alluded to the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Faith and Message statement, which was criticized by moderate Baptists in 2000 for deleting a reference to Jesus Christ as the criterion for biblical interpretation. DeFoor said the CBF was in danger of a similar omission. “I don't think we should ever leave out Jesus Christ.”
Dick Allison of Hattiesburg, Miss., chairman of the CBF legal committee, said the intent was to bring the language in the Fellowship's governing documents in line with its publicized mission statement.
Two motions-to refer the entire document or just the purpose statement back to committe-failed before the revisions were adopted.
The debate brought an immediate reaction from Southern Baptist leaders. “My central concern is what this means about the true nature of the CBF and its commitment to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., told Baptist Press. Added Russell Moore, theology dean at Southern and a frequent CBF critic, “This represents the eclipse of Christ in the moderate Baptist movement.”
But CBF moderator Bob Setzer of Macon, Ga., told ABP: “Jesus is present in all we think, do and say in CBF, and anybody who reads that mission statement otherwise is not being fair to [Jesus] or us. It's hard to believe that a movement whose mission statement is ‘being the presence of Christ' isn't committed to Jesus. We are.”
Several CBF members later said the discussion and action left the wrong impression about CBF. “No one who voted to approve the document was voting to not have a commitment to Jesus Christ and evangelism,” said Carolyn Anderson, coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Florida. “We voted to approve the documents knowing that we do have a commitment to Jesus Christ and evangelism already stated in our values document.”
In other business, assembly participants approved a $16.47 million operating budget for 2005-06, a slight increase, and total expenditures of $21,580,058, which includes more than $5.1 million in designated gifts, mostly for missions. During the closing session, 19 new CBF missionaries were commissioned for service, including five career field personnel.
Participants elected Joy Yee, pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church in San Francisco, as moderator and Emmanuel McCall, retired pastor of Christian Fellowship Baptist Church in Atlanta, as moderator-elect. Yee is Asian-American and McCall is African-American.
The assembly donated $45,000 to a new annual offering for religious liberty and human rights, named for Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, who are CBF supporters.
In the closing sermon, Vestal told CBF members global poverty is “the moral issue of our day,” and how Christians respond is “the acid test of our faith.”
Vestal noted 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day and 8 million people die each year “because they are too poor to stay alive.”
“Our government must make changes in policy that give a greater priority to poor people,” he said. “Our churches must make changes in practice and programs so that more of our money and time is going to the poor and less to ourselves. Our families must make some changes in spending habits, in what we do with leisure and holidays and possessions. And, most important of all, each of us as individuals must make changes in our lifestyle, in our giving and in our attitudes.”
Associated Baptist Press
Ken Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard. Greg Warner is executive editor of ABP.