JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (ABP) — If a Missouri Baptist Convention committee has its way, messengers to the convention's annual meeting Oct. 31 will effectively eject 18 congregations — including the very church in which the convention got its start.
If messengers agree to the move, it would likely be the largest such exclusion of congregations from a United States Baptist body in recent history.
However, as far as many of the targeted congregations are concerned, the move will signify little more than the formal end to a long-running divorce proceeding.
“It's really hard for them to break up with us when we've already broken up with them,” said Brian Ford, pastor of Little Bonne Femme Baptist Church in Columbia. “We had basically cut ties, financially, a long time ago.”
Ford's congregation — the second-oldest Baptist church west of the Mississippi — was founded in 1819 and named for a nearby creek. It was in Little Bonne Femme's building in 1835 that Baptists from around Missouri constituted the forerunner organization to the Missouri convention.
The convention has been roiled for years by bitter dissent between moderates and fundamentalists, who solidified their control of the body's leadership in 2001. Since then, many moderate churches have either officially left or severely limited their support for the convention.
At last year's annual meeting, messengers voted to broaden a part of the Missouri convention's rules that were unique among state conventions that relate to the national Southern Baptist Convention.
The provision, the original version of which dated to 1919, requires Missouri Baptist churches to be uniquely aligned with the SBC in their denominational affiliation. Messengers expanded the provision to also ban alignment by churches with para-denominational groups, such as the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship or the Baptist General Convention of Missouri. Moderate leaders in the state formed the BGCM in response to conservatives' takeover of the older convention.
Part of the change involved establishing a permanent Missouri Baptist Convention Credentials Committee that would be able to investigate challenges to a church's standing year-round. Previously, the committee only existed during the annual meeting.
The committee notified the 18 churches by certified mail that it would recommend unseating of any messengers they might send to the convention. If the recommendation is approved, the messengers will be disqualified from participating in the meeting and any future MBC meetings, according to The Pathway, the convention's in-house newspaper.
Besides Little Bonne Femme, the churches recommended for expulsion are: Chandler Baptist Church in Liberty; Cornerstone Baptist Church in Columbia; Cornerstone Baptist Church in Lee's Summit; Grace Point Baptist Church in Kansas City; Olive Branch Baptist Church in Sedalia; Rock Falls Baptist in Orrick; Third Baptist Church in St. Louis; University Heights Baptist Church in Springfield; Winnwood Baptist Church in Kansas City; and the First Baptist churches of Cape Girardeau, Hamilton, Independence, Jefferson City, Lee's Summit, Savannah, Smithville and Sweet Springs.
Each church's messengers will be excluded until “their congregation takes the appropriate and necessary action to demonstrate a desire 'to cooperate with the Missouri Baptist Convention in her program of single alignment with the Southern Baptist Convention,'” the recommendation states.
At least one of the 18 — Third Baptist of St. Louis — plans to send a messenger to the Cape Girardeau meeting.
“We have tried to be aboveboard with our process,” Third Baptist pastor Warren Hoffman said Oct. 26. “We realize that we are in non-compliance.”
But, he added, the church historically has related to multiple Baptist groups. It contributes to the SBC, the American Baptist Churches and CBF.
Third Baptist members disagreed with the move in 1915 that abolished the Missouri Plan, a means by which churches could contribute through the Missouri Baptist Convention to both the American (Northern) and Southern Baptist conventions, and they disagreed in 1919 when messengers approved aligning solely with the SBC.
“We see ourselves as one of the agents to bridge the gap between groups,” Hoffman said.
He added that the Third Baptist contingent would not protest if messengers approve the committee's recommendation. “We are sad at the change, but we are excited about what God is doing in Missouri and in St. Louis,” he said.
Several of the other churches affected already had stopped any sort of cooperation with the Missouri convention.
“The truth of the matter is we haven't sent any messengers to the Missouri Baptist Convention since 2001, and we actually voted to stop supporting the MBC in 2002,” said Dick Lionberger, pastor of First Baptist of Savannah. His church is aligned with the BGCM.
Lionberger said that, after the convention passed its broadened interpretation of the single-alignment provision, he wrote the MBC executive director a letter informing him that First Baptist, Savannah, was no longer affiliated. “I wrote a letter to David Clippard that just said, 'We want you all to know, according to the action you've taken we no longer qualify, so you can just quit sending us mail,'” Lionberger said.
But even leaders at some of the affected churches that continued to provide financial support to the convention said the move wasn't unexpected — or entirely unwelcome.
“It's sort of like, it's time,” said Doyle Sager, pastor of First Baptist, Jefferson City. “We've been sort of divorcing for a long time, and in some ways it's good that it's taken so long, because it's given our congregation a long time to accept reality.”
Sager's church — located just two blocks from the convention headquarters building — was, for much of its history, the spiritual home to the convention's top staffers. He said at least one remaining high-level MBC employee who has belonged to First Baptist for decades has been instructed by superiors to move his membership to a different congregation.
Several years ago, First Baptist, Jefferson City, arranged its accounting procedures to allow members to continue giving through the MBC as well as CBF and other giving plans. Sager said that, in the first three quarters of 2006, members of his church designated about $2,000 in gifts to Missouri Baptist Convention missions work. He said it was only 3.2 percent of the congregation's total missions giving for that period.
The proposed recommendation asks that messengers from the targeted congregations not be seated. It is unclear whether the MBC will continue to include those churches in its membership or baptism statistics, or to accept gifts from those churches. Rick Seaton, chairman of the convention's credentials committee and pastor of First Baptist Church of Kahoka, declined comment on the situation Oct. 26. He cited a committee policy of commenting exclusively to one media outlet — the convention's in-house newspaper.
Ford, the Little Bonne Femme pastor, said the fact that his church was among those targeted for exclusion was symptomatic of a convention that had forgotten its roots.
“This is the historic church where the MBC was birthed out of. The convention was created by the churches for the churches, not the reverse,” he said.
But being officially booted from the convention that it helped found would affect his church's ministry little, Ford added.
“We were founded before the Missouri Baptist Convention or the Southern Baptist Convention were ever born,” he said. “We've done ministry in God's Kingdom since before then, and we will continue to be the presence of Christ…and partner with whatever Christian group we want to.”
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