COLUMBIA, S.C. (ABP) — In quiet but efficient fashion, messengers to the 184th annual session of the South Carolina Baptist Convention elected a veteran pastor from Greer as president, adopted a 2005 budget that does not increase from this year, and launched the convention's most ambitious international missions partnership ever.
The Nov. 16-17 meeting in the state's capital of Columbia drew 1,117 messengers for the day-and-a-half gathering.
Jerry White, pastor of Riverside Baptist Church in Greer, was elected president by acclamation, as was the case with all the new officers. White has been a pastor for 33 years, 25 of them in South Carolina.
Other officers elected were first vice president James Merritt, a member of Rock Springs Baptist Church, Easley, who had been second vice president, and second vice president Richard Porter, pastor of Branchville Baptist Church in Orangeburg-Calhoun Baptist Association.
Messengers approved a budget of $32 million. Sixty percent of the budget is earmarked for ministry within South Carolina, with 40 percent sent to the Southern Baptist Convention.
South Carolina Baptists have carried out missions partnerships in Rio de Janeiro, Kenya, Romania and Taiwan but had not taken on an entire region of the world until now. Beginning in 2005, the convention's three-year assignment will be South Asia, which includes Bhutan, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Pakistan.
Sixteen teams of volunteers from South Carolina are lined up to go during the first year of the partnership to a region where, according to volunteer missions coordinator Debbie McDowell, there is “the greatest concentration of lostness in the world.”
Carlisle Driggers, the convention's executive director-treasurer, told of William Carey's pioneering missionary work in India in the late 1700s and how First Baptist Church in Charleston made what is believed to be the first contribution of money by an American congregation to overseas missions. The new partnership brings South Carolina's involvement in South Asia “full circle,” he said.
Resolutions approved by messengers included support for South Carolina Baptist involvement in education, for prayer at public gatherings, and for citizens having more input in the selection of judges. Other resolutions voiced opposition to gambling and the trafficking and exploitation of human beings smuggled into the country.
Another resolution asked that Woman's Missionary Union, at the state and national levels, “consider their relationship with the Baptist World Alliance and its Women's Department,” while affirming South Carolina's WMU for its “longstanding decision not to forward or channel any financial or other support” to the Women's Department of the BWA.
The Southern Baptist Convention recently withdrew its membership and funding from the Baptist World Alliance, charging the organization with being soft on liberalism. The BWA Women's Department has championed women's rights worldwide.