Editor's note: This story is updated from its April 17 release.
ARLINGTON, Texas (ABP) — In a sign of the controversy threatening to engulf the Southern Baptist Convention's upcoming annual meeting, a Texas pastor has formally submitted a resolution that accuses SBC leaders of trying to “silence principled dissent.”
Benjamin Cole, a leading critic of recent actions by the SBC's International Mission Board, has sent his resolution, titled “On Baptist dissent,” to the SBC Resolutions Committee, according to a popular weblog run by an IMB trustee.
Wade Burleson's blog (www.wadeburleson.com) reported the action and the proposal's final text April 18. It says Southern Baptists recognize that “majorities are not always right, and that it is necessary for the voice of dissent … to be welcomed and heard if the dangers of authoritarian confessionalism or tyrannical governance are to be withstood both in our denomination and the world.”
It goes on to state, “we regard all attempts to silence principled dissent by fellow Baptists within our denomination, or of any religious minority, as a compromise of our cherished Baptist witness and an egregious disservice to the Kingdom of God,” and that Southern Baptists “affirm dissenters both within our denomination and without who raise objection to articles of our confession, policies of our institutions, and governance of our agencies when that dissent has been voiced in a manner consistent with the teaching of Jesus Christ.”
Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, earlier wrote an open letter suggesting Southern Baptists should vote during their meeting June 13-14 in Greensboro, N.C., to dismiss all the trustees of the IMB. Cole's ire was raised by the board's January decision to recommend that the convention dismiss Burleson, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla., from his trustee post.
At the time, IMB trustee leaders had accused Burleson of “gossip and slander” for blogging about his opposition to restrictive new policies approved for IMB missionaries. Trustees later voted to rescind their request to remove Burleson, but they also approved a new policy that bars trustees from criticizing actions of the board.
That policy has proven as controversial as the original move to dismiss Burleson, particularly among younger pastors and laypeople who populate the SBC-related “blogosphere.”
Cole, reached by telephone at his home April 17, told an Associated Baptist Press reporter he is the author of the resolution, an earlier version of which Burleson had posted on his website April 14. He said it wasn't necessarily aimed solely at the IMB but at SBC agencies and leaders in general.
“I really do think the cherished principle of dissent has been subverted in certain quarters of our denomination,” he said.
Cole also said he had submitted it to several other SBC pastors and leaders and that other SBC members had run proposals for similar resolutions and motions by him. Discussion of such moves has dominated SBC blogs for weeks.
Among them may be a motion to force the IMB to re-think its controversial policy changes. Normally, motions messengers make from the floor of SBC meetings are referred to the agency they concern, and the agency's trustees report back at the following year's annual meeting. A two-thirds majority of the convention, however, can vote to require the agency to report back on the motion before the meeting is over.
In an April 17 post on his blog, “12 Witnesses,” (twelvewitnesses.blogspot.com), Kentucky minister Art Rogers suggested that is exactly what might happen during the Greensboro meeting.
“So, if a motion concerning policies at the IMB were ‘in order' and therefore referred to the IMB's [board of trustees], the convention could then direct, by 2/3 vote, that the [trustees] answer back to the convention before we dismissed,” he said. “Now, this does not give the convention the right to tell the IMB what to do concerning any policy, but it does give the convention the opportunity to express its mind clearly to the IMB's governing body.”
Under SBC governing documents, only trustees of an agency — not the convention as a whole — can set policy for the agency.
The moves could be part of the stormiest SBC annual meeting since the decades-long battle between moderates and fundamentalists for control of the denomination during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The moderates, who lost, largely stopped attending SBC meetings and went on to form their own missionary-sending agencies and other institutions.
Little controversy has erupted at SBC meetings since then. But that may change this summer. In another sign of a brewing controversy, supporters of the SBC's current leadership say the newfound dissent is actually an attack on Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, who was one of the two architects of the rise of fundamentalists in the SBC.
Marty Duren, a Georgia pastor who owns the blog sbcoutpost.com, quoted letters April 14 from two conservative Texas leaders defending Patterson and targeting the IMB critics.
According to several IMB observers, Patterson is believed to be behind the controversial new IMB policies. Duren wrote that the letters defending Patterson are examples of how Patterson's political machinery is retooling itself for a new fight — this time with fellow conservatives upset over the IMB's moves.
“Yes, the signs are all in place and apparently the stars are aligned as the machine is belching forth black smoke while the carbon deposits are burned off the pistons and the framework is beginning to rock [and] sway,” Duren wrote.
“Do not be deceived, the SBC is resting between two visions: the past and the future, legalism and freedom, monument and movement, staidness and creativity, bureauracracy and restructure, law and Spirit, oligarchy and grass roots,” Duren continued. “… Apathy, this year, is capitulation to the status quo.”
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