INDIANAPOLIS (ABP) — The Southern Baptist Convention, struggling with a membership decline nationwide, passed a resolution June 11 that could significantly shrink church membership rolls even further.
Messengers to the SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis also turned back efforts to encourage Christians to remove their children from public schools and asked Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.
A resolution calling on churches to “lovingly correct wayward members” — intended to ensure only true and obedient Christians make it onto church rolls — was toughened even more with two amendments that encourage tighter definitions of a “member.”
The resolution, which reflects the growing influencing of Calvinism in the SBC, comes on the heels of denominational statistics that showed the 16 million-member convention shrinking.
Photo by Jim Yates/BP
Messengers raise their ballots to vote on one of several issues.
Membership fell in 2007 for the second time in a decade. Even more discouraging, officials said, baptisms in SBC churches dropped for the seventh time in eight years — down 5.5 percent in 2007.
The resolutions — a total of nine were adopted — are simply statements that reflect the sentiment of messengers gathered at a particular annual meeting and have no weight of law for Southern Baptists. However, as resolution committee chair Darrell Orman, pastor of First Baptist Church, Stuart, Fla., said when introducing the resolutions, these statements “speak to the nation.”
Other resolutions included statements:
• Celebrating growing ethnic diversity within the SBC.
• Encouraging Christians to participate in the secular political process but warning against “potential problems of politicizing the church and the pulpit.”
• Affirming use of the term “Christmas” in public life.
• Offering “wholehearted support” for a petition in California requiring the state to place a referendum on the ballot in November defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.
• Recognizing the centennial anniversary of the boys mission education group Royal Ambassadors.
The resolution on “regenerate” church membership drew two amendments that encouraged churches to tighten membership definitions. The original resolution called for “churches to maintain a regenerate membership by acknowledging the necessity of spiritual regeneration of Christ's lordship for all members” and urged churches to “maintain accurate membership rolls for the purpose of fostering ministry and accountability.”
It also urged churches to “restore wayward members,” reviving the principle of church discipline.
After much discussion, messengers adopted two amendments. The first, offered by Malcolm Yarnell, a professor at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, added to the definition of a New Testament church.
The original included the definition “composed only of those who have been born again by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Word, becoming disciples of Jesus Christ, the local church's only Lord, by grace through faith.” The amendment added as further definition: “which church practices believers-only baptism by immersion, (Matt. 28:16-20,) the Lord's Supper (Matt. 26:26-30) and church discipline (Matt. 18:15-20).
Messengers adopted an amendment by Tom Ascol, prominent in the Calvinist-inspired Founder's Movement in the SBC, urging “the churches of the SBC to repent of any failure among us to live up to our professed commitment to regenerate church membership and any failure to obey Jesus Christ in lovingly correcting wayward church members.”
Calvinist doctrine has been on the ascent in the SBC in recent years.
The amendment encouraged “denominational servants to support and encourage any church's efforts to recover and implement this discipline of our Lord Jesus Christ … even if such efforts result in a reduction in the number of members that are recorded in those churches.”
Southern Baptist leaders have been worrying publicly about the decline in SBC membership and baptisms, which they say reflects the fact three-fourths of SBC churches are stagnant or dying. Outgoing SBC president Frank Page predicted that, without intervention, half of the SBC's 44,000 churches won't exist by 2030.
Some messengers tried to amend the resolution against same-sex marriage to include an admonition to withdraw children from public schools — a frequent but unsuccessful initiative at recent SBC meetings.
Ron Wilson from Thousand Oaks, Calif., said if the convention was going to pass a resolution opposing same-sex marriage, they ought to encourage families to remove their children from public schools, “which are the main training grounds for the teaching of same-sex marriage.”
The committee, however, did not “want to dilute the emphasis of this resolution by bringing in the corollary issue of the education system,” Orman explained.
The resolution on ethnic diversity encouraged nominating committees to “identify ethnic leadership” for SBC service and encouraged them to “strive toward a balanced representation of our ethnic diversity.”
Ethnic congregations are the only growing segment of the Southern Baptist Convention. Without that growth, the decline in SBC membership would have surfaced much earlier.
Reported by Norman Jameson. Greg Warner contributed to this article.