NASHVILLE (ABP) — The Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee voted overwhelmingly Feb. 17 to withdraw SBC membership and funding from the Baptist World Alliance, the 99-year-old fellowship of 211 Baptist bodies worldwide.
Despite pleas from Baptist leaders worldwide and some Southern Baptists not to leave BWA, the Executive Committee voted 62-10 to approve the recommendation from an SBC study committee.
The proposal will now go to messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention in June for final approval. The action would take effect Oct. 1, deleting the final $300,000 of annual SBC support for the Baptist World Alliance, which has an annual budget of $1.7 million.
The Southern Baptist Convention, with 16 million members, is the largest member body and biggest contributor to the Baptist World Alliance, which represents 43 million Baptists. But the conservative leaders of the SBC say the organization has become too liberal, a charge Baptist leaders worldwide deny.
The hour-long debate was limited to Executive Committee members only. Denton Lotz, BWA general secretary, was present but not permitted to speak to the recommendation.
“We are, of course, very sad,” Lotz told Associated Baptist Press after the vote. “Any time there is a breach in fellowship, it is sad.” Opposition from within the Executive Committee focused on preserving Baptist unity worldwide. But supporters said unity must take a back seat to a “biblical stand” on theological issues.
“We must as a convention allow the world to see us without having to look through a BWA lens, a lens which for us has become too cloudy,” the study committee said in its final report to the Executive Committee. The Baptist World Alliance “no longer efficiently communicates to the unsaved a crystal-clear gospel message that our Lord Jesus Christ is solely sufficient for salvation.”
The plan approved by the Executive Committee calls for creating a new worldwide network of “conservative evangelical Christians” which likely would be run by the Executive Committee. Some of the more conservative Baptist bodies around the world have already expressed interest in the new SBC-led organization, the Executive Committee was told, raising the possibility of two competing worldwide organizations of Baptists.
The initial study committee report in December complained the BWA sanctions theological positions contrary to Southern Baptists' conservative views and has ignored the SBC's complaints.
“Continuing to allow presentations that call into question the truthfulness of Holy Scripture, refusing to support openly the idea that all who are saved must come to the salvation through conscious faith in Jesus Christ, and promoting women as preachers and pastors are among the issues that make it impossible to endorse the BWA as a genuinely representative organization of world Baptists,” said the study committee.
The BWA, as well as its member groups, has consistently denied those charges.
“The BWA rejects categorically this false accusation of liberalism,” Lotz said in December. “Of course, there is a spectrum of theological thought in all of our conventions, just as in local churches, but we belong to one another because we belong to Christ.”
Members of the Executive Committee did not hear from Florida retired pastor and physician Bob Casey, who staged a weeklong fast and daily prayer-walk around the SBC headquarters building in a Joshua-like attempt to change the committee's mind.
Gary Smith, Executive Committee chair, apologized to Casey for not allowing him to deliver a resolution from his church — Parkview Baptist Church in Gainesville, Fla. — one of many Southern Baptist congregations that asked their denominational leaders to reconsider the BWA decision.
While the SBC study committee based its recommendation on allegations of liberalism within BWA, other Southern Baptist leaders said the departure is based in part on the BWA's decision last year to admit the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship into membership. Southern Baptist leaders strongly oppose the Fellowship, which was formed by Southern Baptists dissatisfied with the denomination's fundamentalist direction.
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