LOUISVILLE (ABP) — A third Southern Baptist seminary president has endorsed Arkansas pastor Ronnie Floyd for president of the denomination. Meanwhile, Floyd offered an explanation for his church's relatively low support of the Cooperative Program, which funds Southern Baptists' seminaries and other agencies.
“Congratulations upon the news of your nomination to serve as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. I am greatly encouraged by this news, and I want you to know of my eager support for you as the elected leader of our convention,” Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., wrote in a letter that Floyd posted on his weblog, www.betweensundays.com, on May 17. Floyd said he made the letter public with Mohler's enthusiastic consent.
“You have never said no to Southern Baptists when duty has called, and I deeply appreciate your willingness to serve as president of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Mohler added in the 300-word letter.
“I am humbled that a man like Dr. Al Mohler would ever be enthusiastic about the possibility of me serving as president of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Floyd, pastor of the 16,000-member First Baptist Church of Springdale, Ark., wrote.
Mohler joins two other SBC seminary presidents — Paige Patterson of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Danny Akin of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary — in endorsing Floyd, despite a warning from the SBC's chief executive that such endorsements are inappropriate.
The SBC's six seminaries offer fertile ground for presidential candidates — a ready resource of conservative voters. Southeastern, where Akin is president, is only 75 miles from the convention site.
For inerrantists, the presidency has been the key to gaining and retaining control of the 16 million-member denomination and its agencies. The election will be held June 13 in Greensboro, N.C.
Floyd became a candidate after the previously announced candidate, Georgia pastor Johnny Hunt, withdrew from consideration April 30. Both had the support of SBC's inerrantist leaders but were criticized by some rank-and-file Southern Baptists as weak supporters of the convention's Cooperative Program unified budget, which supports the SBC's agencies.
According to figures from the SBC and the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, Floyd's church contributed only $32,000 to the Cooperative Program in 2005. That's about one fourth of 1 percent of the megachurch's nearly $12 million in undesignated receipts that year. A blue-ribbon panel trying to increase Cooperative Program giving recently recommended that SBC officers should come from churches that give 10 percent or more to the CP.
Floyd responded to those critics in an interview with the conservative Southern Baptist Texan newspaper.
“It's real difficult to spend percentages,” Floyd told the newspaper. “You spend dollars and cents. I don't think we need to be judging a church in relationship to what it gives percentile-wise. It violates the whole essence of the Cooperative Program, which is voluntary cooperation.”
Floyd and his supporters point to the $489,862 the Springdale church gave to all “Southern Baptist causes” in 2005. According to the church's administrator, Ben Mayes, that figure includes $189,000 given directly to the SBC's national budget, bypassing the Arkansas convention.
Mayes said the church gave a total of “$221,000 to the Cooperative Program” in 2005. That includes the $32,000 through the Arkansas convention and the $189,000 directly to the national budget, although traditionally only the amount channeled through the states is considered CP funding.
A church spokesman declined to tell Associated Baptist Press why Springdale bypassed the state convention.
The Texan article also noted the church in 2005 gave $158,028 to the SBC's international missions offering and $9,582 to the SBC's North American missions offering, $35,000 to the SBC's tsunami-relief efforts, and $25,000 directly to the SBC seminaries. It's not known which seminaries received those funds.
Tony Cartledge, editor of North Carolina Baptists' Biblical Recorder newspaper, suggested that the seminary presidents who have endorsed Floyd could conceivably have monetary motives.
“The traditional method of contributing to the Cooperative Program calls for churches to send funds to their state conventions, which retain a portion for state ministries and forward a portion to [SBC headquarters in] Nashville for use by the SBC's mission boards, seminaries, and agencies,” Cartledge wrote, in a May 17 entry on his blog.
Under the 81-year-old Cooperative Program plan, most state conventions retain more than half of the undesignated funds churches contribute, sending the remainder on to the SBC. But if the state convention is bypassed, the SBC agencies get a much larger slice of that church's pie. In the case of Floyd's church, the SBC agencies received more than double what they would have gotten had the congregation contributed all of its $221,000 through the traditional state-convention channel.
“If a significant number of churches took this option of bypassing the state conventions, it could be quite profitable for the seminaries and other SBC beneficiaries, while leaving the state conventions in a pinch,” Cartledge wrote.
“I can't judge the motives of those who don't find Floyd's 0.27 percent record of Cooperative Program giving to be troublesome,” he continued. “But the fact that their institutions benefit directly from any church's side-stepping of the traditional Cooperative Program should not be overlooked.”
The controversy over agency leaders endorsing candidates is not new. When the SBC's moderates controlled the denominational agencies in the 1980s, inerrantists complained they used agency funds — from the Cooperative Program — to campaign against inerrantist candidates.
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