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Ben Condray considers himself theologically conservative and a traditional Southern Baptist. Yet he takes issue with the national convention's requirement that its seminary professors and denominational leaders agree with the amended Baptist Faith and Message, approved earlier this year. In Texas, that makes him a moderate. "For the last 150 years, Baptists haven't believed in creeds," Condray says. "[They are] something I can't support."

The staff counselor at First Baptist Church of Midlothian, Texas, served as a messenger (delegate) from his church to the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) convention, held earlier this week. He finds himself in step with the denomination's Texas convention, which cut more than $5 million in funding for the convention's six seminaries, the Southern Baptist Executive Committee, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. The move came at the BGCT gathering October 30-31. The money will be redirected to three theological schools in Texas. Although the loss of $5 million is significant, none of the agencies or seminaries to lose money has announced a budget cut.

The issues important to Condray and his fellow Texans include local church autonomy and the right for individual Baptists to interpret Scripture.

Some 6,700 messengers from Southern Baptist churches across Texas overwhelmingly voted for the funding cut. Among other actions, convention messengers voted to allow Baptists from outside Texas to serve on BGCT governing boards.

"No Baptist coerces other Baptists about what they have to believe. That's not how you share the gospel," says David Currie of Texas Baptists Committed, a support organization for moderate Baptist churches.

"We have the right to partner with whomever we want. It was poor stewardship to partner with Southern Baptist seminaries that were fundamentalist and do not teach historic Baptist doctrines."

Moderates complain that Southern Baptist conservatives who have controlled the denomination since 1979 refuse to allow them positions in leadership.

They decry what they view as legalism in the Southern Baptist Convention's refusal to allow differing opinions on the meaning of Scripture, such as women in the pastorate, and accuse its leaders of wedding the denomination to the Religious Right. BGCT president Clyde Glazener told messengers that religious leaders of Jesus' day used the law as a club to beat others into line and spoke against those who use the Bible to claim all others are liberals.

"The best friend to true liberalism is. ... a loveless, witch-hunting fundamentalism," Glazener said. "The thing liberalism and fundamentalism most have in common is that they both think they have God in their hip pockets."

As for the Baptist Faith and Message, the amended version of this statement of faith omits the phrase included in the 1963 statement, "The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ." This omission troubles moderates, who value traditional Baptist doctrines, including the priesthood of the believer. Moderates reject forcing leaders and professors to adhere to the 2000 statement as "creedalism," a litmus test of sorts for believers, which Baptists have long stood against.

But SBC president James Merritt, in an interview with Christianity Today, says that requiring seminary professors to agree with the basic tenets of faith is not creedalism. The professors have had to sign an abstract of principle, stating the theological parameters around which they must teach, since the seminaries were founded, he says. "It only stands to reason that any professor teaching in a Baptist school should be willing to fully support that Baptist denomination's confession of faith," Merritt says.

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14