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Southern Baptists break with global network
Citing "a continual leftward drift" in the Baptist World Alliance, the Southern Baptist Convention yesterday overwhelmingly voted to withdraw from the international group.

A Southern Baptist committee said the BWA had taken anti-American stances, had become tolerant of liberal theology, and had wrongly accepted the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an American group that has been critical of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Those accusations are a mystery to BWA general secretary Denton Lotz. Yes, that's brother-in-law of popular Bible teacher Anne Graham Lotz, Billy's daughter.

"We certainly are not liberal," Lotz says. "We're all conservative evangelicals."

But Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a member of the committee recommending the split, pointed to Baptist World Alliance's inclusion of American Baptist Churches, and that denomination's recent accepting of the membership of Evergreen Baptist Association. That group has two churches that accept practicing homosexuals.

To Patterson, being a member of an organization that has links to such churches, no matter how far removed, is a form of infidelity to Scripture.

"We can no longer afford in this particular day, when the press for 'gay marriage' is on, to be in an alliance of any kind with denominations which support 'gay marriage' in any form or fashion," he said.

Lotz notes that the American Baptist Convention has "a statement that says that homosexuality is inconsistent with the Christian lifestyle."

ABC General Secretary Roy Medley called Patterson's comments "completely outrageous. … To characterize American Baptist Churches USA as being in favor of gay marriage goes beyond the pale. Our policy statement on family life, adopted in 1984, maintains, 'We affirm that God intends marriage to be a monogamous, life-long, one-flesh union of a woman and a man.'"

As you can see, this debate is really nothing like the debates in the global Anglican Communion or the United Methodist Church. Both of those denominations have more hierarchical structures, and their large church bodies carry more weight in individual congregations than in Baptist polity. The Baptist World Alliance has no authority which is more of a fellowship or fraternity, with no authority. And where both sides in the mainline denominations tend to agree that disagreements are between liberals and conservatives (though terms like "orthodox" and "fundamentalist" tend to be used more often in the debates), in the Baptist world there's still a major debate over what makes one a conservative evangelical.

More articles on leaving the Baptist World Alliance:

• SBC severs ties with BWA as theological concerns remain (Baptist Press)
  
  
• SBC votes to cut ties to Baptist World Alliance (Associated Baptist Press)
  
  
• Southern Baptists leave alliance | Denomination cites unwanted liberal shift in vote to quit world group (The Indianapolis Star)
  
  
• Southern Baptists vote to leave World Alliance | The Southern Baptist Convention voted yesterday to pull out of the Baptist World Alliance, accusing the worldwide organization of a drift toward liberalism that included growing tolerance of homosexuality, support for women in the clergy and "anti-American" pronouncements (The Washington Post)
  
  
• Southern Baptists leave Alliance | The Southern Baptist Convention voted yesterday to sever its 99-year relationship with the Baptist World Alliance on the grounds that it includes a Baptist denomination with openly homosexual members (The Washington Times)
  
  

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48