For the fifth time this century, the fast-growing 12.9-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, the largest of America’s non-Catholic church bodies, held its annual meeting in Kansas City. Because of President Carter’s involvement it was one of the SBC’s most publicized conventions since it split from northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of slave-owning missionaries. More than 16,000 messengers (delegates) attended.
Three previous Kansas City conventions were important. In 1905, the Landmark faction left after failing to topple board structures above the local church level. In 1923, the messengers battled over evolution and creation. In 1963, they adopted the Baptist Faith and Message Statement, which has become the focal point of a dispute over inerrancy. The now-retired pastor Herschel Hobbs was SBC president then and chairman of the committee that presented the statement. “I couldn’t see how inspiration could be misinterpreted,” he recalled during this year’s meeting. “But some have been more ingenious than I thought.”
That inerrancy is still a live issue was obvious at the warm-up pastors’ conference, the largest of the pre-convention get-togethers of special-interest groups. Critics cited this year’s program as continuing evidence that the conference has been captured by a successionist line of conservative “super-church” pastors bent on policing the doctrinal beliefs of SBC institutions and promoting one of their own for the SBC presidency.
Some confirming conference quotes in Kansas City: “From beginning to ending there is not a word or syllable or revelation in the Word of God that has contradicted or ever will contradict any true, substantiated scientific fact” (W. A. Criswell, First Baptist Church, Dallas). “If Genesis 3 is a myth, John 3:16 is a farce” (Adrian Rogers, Bellevue Baptist Church, Memphis). Those who can’t subscribe to inerrancy should “just get out … and as you go, don’t take any of our churches with you” (Sam Cathey, Oklahoma evangelist).
This year half of the program time went to three non-Southern Baptist evangelicals—pastor Warren Wiersbe of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago, psychologist Clyde Narramore, and TV preacher Stephen Olford—all avowed verbal inspirationists. Fending off complaints that he was disloyal to SBC men, conference president Jerry Vines (Dauphin Way Baptist Church, Mobile), declared, “I chose them for their Bible teaching.”
There was more teeth-gnashing when David Hall, president of Scripture Press, publicly presented Vines’s new Victor book “I Shall Return”—Jesus. Besides publishing under the Victor label, SP imprints a “Verbal Inspiration Series” of Sunday school curriculum for the maverick Baptist Literature Board (BLB), a fledgling competitor to the official Baptist Sunday School Board. Before the presentation, SP promoters had slapped a book promo with the BLB logo on every chair in the auditorium. Not to be outdone, the SBC’s Broadman Press came back with a presentation of Vines’s The Fire Next Time under its label.
The 7,500 preachers went on to elect another inerrancy super-star as president of the pastors’ conference: Bailey Smith, 38, pastor of the 11,000-member First Southern Baptist Church in Del City, Oklahoma. Smith credited his election to being a conservative.
The inerrancy activists supported two candidates for the SBC presidency. Adrian Rogers, their first choice, nominated Jerry Vines: “He believes the Bible to be inerrant, infallible … He is one of us.” Vines outpolled Richard Jackson of Tucson, then lost 5,136 to 3,319 in a runoff against Jimmy Allen of the 9,000-member First Baptist Church, San Antonio. The vote was the first tally revealed following a new convention decision to disclose election vote counts.
Allen, 49, was seen as the man for the bureaucracy, the seminaries, the social activists, the editors, and others wanting a high-image president to complement Jimmy Carter. One editor remarked, “Allen will tolerate other theological viewpoints [on Bible inspiration]. Vines will not.”
Allen’s church ranks eighth in size in the SBC, one notch above Vines’s congregation. In a news conference Allen described himself as “a theological conservative and social-application progressive.” He was president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State from 1969 until last February. Before he assumed the San Antonio pastorate in 1968 he was executive secretary of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission. A Democrat, he got on the Carter bandwagon early, disagreeing publicly with Criswell’s denunciation of Carter’s Playboy Interview. He hosted Carter’s visit to San Antonio during the national election campaign. He also opposed dismissal of charismatic churches from the Dallas Baptist Association. “There’s been a real fresh moving of the Holy Spirit in a great many places within our fellowship for which I’m very grateful,” he explained. Questioned in an interview about women in SBC life, he replied rhetorically, “The question is: Are they allowed to be decision makers?” (They are not. A recent study showed only 5.5 per cent of the members of agency boards and only 20 per cent of the trustees for Baptist women’s colleges are female.)
Whatever, Allen appeared acceptable to verbal inspirationists. “He’s a good Bible preacher,” noted Adrian Rogers. “I hear he believes Adam and Eve were real people,” observed Bill Powell, leader of the controversial Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship (and a founder of the Baptist Literature Board).
The sharpest convention debate came over disclosure of salaries of agency heads. After narrowly voting down a motion to require publication of salaries and benefits of agency heads, the messengers “instructed” the agencies to provide salary scales of their employees upon written request from members of SBC churches.
The hassle produced much corridor speculation over who made what. One reliable source passed word that four executives receive around $60,000 in salaries and benefits: Southwestern Seminary’s Robert E. Naylor, the Foreign Mission Board’s Baker J. Cauthen, the Sunday School Board’s Grady C. Cothen, and the Radio and TV Commission’s Paul M. Stevens. Stevens, however, claimed he was getting only $38,000 plus a $6,000 tax-free housing allowance, retirement, and other benefits. The Home Mission Board’s William G. Tanner told his subordinates his base was $29,000 plus another $16,000 in fringes. Some agency people countered that many pastors concealed their salaries in financial reports. “Several” Dallas pastors were said to be making over $60,000. Jimmy Allen voluntarily reported his remuneration at $36,000.
The messengers commended Anita Bryant and her “courageous stand” against the evils inherent in homosexuality,” but they did not endorse her campaign outright. They also reaffirmed a 1976 resolution that urged churches not to ordain or employ homosexuals. They spoke out against the “radical scheme” of gays “to secure legal, social, and religious acceptance by portraying homosexuality as normal behavior.” Homosexual practice, declared the messengers, is “sin.”
Neither evangelist Billy Graham, who gave the convention’s closing address, nor Jimmy Allen would fully endorse Ms. Bryant. Graham in a press conference said he “admired the courage of my dear friend,” then declared his thrust was against “sin singular,” not “sins plural.” When quizzed about gay rights, he replied (a bit curtly, some reporters alleged), “I’ve said all I intend to on this subject.”
In other actions, the convention:
• Reaffirmed a 1976 resolution opposing “abortion on demand and all governmental policies and actions which permit this.” A pro-life attempt to insert a call for a constitutional amendment outlawing permissive abortion was ruled out of order after a parliamentary wrangle at the podium.
• Denounced the Internal Revenue Service for trying to define “integrated auxiliaries” of churches as “none of their business” (the IRS has ruled that if a religious organization is not an integrated auxiliary of a church, it must file informational returns).
• Flayed government rulings on discrimination that lead to “ridiculous extremes,” such as legalizing gay marriages and prohibiting father-son banquets.
• Announced a three-month denomination-wide study and action campaign directed at harnessing television’s potential for good and checking its evils.
• Approved a call for 5,000 new short-term volunteer missionaries by 1982 to reinforce the SBC’s current 5,000 career and short-term missionaries. The impetus came from the SBC’s best-known volunteer, President Jimmy Carter, who hosted a strategy luncheon of SBC agency heads at the White House shortly before the convention. The President, who implied that he got the idea from the Mormons, in a videotaped presentation to the convention participants pledged his personal support of a volunteer for two years. On a percentage basis, he said, SBC mission support has decreased, and the net gain in missionary personnel last year was only forty-eight.
United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, a United Church of Christ clergyman, backed Carter’s call. The first black civil-rights leader to address the SBC, Young also suggested that liberation aspirations in Africa had been fueled by missionaries who provided Bibles and taught nationals how to read and write. Some tribal divisions, he charged, had been “reinforced” by western denominational divisions.
The convention ended in an atmosphere of joy and warmth. Commented Jaroy Weber, a SBC president: “When we get together on missions, we stop fighting.”
Presidential Giving
After President Carter made public his and his wife’s joint income tax return for 1976, some reporters noted that he did not appear to be a tither. The return showed an adjusted gross income of $54,934.79 and contributions of $4,507.20—8.2 per cent of the total. The President chose not to disclose a breakdown of the contributions, but about half went to the now-split Plains Baptist Church in Georgia, according to press secretary Jody Powell. The couple’s 1975 return showed an adjusted gross income of $136,138.98 and contributions of $6,161.11—a total of 4.5 per cent.
Vice President Walter F. Mondale and his wife, both offspring of ministers, turned in a lower percentage. They listed income of $64,021 last year and contributions of $457 (.7 per cent). Their donations were divided among colleges, a private school, a library, two Presbyterian churches (in Washington and Minneapolis), and the Minneapolis symphony.
Which Way, American Baptists?
Which way is the 1.6 million-member denomination, the American Baptist Churches in the U.S. A. (formerly American Baptist Convention), headed? If no clear theological direction was discernible at its biennial meeting in San Diego last month, other changes were apparent: a closer relationship between the autonomous city, state and regional levels of the church, and a broadening racial mix in membership that gives the ABC the largest proportion of black members—nearly 20 per cent—of the major, predominantly white denominations.
Theological direction was not an agenda issue at the convention, attended by about 6,000 delegates and visitors. But it seemed to be a topic of fascination in corridor talk and at special-interest meetings. Nowhere was it more evident than at an early breakfast for alumni and friends of the American Baptist Seminary of the West. A record 450 persons turned out.
The seminary, a merger of the Covina and Berkeley campuses at Berkeley, has been headed since January by Doward McBain, formerly pastor of First Baptist, Phoenix. His challenge: to keep happy those associated with the former Covina campus, which had “a clear evangelical statement—everything from the Virgin Birth to the Second Coming,” according to McBain, while also pleasing the more liberal students and faculty at Berkeley, where the ABSW campus is affiliated with the very liberal and ecumenical Graduate Theological Union (GTU). McBain himself reflects that mix: a staunch evangelical theologically, he is also committed to ecumenism and pacifism.
Covina faculty members were always required to sign the confessional statement of conservative theology, pointed out pastor John A. MacDonald of Blossom Hill Church, San Jose, a Berkeley ABSW graduate. With the merger three years ago, Berkeley faculty members were also required to sign it—a kind of “hold out” by conservatives in exchange for losing their Southern California campus and identity.
Enter McBain as head of the combined 100-student seminary, the denomination’s only one west of Kansas City. He told CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “The theological mix of the GTU [the ABSW joined in last fall] caused problems right away.… And just that [the ABSW is] in Berkeley is enough to send shivers up and down the spines of many. It’s an emotional thing.”
McBain appealed at the breakfast to American Baptists who are comfortable in being both evangelical and ecumenical. He said the annual confession signing by faculty and trustees “clearly mandates ABSW to be evangelical.… Many fine Baptists don’t like creeds, but the school could not have been put together unless it had been both evangelical and ecumenical.”
McBain, who has been national chairman of Evangelistic Life Style, the denomination’s evangelism program, sees the seminary in flux, but on the upswing, catering to American Baptist churches that want an evangelical Baptist school in an ecumenical environment.
Some, like MacDonald, are concerned about which way ABSW will swing: “I can’t say I would feel free to send young people there now” he cautioned, adding that he would like to see a greater emphasis on biblical theology at ABSW.
Theological concern also surfaced in reaction to the well-applauded speeches of one of the denomination’s controversial theologians, Jitsuo Morikawa, interim senior minister of Riverside Church, New York City, and formerly the ABC’s evangelism director. ABC conservatives long have accused him of being a universalist on salvation (the belief that Christ has already saved everyone).
Speaking of his own conversion, the Japanese American said he “bowed before my Saviour as a broken penitent to acknowledge Him as my Saviour and Lord.” He also said American Baptists must “believe and pray and act for a revival to sweep through our nation, to provide moral force.…” But in the first of his two speeches, Morikawa declared that “no power on earth can resist the leavening power of the Kingdom [of God], until the whole cosmos is leavened.”
Morikawa’s “cosmic hope,” commented a critic, avoids the question of individual destiny, which to him [Morikawa] “characterizes early, immature consciousness. Morikawa doesn’t admit universalism but leaves us with a very broad implication thereto. In the face of the obvious question, he doesn’t bother to deny or clarify.”
If theological waters were muddy in San Diego, the structure and composition of the church was more clear. Of the some 6,500 ABC congregations, there are 567 black churches that have a membership of 310,000 out of the denominational total of 1.6 million, Dean Charles Z. Smith of Seattle, outgoing ABC president, observed in his keynote message. Most of the blacks, however, belong to 550 congregations that are dually aligned with black Baptist denominations, and the vast majority of ABC congregations are all white or nearly so. Still, Smith added during an interview, “the direction of the ABC since 1968 … has been affirmative inclusion and participation across all ethnic and racial lines … which reflects the general population of the United States.”
While overall membership has remained nearly constant over the past decade, giving has steadily risen, officials said.
Only one controversy erupted on the convention floor: debate over revision of bylaws that affect the organizational units of the church. Finally approved overwhelmingly were changes creating “covenant relationships” for the work of the autonomous city, state, and regional levels and the national organizations. Also, local churches and the regions, states, and cities will be represented by the same election-district representative to the denomination’s General Board. The new bylaws will take effect when voted by two-thirds of the city, state, and regional boards. Opposition centered on the contention that tighter restructuring was antithetical to Baptist tradition.
In other action, Cora Sparrowk, 60, of Ione, California, a housewife long active in Baptist and ecumenical affairs at the national level, was elected the sixth woman president of the seventy-year-old denomination.
RUSSELL CHANDLER
The View From Tanzania
The following news story is based largely on an account filed by special correspondent George H. Muedeking:
Some 300 delegates representing 53 million members in the ninety-five denominations affiliated with the Lutheran World Federation gathered last month in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for the LWF’s Sixth Assembly. They and about 500 other assembly participants and observers were joined by 2,000 Tanzanian Lutherans in the opening communion service. Ninety years earlier that very week the first Lutheran missionary to Tanzania began his work. Today the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT) has more than 800,000 members, and it has increased in size 60 per cent in the last four years, according to church sources. This makes the ELCT the largest Lutheran church in Africa.
Against such a backdrop, therefore, issues related to missionary endeavors took on a sense of immediacy for the delegates, who came from fifty-three countries. The matter of “self-reliance” among mission-assisted churches was discussed. The ELCT, for example, accepts missionary and financial assistance but conducts its own affairs independently; missionaries serve at the invitation of the national church. Further independence was called for by a Tanzanian government official, Nicolaus Moro, who is a member of the ELCT. In a major plenary address he recommended a moratorium on mission support from “northern” (American and European) churches. This should begin, he said, with a disengagement in planned stages, starting with the local congregations, proceeding through administrative structures, and extending to the mission-supported institutions of the churches.
ELCT bishop Josiah M. Kibira, chairman of the LWF’s Commission on Church Cooperation (CCC), said that mission ought to become a two-way street, with evangelistic proclamation provided by Christians in the Third World countries to a “post-Christian” Atlantic community.
Kibira, 52, was elected the sixth president of the Geneva-based LWF, succeeding Mikko Juva, chancellor of the University of Helsinki. The vote was 130 for Kibira and 117 for Bishop August W. Habelgaarn of the Moravian Church of South Africa. Kibira is the first president to come from the Third World in the LWF’s thirty-year history.
The official actions of the two-week assembly were based on statements and recommendations thrashed out in three seminars. African issues kept cropping up in the seminars—and thus in the assembly’s final pronouncements. Among other things, the assembly:
• Adopted a human rights statement that especially protested the “continuing threat to human dignity and the manifold violations of human rights by the white minority in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia).”
• Called on white South African churches to reject apartheid as a violation of the Christian faith.
• Asked member churches to intensify evangelization efforts, including the “re-evangelization” of “multitudes of nominal Christians.”
• Urged pursuit of deeper ecumenical relationships, including the mutual recognition of baptism and church ministries (the delegates endorsed “visible unity” as the ultimate goal of the ecumenical movement).
A budget report showed that the LWF spent $125 million ($50 million of it for 415 “world service” projects) since the last assembly at Evian, France, in 1970. Four new churches were added at the latest assembly, the largest being the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea with more than 400,000 members. Carl Mau of the American Lutheran Church was elected to another seven-year term as LWF executive secretary.
Positive Thinking
The Carmel, New York, school board is no longer thinking negatively about clergyman-author Norman Vincent Peale and his Guideposts publishing operation. Not since Peale shared his thoughts about the board’s legal efforts to place his Guideposts publishing operation on the tax rolls. The board backed down after the minister threatened to pull his firm out of town, where it occupies a fifty-acre site and employs nearly 400.
“We weighed the total loss of their $5 million payroll a year vis-a-vis approximately $100,000 the school board would obtain [in taxes],” explained board president Philip Buxbaum.
An Urge to Merge
Should a Christian marriage counselor advise a couple to live together before their wedding in order for the partners to get to know each other better?
That question was asked on the floor of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) General Assembly in Nashville last month as the denomination’s governing body discussed its future relations with the United Presbyterian Church. The committee promoting union of the two churches had proposed, in effect, that all of the agencies of the churches live together before the union is formally consummated.
Despite the argument by opponents of union that such living arrangements are contrary to the church’s teachings on marriage, the assembly granted most of the merger committee’s requests. The major exception was the governing body’s decision to exempt from its action the publications issued by the denomination. The action also was amended on the floor so that the operative verb was changed from “instruct” to “urge,” thereby leaving the agencies with the authorization but without the requirement that they merge their work.
Another part of the “getting-to-know-you” program voted by the assembly was approval of a plan to meet every other year in the future at the same time and place as the United Presbyterian assembly. The first of the common sites to be approved was Kansas City in 1979.
All of the getting acquainted will not be at the top level if the recommendations adopted in Nashville are followed by the judicatories below national level. Regional synods were urged to hold joint meetings more often, and the judicial commission was asked to check into the possibility of constitutional amendments to permit organic merger of synods. The constitutions of the two churches already permit union of presbyteries, the governing bodies between synods and local churches. The assembly urged more presbytery mergers, as well as formation of new union congregations.
The current merger negotiations between the PCUS and the United Presbyterians have been under way since 1969, but no consummation is seen in the near future. A conservative bloc tried to push for a vote next year, but the assembly failed to set a date for a constitutional vote. Union advocates are fearful that the plan would not be favored by the necessary three-fourths of the presbyteries if it is submitted to them now. Last winter a doctrinal package that would have put the PCUS closer to the position of the United Presbyterians failed to get a three-fourths vote. J. Randolph Taylor, PCUS co-chairman of the merger panel, suggested to the assembly that much more time is needed before the church is ready to vote. His committee has been negotiating for only eight years, he said, and the predecessor group that submitted a plan defeated by the church in 1955 worked for seventeen years. The denomination was not ready to vote then, Taylor concluded. Commissioners got the impression that his committee will press for as much “living together” as possible until it sees that it has enough votes to pass organic union.
While unions and doctrinal changes require approval by three-fourths of the presbyteries, changes in polity require only a simple majority. The doctrinal package considered by presbyteries last winter included new ordination vows that were passed by a majority of the presbyteries. Since these were changes in the polity section of the constitution, the assembly enacted them despite pleas that they were a part of the rejected package. The “book of confessions,” including a contemporary declaration of faith, had lost in the presbyteries but was endorsed by the assembly for use throughout the church. Even though it failed to gain constitutional status the book will be printed and distributed, by order of the assembly. The chairman of the committee that produced the defeated theological package, Albert C. Winn, got a standing ovation. Formerly president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Winn is a pastor in Richmond, Virginia.
In one ecumenical gesture the PCUS governing body broke ground that few of its sister denominations have even considered. After long debate it decided to invite representatives of other denominations to future assemblies. Commissioners were unwilling to give them a vote on the floor of plenary sessions, but they will be able to speak there as well as in the standing committees which screen all business. The visitors will also have the privilege of voting in committees.
Eight to twelve of the ecumencial visitors will be invited to each assembly as a symbol of the unity of the church. The 1977 assembly approved a list of fourteen communions, in priority order, which will be approached to send representatives. Fourth on the list is the Presbyterian Church in America, which is composed largely of former members of PCUS. The first three denominations on the list are the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Episcopal Church, and the United Presbyterian Church. After the PCA the list continues: Greek Orthodox Church, National Presbyterian Church of Mexico, Presbyterian Church of Canada, Lutheran Church in America, United Methodist Church, Church of Scotland, United Church of Christ, Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Reformed Church in America, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
In one of its longest debates the assembly considered a study paper on homosexuality drafted by its council on theology and culture. The paper does not take a position on the subject of homosexual behavior, and drafters asked the denomination’s governing body to send it out for study without stating a position. The document was “endorsed as a basis for study,” but commissioners added a statement that they need “more light” and “spiritual guidance” on the subject, currently believing that homosexuality “falls short of God’s plan for sexual relationships.…” The body turned down requests from a number of commissioners and from one of its presbyteries that it flatly declare homosexual activity a sin. The study paper says some Christians believe such activity is sin while others believe it is a sickness and others consider it “a legitimate variety of human sexuality.”
Settling one of its most celebrated judicial cases in recent times, the assembly upheld the Atlanta Presbytery’s reception of a minister who is opposed to women’s ordination (see February 13, 1976, issue, Page 61). Thomas T. Ellis had told the presbytery that while he did not believe women should be ministers or ruling elders he would assist in an ordination if ordered by presbytery to do so. “The issue,” said the judicial commission that drafted the assembly decision, “is one of freedom of conscience versus invidious action.”
The church continued to lose communicants last year, with 882,820 on the roll at the close of 1976. The net loss in 1976 was 365, or one a day. While giving was up in 1976, the constant dollar receipts of assembly agencies were only about half of what they were ten years ago.
ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS
