The Southern Baptist wars may be over, but all the troops have yet to lay down their arms. More than half of the resolutions proposed at the 1993 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in Houston took critical aim at fellow Southern Baptist Bill Clinton, or his policies.
“If you saw what we didn’t say, we’d be getting pats on the back,” said James Merritt, head of the resolutions committee, after the SBC adopted a consensus resolution critical of President Clinton’s policies on abortion and homosexuals, yet free of personal attacks on the President as suggested by some Clinton critics. After voting, Edwin Young, newly re-elected as SBC president, led the 17,814 “messengers,” or voting delegates, in prayer for Clinton.
The convention took several actions, which further clarified who is and who is not in good standing with the SBC.
There are an estimated 500,000 Southern Baptists who are Masons, the secretive, international fraternal organization. A yearlong study of Freemasonry by the SBC resulted in a compromise resolution, stating that “membership in a Masonic Order [should] be a matter of personal conscience.” The resolution passed following a brief but sharp debate on the convention floor.
The role of spiritual gifts in public worship came before Southern Baptists through the Foreign Mission Board’s (FMB) election of Jerry Rankin, who has acknowledged “praying in the Spirit.” Rankin has publicly maintained he is not an advocate for charismatic expression and was able to gain the two-thirds vote needed for election as FMB president.
The convention affirmed the 1992 amendment to its constitution, which now will bar any SBC church that acts “to affirm, approve or endorse homosexual behavior.” With the amendment’s approval for the second year, it will go into effect.
An attempt to unseat the messengers from Little Rock’s Immanuel Baptist Church, Clinton’s home congregation in Arkansas, was thrown out by the SBC credentials committee for technical reasons. The motion by a Florida pastor stated that members of Clinton’s church “by their silence [are supporting] Bill Clinton’s endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle.” Immanuel’s pastor, Rex Horne, said he has met with Clinton and has openly expressed his opposition to the President’s policies on abortion and homosexuality.
The atmosphere of harmony at the three-day session was markedly changed from the recent years of struggle between conservatives and moderates.
“The civil war is over. This is ‘reconstruction,’ “said Timothy George, a member of the denomination’s Theological Study Committee. “The SBC is … returning to its evangelical roots.”
However, the dispute had a brief reprise at the convention when an unpublished paper, “Understanding the Controversy,” by Paige Patterson, a leading conservative, was distributed without Patterson’s authorization. The paper outlines which top institutions and prominent individuals are associated with orthodox, neo-orthodox, or liberal Christian beliefs. The document was pulled quickly from distribution, and Patterson apologized.
SBC President Young, during his convention address, sternly urged Southern Baptists to turn their attentions from the “side streets” of political involvement and other issues and refocus on “the main thing”—missions and evangelism.
He said, “We have compromised [where] Jesus himself refused to compromise.” Young said of the 38,433 SBC churches, 7,771 did not baptize anyone in 1992. He said renewal in the church comes from an attitude of desperation. “The church has to be before the church can do. And that comes out of desperation.… When the main thing, evangelism, becomes the main thing again, the Southern Baptist Convention will no longer be on side streets.”
By Timothy C. Morgan in Houston.
