At a meeting perhaps as notable for its location as its action, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gathered last month in Las Vegas and continued on a course directed by conservative leaders.

Jerry Vines, pastor of First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, was re-elected to a second term as president of the 14.8 million-member denomination, defeating moderate candidate Daniel Vestal of Atlanta, 10,754 votes to 8,248. Vines’s election marks the eleventh consecutive year a conservative candidate has held the top office.

While Las Vegas odds makers were laying 2-to-1 odds for Vines’s re-election, moderates went into the convention hoping a low turnout and a site far from conservative Baptist strongholds would work in their favor. But instead of the expected 16,000 to 18,000 messengers, 20,202 had registered when the vote was taken, and the election went to Vines.

“I believe the issue of the Bible is settled in Southern Baptist life,” Vines said at a press conference after the election. “Southern Baptists, every time they have had an opportunity to do so, have overwhelmingly affirmed we believe the Bible is without error.” While controversy is not over nor all problems solved, Vines said, administrators and trustees of Southern Baptist institutions “clearly understand the direction which Southern Baptists want to go.”

Moderate candidate Vestal said he believes the issue dividing the convention is not belief in the Bible, but freedom. Those who voted for him do not want liberalism taught in seminaries, he said. “The question is: Will we be a noncreedal denomination that will allow freedom and openness, or are we going to have a forced conformity? Are we going to disenfranchise and exclude the great numbers of Southern Baptists who will not participate in this political move?”

Though he said he was “willing and available” to be a candidate in 1990, Vestal said he was not ready to make a commitment to run again for president. He said he plans first to return to pastoring his church, which will continue to support the SBC.

Avoiding Divisions

Upon his election at last year’s convention in San Antonio, Texas, Vines had called for Southern Baptists to set aside divisive issues and return to a unifying emphasis on missions and evangelism. Continuing that theme, convention speakers frequently extolled soul winning, while SBC messengers (delegates) took to the streets of “Sin City” in a variety of outreach efforts to bolster church planting efforts in the Las Vegas area (see article below).

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The day before the convention opened, the SBC executive committee sidestepped one potential point of serious conflict. At Vines’s request, the committee postponed consideration by the convention of a proposal to establish a new political lobby in Washington, D.C. Last February, the committee voted to recommend that the SBC create the Religious Liberty Commission to “represent the stated positions of the Southern Baptist Convention” to the government and other bodies, and to inform Southern Baptists of religious-liberty issues and appropriate ways to influence decision makers. Conservative leaders have been critical of actions of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, of which the SBC and eight other Baptist bodies are members.

The creation of the new commission would in effect displace the Baptist Joint Committee (BJC) as the convention’s voice in Washington. Such an action requires the approval of a majority of messengers at two consecutive SBC annual meetings. The executive committee postponed consideration of the matter until the 1990 convention in New Orleans.

Though little controversy surfaced on the convention floor, discussion of the BJC revealed the tensions that have divided the SBC between so-called conservative and moderate factions in recent years. For example, one day after approving a $137.2 million budget for 1989–90 (down from $145.6 million for the past year), convention messengers were asked in a motion from the floor to reconsider the budget, a move designed to clear the way to cut $200,000 of the Southern Baptists’ allocation of $391,000 to the BJC.

During extended debate, former SBC president Adrian Rogers, speaking in favor of reconsidering the budget, said, “We have marched around this issue so many times … the body now needs to speak.” The convention, however, left the budget unchanged and continued funds for the BJC.

For moderates, who generally support the BJC, the vote was a bright spot in an otherwise dull convention. “The Baptist Joint Committee has some hidden support in the denomination,” said Stan Hastey, executive director of the Southern Baptist Alliance, a moderate group. “There are many theological fundamentalists in this denomination who do not go along with the national political agenda of the fundamentalist leaders in the SBC.”

Potential Problems

Conservative leaders also avoided convention discussion of two other potential controversies. The first involves a “memorial,” or message, from the Baptist General Association of Virginia (BGAV) delivered to the SBC, which questions the direction of the convention. The moderate-controlled BGAV could choose to withhold funds from the SBC, or even sever ties with the convention, if it is not satisfied with the response of the SBC to the issues raised in the message. The BGAV memorial was referred to the SBC executive committee and was not considered by the convention at large.

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The second potential controversy centered on remarks made by Curtis Caine of Jackson, Mississippi, a trustee of the SBC Christian Life Commission. At the commission’s annual meeting last September, Caine allegedly called Martin Luther King, Jr., a “fraud” and said “apartheid in South Africa … doesn’t exist anymore and was beneficial when it did.” A motion to remove Caine immediately from the commission was postponed to the 1990 convention to allow for an investigation into the affair and the legal ramifications of any action, and to allow Caine time for response.

By Ken Sidey, in Las Vegas.

The Cross and the Casino

Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas has witnessed many unusual events, from super-hyped boxing matches to motorcycle jumps over its towering fountains. But seldom—if ever—has it been the site of an evangelistic rally. So when more than a hundred people knelt, sang, and prayed around a 12-foot wooden cross near the templelike entrance to the casino, traffic stopped and TV cameras converged.

The scene ended a three-mile march by several hundred Southern Baptists down the city’s famous “Strip” of casinos and hotels. With Arthur Blessitt, a California evangelist who has dragged the cross in more than 100 countries, leading the way, the marchers handed out Bibles and tracts to people on the sidewalks.

“We’re not here to close down the Strip,” one marcher said. “We’re just planting seeds.” While most on the street merely looked on with curiosity or avoided the group, one tourist, who said he got off his bus one stop early to find out what was going on, said he accepted Christ after talking with one of the marchers.

Prior to the convention, almost 1,800 conventioneers, including SBC president Jerry Vines, went door-to-door through residential Las Vegas, conducting evangelistic surveys and handing out tracts. Their work was coordinated with efforts by Nevada Baptist officials to launch 25 new churches or missions in the area during the next year.

One of the reasons Las Vegas was chosen as the site for the 1989 convention, Baptist leaders said, was to encourage church planting in the West. More than 100,000 households were contacted in two afternoons of witnessing; organizers reported 470 people came to faith in Christ during the outreach.

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