Baptist rift reconcilable?

The Southern Baptist Convention is threatening to break with the world’s largest Baptist body over complaints that the Baptist World Alliance is too liberal.

Although the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee voted 62-10 in February to remove itself and its yearly $300,000 dues from the Falls Church-based Baptist World Alliance, the BWA has requested a meeting with the SBC today in Nashville, Tenn., to get it to reconsider.

Several BWA officials, including its president, Billy Kim, have traveled from South Korea, the United Kingdom and Canada for the meeting. The 16.2-million-member SBC, America’s largest non-Catholic denomination, provides approximately one-fifth of the BWA’s $1.6 million budget.

A final vote on the BWA will be at the SBC’s annual meeting June 15-16 in Indianapolis.

“The SBC is the largest denomination in the BWA and has been its most generous financial contributor, despite an increasingly hostile attitude by BWA leaders and vocal, more theologically liberal BWA members,” said an editorial posted on the Baptist Press Web site, www.bpnews.net.

“The increased criticism and the more liberal influences within the BWA are responsible for the executive committee’s action, a move justified given the BWA’s infatuation with ecumenicalism. For the BWA, unity trumps truth,” the site said.

In a Feb. 17 report, the executive committee said the BWA “no longer efficiently communicates to the unsaved a crystal clear gospel message that our Lord Jesus Christ is solely sufficient for salvation.”

However, a spokeswoman for the BWA said the real issues have to do with women’s ordination, which the BWA supports and the SBC opposes, and the BWA’s decision last summer to admit the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an Atlanta-based group that split from the SBC in 1991.

“They also mentioned that we invited [retired Anglican Archbishop] Desmond Tutu to speak at our [1988] meeting in South Africa; they were unhappy that we were against the [U.S.] embargo of Cuba and the fact we’ve allowed people on the floor of our meetings to speak against [SBC’s] policies,” said Wendy Ryan, BWA director of communications.

“The Southern Baptists have a framework of belief that you need to fit into, and if you don’t fit, it is difficult for them to know how to deal with you.”

A change of heart among the Southern Baptists would be “a tremendous breakthrough,” she added.

The Southern Baptists already have announced where they will redirect the $300,000. The Cooperative Baptists have since promised to double their dues to $40,000 to partly make up for the shortfall.

The BWA, which has headquarters just off Interstate 66 across the street from the 2,884-member Columbia Baptist Church, was founded 99 years ago in London. The SBC was a charter member.

A framed tribute to evangelist Billy Graham is posted on the wall of a second-floor reception area, not far from a world map showing BWA’s 47 million members in 211 member bodies in 165,264 affiliated churches in 114 countries.