It’s Vestal and Weatherford

                                                                                                                                                                      Vol. III, No. 2, February 1990

Last September Dr. Dan Vestal announced to his church, Dunwoody Baptist Church in suburban Atlanta, that he will be nominated again this June in New Orleans. In Las Vegas Vestal lost to incumbent Jerry Vines.

On January 14 Vestal announced from his pulpit that in October he had asked Carolyn Weatherford Crumpler, retired executive director of the WMU, to run for SBC first vice president and that she is willing to be nominated. The then Carolyn Weatherford ran last year for the same post and lost, along with two other candidates, on the first ballot to Alabama evangelist Junior Hill.

On January 18-19 Vestal spoke at three political meetings in Florida. At the Orlando meeting Pat Anderson, coordinator of the Florida chapter of Baptists Committed, encouraged participants to join the organization. Although Vestal noted he is not a member, national and state leaders of Baptists Committed have endorsed his candidacy. The Florida Baptist Witness reported about 70 present at the Coral Gables meeting, but Pastor O.S. Hawkins stated – in a letter to the editor published in the Witness of February 8 – that of some 300 Southern Baptist pastors in the greater Miami area only the host pastor, Hawkins, and another conservative pastor, and three other pastors attended.

Hawkins noted that Vestal stated, "I told Patterson and Pressler in the beginning that I was sympathetic with many of their goals," although he later declined to specify which goals. Hawkins also quoted Vestal, "I am not a moderate. I differ with them in that I do believe there are theological problems with the Southern Baptist Convention." When asked, Vestal again would not specify the theological problems to which he referred.

As president Vestal said he would balance his appointments to denominational committees, "...my appointment process will be across the board. But it will be people who are servant-spirited and who are committed to Baptist principles." He listed those principles as the priesthood of the believer, autonomy of the local church, separation of church and state, and cooperative missions. Vestal referred several times to his opposition as the "control group."

Conservatives will note that Vestal did not include among his enumeration of Baptist principles the complete authority and infallibility of the Bible. Yet consider whether the priesthood of the believer would be of importance without the perfect, revealed, written word of God. What would be the purpose of cooperative missions without a completely reliable Book? Likewise, without an inerrant Bible as our rule of faith the autonomy of the local church would be but a license to chaos.

The four Baptist principles listed by Dr. Vestal are, of course, very important, but they only have significance in the presence of God's revealed word. Curious that his emphasis was on the secondary rather than the essential.

Conservatives will not be confused by a candidate who makes such a glaring omission, who intends by his own admission to draw his appointments from across the board Baptists as if a denominational label was all that is important, who has chosen the liberal Carolyn Weatherford Crumpler as his running mate, and who appears on the same program as the Florida state coordinator of Baptists Committed.

In this spiritual battle for the soul and future of the Southern Baptist Convention your theology may be orthodox, but your impact, your influence within the convention depends upon how you vote and from whom your support, advice, and appointments come. From the perspective of those who wish to return the SBC to the great evangelistic engine it used to be when based unwaveringly upon complete faith in the across-the-board perfection of God's revealed written word, Vestal's own words portray him as one who if elected would turn back the clock, interrupt the great progress made over the last eleven years, and prolong the struggle indefinitely.

We need a great outpouring of Bible believing messengers in New Orleans to win a decisive victory. Won't you be there?