MO Pot Continues to Bubble

by T. C. Pinckney                                                                                                                    Vol. XV, No. 5, May 2002

From Baptist Press reports.

The February Banner reported that liberal Missouri Baptists had scheduled a meeting for 19-20 April at Fee-Fee BC in St. Louis to launch the new Baptist General Convention of Missouri. That meeting has come and gone, and the new state convention is in being. It remains to be seen how many Missouri churches will leave the Missouri Baptist Convention to join the BGCM.

As conservatives won the battle for biblical authority at the national level, the struggle focussed on state conventions. New, conservative conventions were founded, first in Virginia in 1996, later in Texas.

The MBC has nine institutions: Hannibal-LaGrange College, William Jewell College, Missouri Baptist Childrens Home, Southwest Baptist University, Missouri Baptist College, The Baptist Home for seniors, Missouri Baptist Foundation, Windermere Conference Center, and Word & Way news journal.

Missouri conservatives have won the votes at state meeting over the last four years, and liberals could see that their dominance of state institution trustee boards would end after election of another slate of conservatives in November 2001. In what seems unlikely to be coincidence, trustee boards of the last five entities listed above voted in 2001 to become self-perpetuating, an action deemed illegal in opinions obtained by the MBC from three prominent Missouri law firms.. All three independently and unanimously concluded that the trustees’ actions violated state law and that the five entities belong to the MBC, not the trustees.

Even though the new BGCM claims all the institutions are “partners” with it, the presidents of Southwest Baptist University and Hannibal-LaGrange College, and the public relations director of Missouri Baptist College deny any such relationship exists.

The MBC voted to escrow budget funds to the five agencies that voted to be self-perpetuating. And MBC president Bob Curtis says he hopes the dispute can be settled out of court. “It is our desire that biblical restitution and reconciliation will take place”, he said.

An executive committee ad hoc committee appointed to study the feasibility of starting a news journal joined with the administrative committee to recommend a web-based product at first with a printed version to follow later. In whatever form, the news journal would replace the long-standing state Baptist newspaper Word & Way if the latter does not return to the MBC fold.

The dispute has affected MBC funding with Cooperative Program gifts of $1.28 million about 25% under budget during the first quarter of 2001, while designated gifts were $104,803 ... more than four times the budgetted $25,000.

Postscript: In Georgia, Shorter College’s trustees met 16 January and rescinded an earlier action they had taken to hand control of the college to a newly created foundation which would have been self-perpetuating. State convention officials first learned of the action on 8 January. They immediately withdrew funding for the school.

Here was another attempt by CBF sympathizers to wrest away an agency of a conservative Baptist state convention. That the Shorter insurrection collapsed so swiftly is probably due to (1) the fact that the school’s property was willed to the use of the college as long as the school remained affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention with the proviso that if that relationship were ever severed, the property would revert to the estate; (2) the GBC provides a major portion of Shorter’s funding ($1.3 million this year) plus controls all the college’s Capital Improvements and Endowment Program, some $8 million; and (3) the state Executive Committee had the intestinal fortitude to act firmly and swiftly. In brief, when confronted with state determination, the trustees realized that they faced losing the property, losing the $8 million, and losing an essential part of their budget funds. TCP