SBC Wrap '99

by   Norman Miller                                                                                                                                     Vol. XII, No. 6, June/July 1999

Emphases on evangelism and the Cooperative Program highlighted the 1999 Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta June 15-16, which was attended by 11,554 messengers from all but three states.

SBC President Paige Patterson's two-fold challenge to Southern Baptists in his sermon was to target the United States' mega-cities while attempting to baptize one million people worldwide next year. The latter can be accomplished if each SBC church baptizes just three more people than last year, said Patterson, who was elected to a second term by acclamation.

"Brothers and sisters, if we reach the cities of our country, it will take more than an affirmation of belief in the inerrancy of the Bible," Patterson told messengers. With 47 U.S. cities each numbering more than one million people, he said the "great metropolises of our own nation have burgeoned into some of the world's most demanding mission assignments."

"Southern Baptists, will you pray as never before? ... will you go to the great population centers of our nation? ... will you give? ... will you get your church to take a city? ... will you ask your association to accept the challenge of the inner city? ... will you weep before God like Jesus wept over Jerusalem? ... May God grant it," Patterson said.

Introducing the "Partners in the Harvest" program -- an emphasis on the Cooperative Program's 75th birthday in the year 2000 -- president of the SBC executive committee, Morris Chapman, described the CP as the "greatest voluntary funding program in the history of Christendom." The SBC and Baptist state conventions set three cooperative goals for the "Partners in the Harvest" campaign:

-- $750 million in CP giving by local churches and in their special offerings for international, North American and state missions in the 2000-2001 church year.

-- baptizing 1 million people in the year 2000 -- 500,000 in the United States and 500,000 in tandem with Baptist co-workers abroad.

-- enlisting a record number of Baptists for volunteer missions projects.

The SBCV will follow the executive committee's lead in officially kicking-off the CP's 75th anniversary national emphasis next year.

President Bill Clinton's June 11 proclamation of June as "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" prompted the most significant controversy of the SBC. Messengers responded to that with a resolution deploring Clinton's "most public endorsement of that which is contrary to the Word of God" and calling on him to rescind the proclamation. An amendment asked Clinton to pull his recent appointment of James Hormel, a professed homosexual, as ambassador to Luxembourg. The resolution also affirmed love for the president and "for people enslaved in sins of all types, including homosexual sins" but noted that rebuke indeed can be a loving corrective.

"You can't call right wrong and wrong right," said Patterson during a June 15 press conference in reference to Clinton's stance on homosexuality. "And the president either does not know what the Bible says about [homosexuality], or else he has chosen to disregard what the Bible says about it and have a totally different view." President Clinton's historic proclamation of a "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month" should be a basis for the Southern Baptist church of which he is a member to discipline him, SBC President Paige Patterson said on the eve of the convention's annual meeting. The proclamation, which was announced by the White House June 11, is "entirely inconsistent with [Clinton's] confession as an evangelical Christian and certainly as a Southern Baptist," Patterson said. "I would call once again upon the church in which the president holds membership to take before them this proclamation that he has made at the White House and make it the subject of church discipline," the SBC leader said. "The fact that he is the president of the United States ought to make no difference. When a member of a Southern Baptist church takes the position that he has taken in outright contradistinction to the Word of God, that church should act to bring about church discipline in that case."

A motion formally suggesting that Clinton's home church in Little Rock, AR, exercise church discipline, and another motion requesting Immanuel's formal position regarding Clinton's policies, however, were ruled out of order. Like many Southern Baptist churches, Immanuel has not practiced formal church discipline in decades, but pastor Rex Horne has acknowledged discussing the issues privately with Clinton.

The convention's theme of "His Tears -- Our Task!" was based on Jesus’ weeping over Jerusalem in Luke 19:41. Southern Baptists engaged the task in a number of ways, including:

-- Crossover Metro Atlanta, a multi-faceted evangelistic blitz June 6-19, which yielded more than 2,500 professions of faith as of June 16. The effort was part of a five-month Baptist effort called Arms Around Atlanta, involving the Georgia Baptist Convention and 10 metro-area Baptist associations.

-- A "Multicultural Church Network" was officially launched on the premise that increasingly multicultural major cities can only be reached effectively by developing more multicultural churches.

-- NAMB reported to messengers the planned startup of 34 large flagship churches in the largest cities in the United States and Canada, each undertaken as a special project of one of Southern Baptists' existing mega-churches.

-- More than 1,350 individuals signed NAMB commitment cards to make their homes "Lighthouses of Prayer" -- a commitment that includes praying and caring for and sharing Christ with families in their respective neighborhoods. The Lighthouses of Prayer concept encourages Christians to pray for five neighbors on each side of them, as well as 10 neighbors across the street.

Also during the convention:

A $159,583,743 CP budget for 1999-2000 was approved by messengers. The new budget represents a $4.6 million increase over the 1997-98 budget and is based on actual receipts for 1997-98.

A study of the Baptist Faith and Message statement was approved in a 2,327-1,963 vote, or 54-46 percent. In proposing the action, T.C. Pinckney, of Good News Baptist Church, Alexandria, VA, and editor of The Baptist Banner, said the intervening 36 years since the BFM's 1963 revision "have been momentous ones for the Southern Baptist Convention [and] I believe it is appropriate at this time that the Baptist Faith and Message be reviewed and that it be made consistent with the current stand of the Southern Baptist Convention." A yet-to-be-appointed committee will bring a report at next year's annual meeting, June 13-14 in Orlando, FL.

A motion to take a non-binding straw poll on whether messengers wanted to change the name of the SBC, spearheaded by Michigan pastor Blaine Barber, a member of the executive committee, fell "overwhelmingly" short on a raised-hand, show-of-ballots vote, as assessed by Patterson. Barber contended a new name would bolster church planting and racial reconciliation, while messenger Jeff Johnson of Grants, NM, countered, "'Southern Baptist' is a term for a theology -- not a term for a location. It is a term we've come to respect."

Messengers registered support for a lifestyle of abstinence from alcohol and other drugs by approving the report of a drug task force and then backing up their vote by signing commitments to a life of abstinence from "any substance that would impact negatively" their Christian witness. In presenting the report, the task force's chairman, Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said the alcohol problem is America's number one drug problem, later saying in a news conference, "It is wreaking untold havoc on our nation and our nation's families." Among research findings cited by the task force: When parents use alcohol as a beverage, 66 percent of their children experiment with alcohol at some point during their lives. When parents abstain, only 16 percent of the children try the beverage.

Jerry Rankin, president of the International Mission Board, said in his report that in 1998 the net increase of new missionaries was greater than any increase in previous history and also noted that baptisms overseas, new churches, and new mission points were all up substantially.

Future National Football League Hall of Famer Reggie White, in a Wednesday evening message, nudged the media: "Why don't you report more on the people who come out of [the homosexual lifestyle]? Why don't you give them any credit for their change?" White, an ordained minister, related, "About three weeks ago a man came to me after I preached and said, 'God brought me out of this lifestyle. Thanks for what you had the courage to say, because now I'm saved.'"

Frank Cox, pastor of North Metro First Baptist Church in suburban Atlanta, was elected first vice president; Jerry Spencer, pastor of Ridgecrest Baptist Church, Dothan, Ala., second vice president.

Evangelist Bailey Smith was named to deliver the convention sermon at next year's annual meeting in Orlando. The music director will be Scott White, minister of music at First Baptist Church, Woodstock, GA.