SBCOutpost

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 2, 2008

Pastors, former missionaries join former IMB trustees in calling for removal of controversial, superfluous ‘guidelines’

‘Time to Change’ group opposes policies on baptism, private prayer practices

NORTH CAROLINA –– A group of 37 former Southern Baptist missionaries, former International Mission Board trustees and Southern Baptist pastors has issued a call for rank and file Southern Baptists to reverse “guidelines” enacted by IMB trustees in 2005 that prohibited appointment of missionaries whose baptisms and private prayer lives do not meet those guidelines.

“We express our concern over the restrictions that have been put in place in the form of additional ‘guidelines’ concerning a missionary candidate’s private prayer life and baptism,” says the statement, which was released June 2, 2008. “Our conviction is that these guidelines stray far beyond the parameters set forth by our denominational confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message.”

One position adopted by IMB trustees prohibited appointment of missionary candidates who were not baptized in conformity with a narrow, extra-biblical definition of baptism. The second position prohibited appointment of missionary candidates who practice a “private prayer language.”

The group objects that those restrictions amount to “intrusive scrutiny into the sanctity of the personal prayer closet” and “dictating to local churches what constitutes a legitimate Christian baptism.”

The result of adopting those “guidelines” – with no evidence they were needed – was that “otherwise worthy candidates” for missionary service are unnecessarily rejected and “valuable, faithful IMB personnel” are leaving the field at a time when the overseas missions harvest is greater than ever, the group says.

“Each day, we are all made painfully aware of the scope of the lostness of our world. We agree with the words of our Lord that, indeed, the harvest is abundant. We also, with great sadness, agree with His assessment that the workers are few,” the statement says. “There are good, loyal Southern Baptists who see the multitudes also, and just as Christ did, feel compassion for them. Let us as Southern Baptists not purposefully turn away any qualified worker who has heard and obeyed the call to ‘Go.’”

The group plainly asserts that their opposition to the “guidelines” should not be read as a lack of support for IMB missionaries, staff or administration. They “commend the obedience and commitment to God’s call of the more than 5,000 dedicated brothers and sisters who have been appointed, sent, and supported by Southern Baptists to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth” and declare that they “enthusiastically support our IMB missionaries through their praying, giving, and going.”

They also affirm that the IMB’s candidate approval process “has been fair, thorough, and complete, producing a dedicated, well-trained missionary force” that meet the criteria set out by the SBC Constitution that “all missionaries appointed by the Convention’s boards must, previous to their appointment, furnish evidence of piety, zeal for the Master’s kingdom, conviction of truth as held by Baptists, and talents for missionary service.”

The group “call(s) on Southern Baptists to hold the entities of the SBC accountable to the direction of the convention’s churches, not the churches to the sentiments of their entities” and “strongly urge(s) Southern Baptists to seek the removal of these controversial and superfluous guidelines from use in the candidate approval process.”

The group has created a Web site at imbchange.info to “encourage appropriate principles and guidelines for missionary service through the International Mission Board of the SBC.”

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For more information, contact:

Concern4Missions@bellsouth.net
Allan & Pam Blume 828-265-0220 or 828-266-9700
Steve Hardy 336-714-5468

Interrupted for breaking news we continue Marty “Carmen Sandiego” Duren’s series we have themed, “Where is the SBC?” Since Marty dropped off the Outpost map some conjectured his displeasure with the Outpost. Instead, Marty has been living out of the reality he now experiences and is writing here in part 2.

We’re Not Who We Thought We Were.

One of the more replayed video clips over the last few years was that of NFL head coach Dennis Green of the Arizona Cardinals. Following a loss to the Chicago Bears in 2006, which his team had led 24-3 in the fourth quarter, came the inevitable press conference. An obviously ticked Green exploded like a man who’d been celebrating Cinco de Mayo for a month. “The Bears are who we thought they were,” has become a favorite line for sports fans ever since. What Green was saying was, “They had nothing on us. They were the team we prepared for and we let them off the hook. We should have won the game.” It was slightly more colorful in the original language.

In thinking through this series, the word “disintegration” was intentionally chosen over the word “collapse.” I do not think that we will wake up one morning in the next year to find that the United Methodists, the Lutherans, Episcopalians (in their various stripes) or SBC will have closed the doors and shuttered the windows. I do think that we will continue to see decreasing viability of meaningful gospel influence in these organizations to the point that, like water against a rock, the slow erosion results in an unstable foundation and eventual cessation of denominational existence.

Linked in Ed Stetzer’s warning shot were two papers by J. Clifford Tharp, Jr. one with the following chart indicating “Total Membership” and “Resident Membership.”

Tharp’s brief analysis included these three points: 1. Trends in Membership (both Total and Resident) are becoming very flat; 2. Total Membership is dangerously close to beginning to decrease; 3. The gap between Total Membership and Resident Membership is widening. Observant readers will notice that if the top line flattens and the gap between the two widens, then necessarily the bottom line is beginning or continuing a downward arc. On this chart, that means that Resident Membership is decreasing. As we know and will soon reconsider, Resident Membership itself is a misleading measure of biblical membership and should not be considered an accurate accounting.

We’re not who we thought we were.

A second chart (below) tracks SBC baptisms from 1950-2004.

As you can see, baptisms have remained virtually static for more than 1/2 a century (there is a minuscule increase of 45 per year). The US population in 1950 was 152,271,417. Non-stop growth brought us to 281,421,906 by the year 2000. In a non-scientific but well thought through series of observations, Nathan Finn suggests that the Southern Baptist Convention is probably reaching no more than 100,000 “unreached Americans” per year while in their book, “Who Will Be Saved?,” Paul House and Greg Thornbury write:

Statistics compiled by the North American Mission Board…reveal that as many as half of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are rebaptisms of persons already baptized by Southern Baptist pastors. Another 40 percent of adults baptized are Christians from other denominations who have never been immersed. Only ten percent of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are making first-time professions of faith.

And this from what is widely considered the most evangelistic denomination in the U.S.

We’re not who we thought we were.

In her new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, Christine Wicker takes both Southern Baptists and evangelicals to task for their faulty reporting of their actual membership totals. She notes, for example, that:

Only 7 percent of members who’ve been in a Southern Baptist church five years of less are true converts, meaning sinners who weren’t raised in the church but came through a profession of faith in Jesus. If you took out the Southern Baptists who married unbelievers and brought them to faith, hardly anybody would be left.

Behind the thesis is that there are not nearly as many committed, Bible believing, Bible following Christians in American as we have all been led to believe, the former Dallas Morning News writer (and former Southern Baptist) pegs SBC active membership at just north of four million. Though Wicker finds herself somewhere between an agnosticism and an reluctant atheisism, her understanding of what genuine church membership should be is decent. She refuses to acknowledge that the SBC consists of 16+ million members, stating, “How many members a church has is a pretty worthless measure of reality…[only] about two-thirds are even residents of the same town as the churches they belong to.”

We’re not who we thought we were.

Not content with exposing the SBC’s lack of clothing, Wicker also points out that the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) does not have its claimed and oft trumpeted 30 million members. There are sixty denominations that make up the membership of the NAE including the Assemblies of God, Church of God, Church of the Nazarene and the Evangelical Free Church of America. According to Wicker’s research, the total membership of the fifty member denominations listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2007, the American Religion Statistical Archives and the denominations’ own Web sites the grand total of the members is 7.6 million people. Active membership would be much less–less than half actually. So, what of the elusive 30 million count we’ve all heard. No one, not even NAE president Leith Anderson knows for sure. The 1990 NAE record listed only 4.5 total members.

We’re not who we thought we were.

What does this mean? Is the issue a matter of simple math? No. The issue is that, not only have we been well behind the population growth curve, we didn’t have as great a number in the starting blocks as we had been led to believe. Since every age group of baptisms is decreasing except those who are under five years old and since the number of those graduating from high school and leaving church is increasing and since the ranks of admitted unbelievers is the fastest growing “faith” category in the US, there simply are not going to be enough people to keep denominations, which are dependent on heavy financial investment, afloat. As denominationally oriented church members age and die (and they already are) younger people will not give tithes to churches that insist on supporting failing bureaucracies, thus leading further down the Post Denominational road.

We’re not who we thought we were.

No. It isn’t falling, but it appears to be in disrepair. Ed Stetzer has come out with Part Two of his analysis on SBC growth trends (or un-growth trends, as the case may be).

The wailing and gnashing of teeth has personally been quite unexpected. I never would have thought that his three-pronged prescription: seek to broaden convention participation, quit fighting so much, and get focused on the gospel, would have been viewed as so much poor medicine. I guess I continue to underestimate the penchant for people to deny what appears to be such clear reality.

I, like Todd, am a little incredulous that people would propose that the SBC has all of a sudden gotten a conscience about church membership or that a significant number of churches have gotten the will to act on that conscience. We’ve tried to address the regenerate church membership issue in our church and I continue to hear objections that “they might come back” or “aren’t we telling them we don’t care about them any more?” Admittedly, I’ve only been here four years and this issue has not necessarily been what I’ve been overly focused on. We’ve had our talks, but I’m not going to shove it down people’s throats. That’s just not how I tend to lead. We’ve been trying to talk more about missions, generosity, the gospel and community impact.

But maybe there are a significant number of churches cleaning up their rolls. Given the convention’s inability to express a positive resolution in favor of such a thing I remain quite skeptical. Let’s not forget that one chairman of the Resolutions Committee actually argued, publicly, that we should keep them on our rolls as prospects. And his argument won the day. This was but two years ago.

Now it appears that Thom Rainer, LifeWay statistician Cliff Tharp and Southern professor Chuck Lawless agree that the trends do not look good. You know where I stand (here, here, here and here).

As Ed says at the end of this second article, “…the fact is that we don’t need to say this is not real. It’s deadly real and has eternal significance. If trends continue, we are entering a period of decline and we need to repent and ask God for His power to change.”

Right you are, Ed. Right you are.

In late February the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma hosted its second Missional Ministry Conference. One of the featured speakers, Ed Stetzer, offered illustration of recent Lifeway Research during a breakout session. During the Q and A he sought to break down some of the technical features of statistical analysis for we average folks. I was left thinking it may be good to include a course in statistics for seminary students - and so we pastors.

I, like many pastors, tend to watch “trends.” For example, one of the trends I have watched over the past five or so years is attendance. Now that is not to imply some kind of weird disinterest in previous years. Instead, I began noticing attendance patterns changing in our church. I will go out on a limb and say ours is not the only church where attendance has “leveled” after a period of growth while we have continued to see additions to our membership over the years. Since we place such an emphasis upon the size of a church in order to imbue another with a sense of honor and prestige it is nigh impossible for we pastor types to leave attendance concerns to someone else. Why, when news breaks about a potential SBC President, it seems we always find mention of the size of church and the kind of growth of said church during the tenure of the “prestigious” pastor. But, I digress.

Growing up in an SBC church meant gauging “regular” attendance by weekly attendance. Over these past five years or so I have found we may need to re-think “regular” attendance. I cannot recall where I read it but it seems that we (SBC) have even adjusted our ruler for “regular” attendance to twice a month, and maybe even monthly. What do these patterns mean? We self-conscious types wonder what we may have done, who we may have neglected, what we have forgotten. After all, when attendance flags the most dreaded description has become, “plateaued or declining.” Yet, I wonder how often that particular category denigrates the work of a local congregation because analysts fail to take into account a host of factors involved in any given local context. When we see the trends we ratchet up our rhetoric and cast about for ways to invigorate and inspire to new heights (read: numbers).

Read the rest of this entry »

Today Ed Stetzer is reporting that, for the first time in our history, the Southern Baptist Convention is in decline in terms of overall membership. We’ve been in decline in baptisms for about seven or so years and now we are seeing that reflected in our membership numbers.

He writes:

…you cannot miss the fact that a dubious historical milestone has been reached—and it needs to be noted in denominational and church offices across the country.

There are three issues Stetzer says we, as a denomination, should address:

1. The absence of young leaders and ethnic leaders in denominational life.
2. Denominational infighting.
3. (most importantly) We’ve lost our focus on the gospel.

Check out Ed’s blog for more details. More commentary to come.

Yesterday, Criswell College trustees voted to reject a proposal whereby the Dallas school would be subsumed into Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Developing . . .

In recent weeks, Defendant Paige Patterson lost the seminary’s general counsel, who has resigned to accept a parallel position at another North Texas school alongside former SWBTS public relations director, Dr. Greg Tomlin. Joe Breshears began his service to SWBTS in the Office of Institutional Advancement under former veep, Jack Terry. He continued in that role until Defendant Patterson moved him to the President’s office around the time that Jack Terry’s administrative assistant was shuffled out by Patterson.

Breshears served as General Counsel to the President of SWBTS during the entirety of the Klouda ordeal until a few weeks ago, when he left the seminary to begin working at the University of North Texas, Dallas campus. According to reports, Breshears also directed the seminary’s planned giving and managed the seminary endowment. The degree of his involvement in orchestrating the $90 Million endowment boondoggle of 2006 is unknown.

On March 6, 2008, the Texas Secretary of State authorized a request from Defendant Patterson to change the seminary’s registered agent from Breshears to his Vice President for Business Administration, Greg Kingry.

Before coming to SWBTS, Breshears was suspended from practicing law by the State Bar of Texas for neglecting clients.

I wonder if Breshears was the one providing legal counsel to Defendant Patterson about how to get rid of Sheri Klouda?  The fact that he is no longer employed by the seminary could mean, of course, that Breshears is free to testify in the Klouda trial.

Klouda’s response to Motion for Summary Judgment

Klouda’s Brief in Support of Response to Patterson MSJ, Pt. 1

Klouda’s Brief in Support of Response to Patterson MSJ, Pt. 2

Last year when the Klouda ordeal became publicized, SWBTS Trustee Chairman Van McClain — himself an Old Testament professor at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary — responded to media inquiries from the Dallas Morning News.  In McClain’s affidavit, on file with the Federal District Clerk, the trustee chairman alleges that his statements in this attached email were misinterpreted.

Klouda’s hiring, McClain suggests, was a result of a “momentary lax of the parameters.”

From this email with Dallas Morning News reporter Sam Hodges, we learn that former SWBTS President Ken Hemphill has been interviewed about Southwestern’s policy on women teaching Hebrew in the School of Theology.  McClain also references former SWBTS Professor Karen Bullock, though he fails to elaborate on the circumstance of her dismissal.

Nevertheless, I find it interesting that McClain can allege that a combined thirteen years of women teaching in the School of Theology at Southwestern is “momentary.”

Van McClain email correspondence with Dallas Morning News

Late in former SWBTS President Ken Hemphill’s tenure, the seminary trustees thought it best to strip him of his academic oversight of the seminary and create a provost position for Craig Blaising. At the time, trustees jokingly referred to Blaising as the “Platinum Provost.”

“His bedside manners are terrible,” one seminary trustee told me upon Blaising’s election. “But he will finally get the job done.”

Blaising hit SWBTS like a storm, reorganizing the administrative structure and negotiating the reassignment or release of professors and staff deemed “not conservative enough” for seminary trustees. When the Karen Bullock fiasco hit the fan, it was Blaising who reportedly carried the message to Hemphill that he had lost the trustee support. At one point, the former Vice President of Institutional Advancement, Dr. Jack Terry, offered to tender his resignation if Blaising wasn’t relieved of his sweeping executive authority.

Not long after Patterson arrived at SWBTS, Blaising’s “platinum provost” position was downgraded to silver. And there was much rejoicing.

Today, Craig Blaising is doing his best to cover Defendant Patterson’s hind quarters. In fact, no greater loyalist at SWBTS can be found among Patterson’s two-legged colleagues. His affidavit reveals the nature of his involvement in negotiating Klouda’s contract with the seminary, in revising the conditions of her faculty responsibility to satisfy hesitant trustees, and in doing the dirty work of giving her the boot when Patterson determined that his “sincere religious belief” warranted a unilateral vacation of the trustee majority opinion regarding the suitability of a woman to teach Semitic languages in the School of Theology.

With that, I give you:

The Sworn Affidavit of Craig Blaising