Gander vs. Goose: Let’s Drop The Double Standard
by Marv Knox,
editor Western Recorder

Reprinted by Permission

Why is the Foreign Mission Board praised for working with other Southern Baptists who want to do missions, while the Woman’s Missionary Union is vilified for doing the same thing?

The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board recently signed a covenant to work with a consortium of Southern Baptist-led autonomous ministries. FMB President Jerry Rankin praised the action. “Here’s a group of Southern Baptists who have a heart for a lost world,” he said. “We can all be more effective by working together cooperatively.”

Three weeks later, the Southern Baptist Woman’s Missionary Union announced it will produce study materials for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a group which, organized to do missions after its members felt their voice in the Southern Baptist Convention had been silenced. Morris Chapman, head of the SBC Executive Committee, lambasted the action, calling it “astonishing” and predicting it “will be regretted throughout the SBC.”

Why the double standard? Is what’s good for the gander not good for the goose? The FMB receives praise for wing with other Southern Baptists who want to do missions, and WMU is vilified for working with other Southern Baptists who want to do missions. This is not unique:

The SBC nominating committee recently rejected an SBC-supportive trustee candidate because his church allows members to designate funds to the Fellowship—even though the church still primarily supports the SBC.

Employees at several SBC agencies have been made to feel they will imperil their jobs if they join SBC-supporting churches which allow individual designations to the Fellowship.

Even as the FMB has signed the covenant with autonomous ministries, it has backed away from cooperation with Baptist groups in Albania, where the Fellowship’s ministry is prominent.

“Oh, but the Fellowship is competing with the SBC, while other organizations are not,” comes the convention response. While some Fellowship money might otherwise go to the SBC, this rationale is nonsense. By the same logic, the organizations which signed the covenant with the FMB are competitors, since the money that goes to support them doesn’t go into SBC coffers. Similarly, para-church groups supported by the mega-churches of current SBC leaders are “competitors” with the SBC. If we applied this logic evenly, we would throw out all but a handful of the very smallest SBC churches. And then where would we be?

It’s time to quit trying to run the “competition” off the road. The SBC believes Jesus Christ is the only answer for a lost and hurting world. So does the Fellowship. Our real competition is Satan. Let’s save our energy for battling the Evil One.

August/September 1995