The Gravel Rule
by Mike Clingenpeel

The Southern Baptist Convention and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship are not exactly bosom buddies. In a list of history’s most adoring couples they line up somewhere behind Sadaam Hussein and Norman Schwartzkopf, Jesse Helms and Teddy Kennedy, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor and, well, pick a name.

Recently, it came to light that the SBC Executive Committee has prepared materials to give to Baptists who want to know more about CBF. Eliu Camacho- Vazquez, executive director of the Caribbean office of the Home Mission Board, obtained the documents and recently used them to say the CBF justifies lesbianism as an alternative lifestyle and the Bible contains errors.

Instead of describing CBF by its own statements of mission, priorities, commitments and initiatives, all approved at a CBF General Assembly, the SBC Executive Committee’s materials contain a page of quotes, selective and without context, from speakers with some affiliation to CBF.

It occurred to me that similar materials could be prepared and used to discredit any organization, like the Republican Party, even the SBC. I thought it would be a curious exercise to create some materials defining the SBC by the same methodology the SBC Executive Committee uses to classify CBF:

•Theological education: “If Southern Baptists believe that pickles have souls, then professors must teach that.” — Adrian Rogers, three-time SBC president, 1987.

•Evangelism: “There is no such thing as a good man who doesn’t know Jesus. The person who is not saved is in fact the son of the devil, a rebel, hating the light. Now they can mask it and bad men can do some good things, but at the core they are bad people.” — Mark Coppenger, President, Midwestern Baptist Theologian Seminary, 1996.

•Cooperative Program: “Southern Baptists have made a golden calf of the program… It’s almost easier to be against the virgin birth than the program.” — Adrian Rogers, 1982.

•Fellowship: “Liberals today call themselves moderate. A skunk by any other name still stinks.” — W.A. Criswell, two time SBC president, 1988.

•Race Relations: Apartheid “doesn’t exist anymore and it was beneficial when it did.” — Curtis Caine, SBC Christian Life Commission trustee, 1988.

•Reconciliation: “We are going for the jugular. We are going for having knowledgeable, Bible-centered, Christ-honoring trustees of all our institutions, who are not going to sit there like a bunch of dummies and rubber-stamp everything.” — Paul Pressler, former member of Southern Baptist Executive Committee and current Foreign Mission Board trustee, 1980.

•Women: “The man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall.” — SBC resolution, 1984.

•Prayer: “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” — Bailey Smith, two time SBC president, 1980

Unfair, you cry. Foul. A low blow. These statements are taken out of context, reach back in some cases over 15 years, and do not reflect other more sensible, orthodox statements made by these Southern Baptists.

Does it make you mad that I have been so catty, so small, so misrepresentative? I hope so, because I am guilty of all the above. When you write to tell me so, keep the stationery out and write a letter to William Merrell, vice-president for convention relations at the SBC Executive Committee, and ask him to remove from the SBC’s materials about the CBF the page of quotations that uses precisely this methodology.

The mission and character of the SBC is no more reflected by the above statements than the CBF’s mission and makeup is by the few quotes mailed out by Nashville. Measure the character of fruit by more than the aroma, flavor and color of a few chosen pieces.

If the SBC must publish literature to counter CBF, which is its privilege, it should employ a biblical methodology— one that resembles the Golden Rule. If not, it invites someone with a twisted sense of humor to respond by the canons of the “Gravel Rule”—do unto others as they have already done unto you.

Mike Clingenpeel is editor and business manager of the Religious Herald, the Virginia state Baptist paper.

August 1996