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Missionary daughter and granddaughter of the famed Baptist Hallock family stands firm for her beliefs.
Missionary fears backlash for not signing faith statement
By Mark Wingfield





GARLAND, Texas (ABP) — Music has opened doors for Southern Baptist missionary Charlotte Greenhaw in Recife, Brazil. She fears new doctrinal requirements by her employer, the International Mission Board, might close them.

Trained as a music educator, Greenhaw is classified as a “church and home” missionary by the Richmond, Va.-based IMB, working alongside her church-planter spouse. In practice, she is a Christian social worker who has led hundreds of people to Christ through ministry among the poor and in prisons in northeastern Brazil. Many of the inmates professing faith through her prison ministry have gone on to seminary since their release and are preparing to be pastors.

But Greenhaw says that work might be in jeopardy. The reason: She and her husband, Houston, have declined to sign an affirmation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s recently revised “Baptist Faith and Message.”

Music has opened doors for Greenhaw’s ministry both in Brazil’s prisons and with the street children of Recife.

“You can go anywhere with music,” the veteran Southern Baptist Convention missionary said during a recent interview at her daughter’s home in Garland, Texas, where Greenhaw was visiting a newborn grandson.

After working her way through the “Experiencing God” discipleship book, Greenhaw said she felt God leading her to move beyond the traditional music-education ministry she had done for years at the Baptist seminary in Recife. The words of Jesus recorded in Matthew 25 drew her. “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

With a boldness that seems to run in her family — her parents were legendary missionaries in Brazil, and her grandfather, “Preacher” Edgar Hallock, was a well-known Baptist pastor in Oklahoma — Greenhaw hit the streets. In Recife, thousands of children live on the streets, and most are addicted to sniffing glue as an escape from the suffering of poverty.

She took an electronic keyboard, sat down on a curb near a church and began to play. A crowd of curious children soon gathered. She turned that crowd into a choir with just one rule: the children must put down their glue.

From that beginning, other ministries to the street children developed in which they learned the gospel story and received help for physical needs. The ministry goes on today with leadership from seminary students and others.

Greenhaw still felt she had not accomplished all God wanted her to do, however. Matthew 25 still beckoning, she went to a prison and started an inmate choir.

The choir led to a Bible study, and the Bible study led to formation of a church within the prison walls. Prison officials eventually gave her permission to build a chapel on the prison grounds. With help from First Baptist Church of Norman, Okla., and others, a team of volunteers and the prisoners themselves built the chapel in five days.

The chapel features a well-used outdoor baptistry that serves as a visual witness to other prisoners. More than 500 prisoners are reported to have professed faith in Jesus Christ in the last three years.

Greenhaw has expanded her ministry to serve the families of prisoners. She assists them when they visit the prison on Sundays, and she devotes one day a week traveling around the region to visit prisoners’ families in their homes. She has arranged for 45 prison weddings — including 22 at one time — having emphasized to the male prisoners the importance of a marriage commitment.

Meanwhile, she also teaches at the seminary and assists her husband in his work as a church starter among wealthy Brazilians. In a recent campaign which reached out to the whole city, more than 900 young professionals received Christ. The Baptist couple is reaching out to both ends of the socio-economic spectrum.

Greenhaw is an American, but she feels just as much Brazilian. She was born in Rio de Janeiro and had been to the United States only twice before she arrived at the University of Oklahoma to attend college.

Her parents, Edgar and Zelma Hallock, were SBC missionaries to Brazil for 45 years. Her father also was a driving force behind the Baptist World Alliance, coordinating world congresses in 1960, 1990 and 1995.

Her grandfather, “Preacher” Hallock, was pastor of First Baptist Church of Norman for 46 years and a popular conference speaker.

Now she fears that legacy, her performance and her own rigorous theological examination upon appointment by the SBC as a missionary in 1980 aren’t enough for anonymous critics who view missionaries with suspicion.

IMB President Jerry Rankin wrote a letter in January asking all 5,100 missionaries to affirm the current version of the “Baptist Faith and Message” and to agree to carry out responsibilities “in accordance with and not contrary to” the confessional statement.

An earlier vote by IMB trustees not to require a poll of missionaries already on the field, Rankin said, “is creating suspicion that there are IMB personnel whose beliefs and practices are inconsistent with those represented by Southern Baptists.”

“While we believe this is unfounded,” Rankin continued in his letter, “we do not need an issue such as this to generate needless controversy, erode support and distract us from the focus on our task at such a critical time of opportunity around the world.”

But critics say “needless controversy” is precisely what Rankin’s letter has generated. Some changes made to the document in 2000 were unpopular with moderate- leaning Baptists. The Baptist General Convention of Texas, the largest state convention affiliated with the SBC, went as far as to go on record as affirming the 1963 “Baptist Faith and Message” instead.

Other criticism is that the faith statement has now become an official “creed” instead of a voluntary “confession” of faith — an important distinction in Baptist tradition. Others have said it’s an insult to question the commitment of missionaries who have served for years and accuse Rankin of bowing to pressure from unnamed skeptics.

Greenhaw said she and her husband never thought the political and theological controversy that has raged among Southern Baptists in the United States since 1979 would reach missionaries who live and work outside the country. The day they received notice that they must sign an affirmation of the convention’s new faith statement, they knew the controversy had indeed touched them.

For three days, Greenhaw said she stayed awake nearly all night, reading her Bible, praying for guidance and agonizing over how to respond to the IMB mandate. Finally, she settled on Daniel 3, in which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to his idol.

At that moment, “the Lord spoke very clearly to me not to sign,” she said.

She also remembered her family’s experience living in Oakington, England, before returning to Brazil. Near their home was a church graveyard where three men were buried who had spent a total of 52 years in prison rather than pledge allegiance to the Church of England under Henry VIII.

“We are not willing to sign off on somebody else’s statement of belief,” Greenhaw said. “I will not sign as a statement of my faith something I did not write. Neither will I promise to conduct my ministry according to a statement of belief which was prepared for a situation foreign to the culture in which I live and work.”

During her appointment process in 1980, Greenhaw said, she and her husband both completed all the scrutiny required by the SBC’s mission board. At the prompting of key questions, they wrote out their own statement of faith.

“My statement of beliefs still stands,” she declared. “My faith has grown, and my relationship with the Lord has deepened. My statement of beliefs still stands.

“I will notify the IMB the day it changes, but it hasn’t changed.” Three of the six IMB missionaries serving in Recife have not signed the affirmation of the 2000 “Baptist Faith and Message,” Greenhaw reported.

She said missionaries in Brazil were given a deadline of March 31 to sign the new faith statement.

After that deadline passed, the Greenhaws were among 12 missionaries called to a meeting with their regional leader and former IMB Executive Vice President Don Kammerdiener. At that meeting, Greenhaw said, they were asked what it would hurt for them to sign the affirmation, and then they were admonished to sign it. Then they were advised to “pray about this.”

Greenhaw responded that she already had prayed about it, extensively, and still would not sign. “If you have a problem with us as missionaries, come check us out,” she urged. “Come see what we’re doing. Help us meet the daily spiritual and cultural challenges of ministry, instead of taking doctrinal potshots from a distance on matters foreign to our culture.”

Although missionaries at the Brazil meeting asked Kammerdiener and the regional leader, “Who are these people who have questioned our beliefs?” they received no answer, Greenhaw said.

Now, as she prepares to leave her new grandson behind in Texas and return to her ministries in Brazil, Greenhaw wonders what will happen next. The missionaries in Brazil who did not sign the affirmation have not been told what will happen to them. They have been told only that IMB trustees will meet in May to discuss the matter.

“I don’t know what will happen,” she said matter-of-factly. “But the Lord has told me my time is not up, and I’m not leaving Brazil. I am not sure at this point who will support me, but I’m not willing to back off on what the Lord has called me to do.”

June 2002