STATES DON’T NEED BUDGET OK FROM NASHVILLE
by Mark Wingfield

Do state or regional Baptist conventions have the right to determine how they spend their own money?

Apparently not, if you listen to the president of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee.

In an exchange reported on page 7 of this week’s Western Recorder, Morris Chapman, Executive Committee president, scolds the Northwest Baptist Convention over just such an issue.

The Northwest Convention—a group not known as liberals by any stretch of the imagination— drew Chapman’s censure because of a unanimous vote taken at their fall convention. They decided to take $50,000 off the top of their national Cooperative Program contribution to support Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. The California-based seminary operates a regional campus in the heart of the Northwest Convention, a strategic decision for which it is penalized by the SBC’s seminary funding formula.

Chapman asserts the Northwest Convention has no right to give a direct contribution to Golden Gate without harming the integrity of the Cooperative Program. The seminary will get what the SBC Executive Committee decides it should get, Chapman implies.

“It is not the prerogative of the Northwest Baptist Convention to spend $50,000 of the money allocated to the Southern Baptist Convention, not even if the state convention messengers vote unanimously,” Chapman wrote in a letter to the Northwest Convention’s leadership.

He then concludes: “I encourage you to discuss with me in the future any such actions under consideration that may significantly harm the Cooperative Program…”

Contrary to what some SBC leaders would have us believe, state and regional Baptist conventions are not farm teams for the SBC. They never have been and never should be. Money is “allocated” to the SBC only by directive of the state and regional conventions.

Neither the SBC nor its Executive Committee have any right to tell a state or regional convention how much money it must send to Nashville or what schools or agencies it may or may not support.

Chapman has it backward. The Northwest Convention has every prerogative to spend $50,000 of the money it otherwise would have sent to the SBC on Golden Gate, even without a unanimous vote.

In Baptist polity, decisions about Cooperative Program gifts flow from the bottom up, not from the top down. Churches determine how much money to send to state conventions, and state conventions in turn determine how much of that money to send to the national convention.

Both churches and state conventions are free to spend their money however they wish.

Following Chapman’s logic, the Kentucky Baptist Convention would have the right to tell your church not to send funds to Campbellsville College, Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children or MidContinent Baptist Bible College.

But your church doesn’t have to call Middletown for permission to determine your own budget; and neither the Northwest Baptist Convention nor the Kentucky Baptist Convention has to obtain permission from Nashville to set their budgets.

The irony is that several state conventions— older, stronger, more affluent conventions in the South—already have changed the way they support the Cooperative Program due to political differences. Just because the Northwest Convention doesn’t carry the financial weight of those conventions doesn’t mean it can’t make a budget change for philosophical reasons.

This article was written by Mark Wingfield, interim editor of the Western Recorder, the Kentucky Baptist state paper. It is reprinted from the Feb. 27, 1996 edition with permission.

April 1996