Does Texas Baptists Committed perpetuate division?
By David R. Currie,
Coordinator

Toby Druin, editor of the Texas Baptist Standard, recently wrote an editorial which stated that the presence of organizations like Texas Baptists Committed and Southern Baptists of Texas perpetuates the division among Texas Baptists. In some ways, I believe he is correct.

I wish there was no Texas Baptists Committed. It is a shame we as Texas Baptists need this organization. But the fact is, we do need TBC and Toby Druin knows we do. The success of TBC in protecting the BGCT from fundamentalist control is one reason Toby has the freedom to write his editorials without clearing them with the BGCT leadership or Paul Pressler.

I wish the SBC takeover had never occurred. I wish Southern Baptists were still focused on proclaiming the Good News rather than meeting in New Orleans trying to tell everyone how to live their lives and how BAD they are. (Do you remember Jesus telling Zacchaeus how bad he was, or the woman caught in adultery, or the woman at the well?) I wish SBC leaders were not offending women and Jews with such frequency.

I wish Walt Carpenter, editor of the Texas Baptists did not have the attitude he expressed in the Dallas Morning News on Saturday, June 8, 1996, when he said, “We’re going to do everything politicians try to do to win. It’s spiritual warfare, and it’s political warfare… We’ve packed cars. If we could get buses, the churches would charter buses. The way we’re going to turn it around is with the younger people.”

We do not want division. We want unity. My lead editorial, “Learning to Get Along” was written in early May, long before Toby’s editorial. We write about unity and respect in every issue. Every proposal we have supported at the BGCT has always been about promoting unity and respect. We never support, and will never support, any changes in the way the BGCT does things that is not as fair to the churches pastored by fundamentalists like Miles Seaborn and O.S. Hawkins as those pastored by Phil Lineberger and Jerold McBride.

We are committed to unity, and it seems to us that the best way to have unity as Texas Baptists is to recognize local church autonomy and the priesthood of the believer, two very Baptist distinctives. We believe we should not try to force any church or individual to support the SBC, CBF, or any national Baptist organization. We need to quit fighting over what local churches and individuals do with their mission money.

What we will never do is allow the fundamentalists to control the BGCT and thus control our Texas Baptist institutions, professors, and leaders without trying to prevent it. Texas Baptist leaders are solid Bible believing, missionminded men and women who need to be supported, not controlled, including Toby Druin and the Baptist Standard.

The one part of Toby Druin’s editorial I do strongly disagree with is the last sentence. He writes, in reference to TBC and Southern Baptists of Texas, that these organizations “have to justify their positions, so instead of searching for solutions to problems that divide us, they more likely will magnify our differences.”

We do not feel the need to justify our existence. The mess in the SBC clearly justifies our existence. We started because Paige Patterson said in the late 1980s that “now that we control the SBC our next agenda is to control the BGCT, Baylor and the Baptist Standard.”

We seek unity and we seek the day when we are no longer needed as an organization. We are simply concerned that with the history of fundamentalism, going back to J. Frank Norris, that day may be a long time coming.

We do not seek to perpetuate division. We believe that if we do not stand up for keeping missions and evangelism at the center of Texas Baptist life, and support our BGCT leaders and institutions, the fundamentalists will bring the same exclusiveness and narrowness to the BGCT that now dominates the SBC. A sad but true reality. So I hope Toby Druin keeps writing what he believes is right. In the mean time, we will keep working to assure him the freedom to do so.

August 1996