DO SBC ACTIONS PUZZLE YOU?
By David R. Currie,
Coordinator

The restructured Southern Baptist Convention is reducing its agencies from 19 to 12 with expectations that more money will go to missions. Instead the SBC will give no increase to missions but raise the funds going to the six SBC seminaries and the Christian Life Commission. In fact, the CLC receives a 50% increase in funding! Does this surprise you? It should not if you understand the nature of the fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is an idealogy. According to A Handbook of Christian Theology, “fundamentalism is now a religious attitude rather than a religious movement. It is a highly ideological attitude. It is intransigent and inflexible; it expects conformity; it fears academic liberty.”

The fundamentalists in control of the SBC are putting their money into the pro- DO SBC ACTIONS PUZZLE YOU? grams which advance their ideology — seminaries where students can be indoctrinated with a fundamentalist world view and the CLC which works cooperatively with the Religious Right.

Missionaries on the field are much harder to control and influence than seminary students. Fundamentalists will talk missions, but if you examine the missions giving of the largest fundamentalist churches, you find nearly all give only 2 or 3 percent of total receipts to missions.

The facts are as follows: Traditional Baptist churches provide the majority of the funds to the SBC; SBC leaders in turn are taking that money and redirecting it into programs that expand their ideology, not missions. If you understand fundamentalism, this should not puzzle you at all.

April 1997