How Good Is Your Memory?
By Charlie McLaughlin,
Associate Coordinator

A healthy organization will make timely self-evaluations resulting in productive changes. The Baptist General Convention of Texas has recently made this type of self-evaluation and has published its conclusion and recommendations in the report of the Effectiveness/Efficiency Committee. This is a 27-member committee which met eight times in 14 months and conducted numerous additional meetings through the work of seven sub-committees.

Some of the recommendations are being met with severe negative responses from Southern Baptist leadership. You can read the quotes of some of these leaders in Jerold McBride’s article, “The Sky is Not Falling.” Their responses imply a sense of innocence, as though the BGCT has wronged the SBC in a way they just don’t understand.

Mike Chancellor, pastor at Crescent Heights Baptist Church, Abilene, served on the Effectiveness/Efficiency committee. He summarized the situation in an article by ABP, “Texas has continued to do business the way it always has done its business. The SBC has redefined its relationship to Texas and has indicated that it did not want to work with our elected leadership.

“They have castigated, bullied, alienated and abused this relationship. When finally Texas Baptists responded with great grace and restraint, they play the injured party and with unbelievable innocence cried out, ‘We are committed to the relationship. We love Texas Baptists. We don’t understand why they are doing what they are doing.’”

Could this type of response by SBC leadership be an attempt to misdirect Texas Baptists away from their own actions in the relationship to the BGCT? How has SBC leadership treated the BGCT in the past three years? Here are a few thoughts to jog your memory:

1. In 1995, BGCT leadership requested $1,500,000 from the Home Mission Board to do more missions work in Texas, especially starting new churches. We have more unchurched people in Texas than the entire population of 42 of the 50 states in the USA.

Even though Texas is a mission field, Texas Baptists contributed $10,000,000 annually to the HMB. Despite efforts to work out a mutually acceptable plan to allow Texas to respond to its own needs, the HMB offered only token assistance of $100,000. Some cooperation?

When the BGCT met in San Antonio in 1995, the BGCT budget was changed to keep funds in Texas for starting new churches. Prior to the convention, the magazine SBC LIFE devoted two pages which criticized the proposed budget change.

2. In the fall of 1996 the BGCT Christian Life Commission altered its world hunger efforts. Giving to world hunger had dropped for several years under the promotion of dividing the offering 80 percent to the SBC Foreign Mission Board and 20 percent to the Home Mission Board.

In 1996, the CLC began soliciting specific proposals from the mission boards, as well as from the Baptist World Alliance, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Texas Baptist associations. An advertisement placed by the Foreign Mission Board in The Baptist Standard was critical of the BGCT way of handling world hunger funds. Understand that this is a SBC agency sarcastically attacking a BGCT commission.

The change by the CLC resulted in increased giving to world hunger. Even though BGCT giving to the FMB world hunger projects were more than any other state convention, the SBC still wanted to tell us what to do and how to do it. Is bullying Texas Baptists a form of cooperation?

3. This year the SBC met in Dallas. It is customary to invite the Director of the State Convention to preach, speak or offer a welcome. Texas Baptists were snubbed by the SBC when our BGCT director, Dr. Pinson, was not invited to address the convention at all. Texas Baptist churches gave over $44 million to the SBC in 1996 and our director was purposefully ignored. Does the idea that they want your money but not you ever cross your mind? Am I the only one getting this feeling of exclusion?

4. Woman’s Missionary Union has a significant role in missions efforts in Texas. This year at the SBC the WMU was undermined when an alternative meeting for women was scheduled at the same time as the WMU’s annual meeting. Is snubbing those who contribute so much to missions a new form of cooperation by the SBC leadership?

It is easy to understand why SBC leaders will oppose the Effectiveness/Efficiency Committee recommendations. If it is not their dictating what to do and how to do it, then they are against it. If it is inclusive of those they want to exclude, then they are against it. If it threatens their sense of power, even if its fair, they are against it.

As Chancellor says, “The way to strengthen our ties is for the SBC to realize that if they want to work with us, they must let us be an equal partner in all that is going on. Our leadership must be consulted, utilized, respected and cooperated with.”

September 1997