Charles Wade speaks to Texas Baptists Leaders

Dear Texas Baptist leader:

As your executive director-elect, I am so excited about the future, and I look forward to having an opportunity to visit with you in the next few months.

I want to listen to you. I want to know your dreams for your church and community. I want to know how the Baptist General Convention of Texas and its staff can help you minister to your people in meaningful ways.

I want to work with all Texas Baptists. I want you to be able to ask me questions— any question. I want to know you better, and I want you to know me.

I am working with directors of missions to set up meetings for this purpose. And if you are bivocational, we will find ways to get together at times that work for you.

There has been much discussion regarding the position taken at the BGCT annual meeting in El Paso regarding the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message and the 1998 amendment known as “Article XVIII, The Family.”

I regret that has been the most high-profile event of the convention. If you were there, you know the state convention was about the extraordinary work of our churches in the past year. It was about how Texas Baptists have sought to be on mission for the Lord Jesus Christ in our communities, in Texas, and around the world.

We put our arms around El Paso in an emphasis called “Abrazando” and hugged the people of that great Borderplex up close to God. We honored Dr. Pinson for his 17 years of unselfish and brilliant service to Texas Baptist churches.

It was a great time of celebrating missions and preparing ourselves for the next great advance of Texas Baptists, as we work together for our Savior and the people He died to save.

Permit me to express what I understand to be the meaning of our decision in El Paso regarding the Baptist Faith and Message, Article XVIII. You know, of course, that I do not speak for Texas Baptists. But your Executive Board has elected me to speak to you, and as best I can, along with elected leaders of the convention, to represent us before the world. I take that responsibility seriously, and I ask for your prayers for me.

The Baptists of Texas are a great people. With hearts committed to God, with firm conviction that Jesus, the Son of God, is the way to life eternal, with dependence upon the Holy Spirit to empower us for bold witness and acts of Christlike ministry, we have grown from a handful of hearty pioneers into a great family of 2.7 million believers who touch every part of our state.

Texas Baptists are a Christian people— a Bible-believing, Gospel-preaching, church-centered, freedom-loving, praying people. We love God and we love others. We live under the authority of the triune God, as we discover Him and His will revealed in His deeds and words recorded in Holy Scripture.

The Bible is true and trustworthy, God’s written Word. Baptists acknowledge no creed or confession of faith to have coercive power over the conscience of the believer. We have no creed but the Bible itself.

We base our doctrines on Scripture itself and not on some humanly crafted interpretation of Scripture.

Confessions of faith have value in giving a concise and comprehensive overview of those truths deemed most crucial for believers and in seeking to make clear what is unique or distinctive about the doctrines of a particular church or gathering of churches.

But the traditional Baptist understanding is those statements must not be used to insist on a spiritual and intellectual conformity.

Baptists certainly reserve to themselves the right to revise, amend, add to, or subtract from their confessions of faith, but we do not have the right to do that to Scripture. The Bible stands above all confessions or creeds that seek to explain it.

Fearful that a confession of faith could be used to divide rather than unify Baptists, the preamble of the Baptist Faith and Message affirms “that the sole authority for faith and practice among Baptists is the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

Confessions are only guides in interpretation, having no authority over the conscience …[and]… they are statements of religious convictions, drawn from the Scriptures, and are not to be used to hamper freedom of thought or investigation in other realms of life.”

This is a powerful reminder of what happens when God’s truth becomes captive to religious power. People are put into the position of having to agree with a teaching that they may be able to affirm in its essence but have serious reservations about when stated in certain ways or when important truths are overlooked or de-emphasized.

The discussion going on among Baptists just now provides an opportunity for Baptists to ask themselves: “Do we want to be faithful to Scripture… all of Scripture… or do we wish to be coerced into doctrinal positions about which we have another insight?”

The issue regarding the “family” article, added in 1998 by the Southern Baptist Convention to the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, is a perfect example of the problem.

The article is not wrong in what it says, but it is limited because it does not fully say what the Bible says. The Bible says, “Submit to one another out of reverence to Christ” (Eph. 5:21). The problem many Baptists have with Article XVIII is not that it calls for women to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22) but that it says nothing about the husband’s responsibility to follow the admonition of Ephesians 5:21 and submit to his wife.

Christian families, even those with a very authoritative husband, practice mutual submission when they are at their best. There can’t be a Christ-like home unless husband and wife serve each other and submit to one another as the need arises.

Some insist that the Ephesians text specifically says that the wife should submit to her husband but does not specifically say a husband should submit to his wife. However, using this line of reasoning, one would have to say that since the wife is not specifically asked to love her husband, it is not important for her to do so.

Jesus asked all of us to put the other first, to serve one another and to love one another. Christians, both men and women, are called on to do both: to submit and to love. (Compare Matt. 20:25-28; John 13:34- 35).

It has been said that those who hold to mutual submission do not believe the Bible and are captive to culture. Rather, it seems to me that this view expresses a fuller and more profound Biblical position and is a genuine reflection of Christ’s attitude toward women.

Another concern which should be addressed is how the statement of faith—the Baptist Faith and Message—is now being used in Baptist life.

Contrary to the clear disclaimer in the preamble, the Baptist Faith and Message is now used as a convenient vehicle to take away Baptist freedom of conscience and the God-given right to an uncoerced faith.

This is not about whether one believes the Bible or not. This discussion has been about how Baptists interpret the Bible. Should any Baptist have to sign a document that he or she did not have any input in developing?

When the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message was adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention, the convention was in historic linkage with the 1833 New Hampshire Confession of Faith and the statement adopted in 1925 by the convention.

According to Dr. Herschel H. Hobbs, the committee that recommended some changes to the 1925 statement sent their revisions to seminary professors in all six schools and to the theological editors of the Baptist Sunday School Board. These scholars were asked for their study and input.

Then it was published in the state papers and discussed by Baptists well before the convention met. It was adopted without having to change even a punctuation mark. (Hobbs, The Baptist Faith and Message, rev. 1996 ed., Convention Press, Nashville, Tenn., p.16)

Now an article over which sincere Bible-believing Baptists have differing interpretations is being pressed down on seminary professors who are not allowed to suggest a more comprehensive or alternate wording. If they will not sign the document they must walk away from their office of teaching to which they deeply believe God called them to serve.

The Baptists I know gladly bring their doctrine, their preaching and their lives under the authority of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Holy Scriptures, which are everywhere true and trustworthy. Convince a Baptist by Scripture and he will acknowledge his debt, but it is to God’s Word and to no ecclesiastical power that Baptists owe their salvation, their calling and their lives.

Thank you for this opportunity to share these thoughts with you.

Yours in Christ,

Charles Wade
Executive Director-Elect, BGCT

Reprinted with permission from The Baptist Standard

December 1999