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Political
Power and Payoffs Shrewd politicians and power-hungry people know: political power does not require a majority vote. Democratic organizations are especially vulnerable to takeovers. Control of a nation, or a denomination, can be grasped by power-hungry people with the help of a small corps of followers. Look at the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example. The SBC currently has twelve (12) boards of directors/trustees. Total membership on those twelve boards is 623! A Committee on Nominations has seventy (70) members. Additionally, the President of the SBC appoints five (5) committees with a total membership of 129. One of the committees, the Committee on Committees, has 70 members. Total the numbers and it becomes clear that the president of the SBC and 822 other persons have the power to control the total life of the SBC! Take the analysis one step farther. The Committee on Committees (70 persons) is appointed by the president of the convention (1 person) and nominates the Committee on Nominations (70 persons). The latter committee, in turn, nominates persons for all vacancies on the twelve boards of the directors/trustees! Add another factor into the equation. Attendance at the annual SBC has taken a dive with the rise of Fundamentalist leadership. The high attendance for an annual SBC convention was 45,519 in Dallas in 1985. The lowest attendance for the SBC annual convention occurred just three years later (1988) in Salt Lake City as the Fundamentalist takeover neared completion. The registration total for that year was 8,852. The numbers have yet to rebound. Figures for 1996 in New Orleans were 13,700. Figures for 1997 in Dallas were 12,420. Some reports for the recent 2000 SBC meeting in Orlando indicate messenger registration totals as low as 10,000. The way the SBC operates makes matters worse. Items that deal with the work of an agency or institution are referred, procedurally, to the chief executive of that body and/or to its trustees for consideration and reporting at the next annual convention. Thus, the powers that control the SBC control the work of the individual agencies and institutions. In a word, the system is closed! What happens when a group with a political agenda grabs control? A political spoils system and political patronage results! Those who grab control believe that the offices and their benefits are the sole property of their faction; and, they believe that those positions are to be bestowed for their own advantage. They practice political patronage. They control appointments and the election process. They oust people who are their "enemies" from office and replace them with "their own kind." They use the patronage to put into place those who support their policies. That has happened in the Southern Baptist Convention and that is the way business is conducted in the national body in AD 2000. Get ready for the same system in Louisiana! Look at the evidence. A small group, composed primarily of preachers, decided to take control of the SBC. The group included Paige Patterson, Paul Pressler, Adrian Rogers, Charles Stanley, Jerry Vines, Jimmy Draper, Morris Chapman, Bailey Smith, Ed Young, Richard Land, O. S. Hawkins, and Tom Eliff and a group that likely totaled no more than eighty (80) persons. Look at some of the results. One: nine of the preachers named in the preceding paragraph were elected as president of the Southern Baptist Convention! Two: Patterson, Draper, Land, Hawkins, and Chapman were rewarded with high-paying denominational posts when their predecessors were forced out, fired, or retired! Three: Rogers was named to the Southeastern Seminary board that elected Patterson as president. Four: Rogers, Stanley, and Young were named to the SBC Peace Committee. Rogers and Land were named to the Baptist Faith and Message "study committee," with Rogers as its chair! Five: Pressler was named first to the Executive Committee of the SBC and then to the Foreign Mission Board, with no lapse of time between appointments. He has also been recently named as an SBC representative to the Baptist World Alliance. Six: Richard Land was named to the 1997 Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee that added a highly controversial and political article to the 1963 document. See it for what it is and call it what it is! Add another piece of information. The 1999 SBC Annual indicates that the following persons are "SBC Members of the Baptist World Alliance General Council" as "Members by Nomination of the SBC"-Chapman, Draper, Hawkins, Land, and Patterson. See it for what it is and call it what it is! Get ready for more of the same in Louisiana. The preceding paragraphs report but a small part of the story. At the SBC level, relatives of Paige Patterson have been named to several posts: Chuck Kelley, Patterson's brother-in-law, to the presidency of New Orleans Baptist Seminary, to the Resolutions Committee, and to the Baptist Faith and Message study committee. Charles S. Kelley, Patterson's father-in-law, to the Midwestern Seminary Board; and Russell Kammerling, another brother-in-law of Patterson, as a trustee with the International Mission Board. Patterson's wife, Dorothy Patterson, was named to the 1997 Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee that proposed an addition to the 1963 document. See it for what it is and call it what it is! What we have in the Southern Baptist Convention is a tightly run political machine that, in recent years, has taken on the appearance of a family business. A spoils system akin to those in the secular political realm is firmly in place. Political patronage and blood ties are the orders of the day! See it for what it is and call it what it is! The political system at work in the Southern Baptist Convention is exactly what the Fundamentalists have in mind for the Louisiana Baptist Convention. Do we want a closed political system in the LBC? "No!" a thousand times over! Do we want the LBC to be a political province of the SBC Fundamentalists? "No!" a thousand times over! The good news is this: we do not have to be pawns in the hands of power-hungry Fundamentalists! We can stop the advance of the Louisiana Inerrancy Fellowship and its political operatives. The Louisiana Baptist Convention on November 13-14, 2000 is the place to shout "No!" with the united voice of our ballots. October 2000 |