SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The president of the Southern Baptist Convention yesterday told the annual meeting of the convention that the denomination should set aside internal differences and be both “right and relevant” to revive a languishing membership.
The Rev. Frank Page made the appeal as moderates, as doctrinal liberals call themselves, took their first steps to slow down conservative attempts to more narrowly define what it means to be a Baptist.
A South Carolina pastor, Mr. Page spoke yesterday morning to thousands of “messengers,” or delegates, at the opening of the annual meeting of the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination. He was later re-elected without opposition to a second year leading the 16.3 million-member convention.
“When we speak the truth without love, it leads to a cold-hearted legalism that our world has come to say is the caricature of the Christian, and I reject that,” Mr. Page said. At the same time, he said, another danger is “a cold-hearted liberalism.”
“God wants balance,” he said. “He wants us to speak the truth in love.”
Mr. Page described the denomination as at a crossroads where it is “not the only game in town.” He called for a renewed focus on the joy of Christianity and a passion for “reaching the lost,” rather than infighting and finding faults with others.
Yesterday evening, a debate and vote were scheduled on a motion that is at the core of the search for a Southern Baptist identity. The work of a coalition of moderates, it proposes adopting an executive committee report that would, in effect, make it more difficult to set litmus tests for Baptist identity beyond a doctrinal road map called the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.
“This will help our entities know our boundaries and help them not make laws unto themselves,” said the Rev. Rick Garner, an Ohio pastor who introduced the motion. “The greatest thing at stake here is to allow our convention to stop narrowing the parameters of exclusion and get back to kingdom-building and inclusion.”
At stake is the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention nearly three decades after a “conservative resurgence” purged liberals over the issue of biblical infallibility. The latest controversy centers on speaking in unknown tongues, a Pentecostal practice that is spreading across denominational lines.
These tongues, which sound like gibberish to others, occur when a penitent at prayer says he feels the Holy Spirit taking over his speech. Many Southern Baptists object to this as contravening Baptist faith and practice, and want to set standards that would bar acceptance of the practice in seminaries.
Advocates argue that the Baptist Faith and Message sets no such standard, and cite a study by the denomination’s research arm that showed that 50 percent of Southern Baptist pastors believe the Holy Spirit can work through speaking in tongues.
In a speech from the podium, Morris Chapman, president of the executive committee, suggested that convention-affiliated groups should be required to seek permission before adopting practices with the force of doctrine beyond Baptist Faith and Message boundaries.
“We must come together in one spirit over the core beliefs that we hold in common …,” Mr. Chapman said. “We must not make every doctrinal issue a crusade or a political football.”
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