MOVE AGAINST EUROPEANS RATTLES SOUTHERN BAPTISTS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 18, 1992                   TAG: 9201180319
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
MOVE AGAINST EUROPEANS RATTLES SOUTHERN BAPTISTS
Aftershocks from the Southern Baptists' Foreign Mission Board decision to stop funding a Swiss Baptist seminary continue to shake up the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
Earlier this month, Isam Ballenger and Keith Parker, the board's two top executives who work with European missions, resigned, saying the board's trustees had undermined their attempts to build trust and cooperation with the Europeans.
The board voted in October and December to rescind a promise of $365,000 for the Ruschlikon Baptist Theological Seminary's 1992 budget. The action followed the seminary's hiring of a moderate Southern Baptist theologian to teach for a semester.
Parker said the effect of the move was intimidation of European churches and mission bodies to agree with what he called the fundamentalist agenda of the Foreign Mission Board trustees.
In a Baptist Press article, Parker quoted a letter between two trustees who accused the board staff and its European missionaries of being " `liberals' or `neo-orthodox' [whose] appointment over the past 25 years has brought about the problems we have now."
Both Parker and Ballenger refused to go so far as to advise potential missionary candidates against seeking appointments, but they didn't encourage them either.
The coordinating council of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a moderate splinter organization, this week voted to hire Southern Baptist missionaries in Europe who no longer want to work for the Foreign Mission Board.

In other news from the mailbag this week:
Religious or quasi-religious organizations dominated the list of the five largest U.S. charities for 1990, the latest year for which totals have been compiled by The NonProfit Times, a New Jersey publication.
The top five, in order, were Catholic Charities USA, Lutheran Social Ministry Organizations, American Red Cross, YMCA and Salvation Army.
Lutheran World Relief ranked 32nd but was the fastest growing in 1990, when its income rose 151.4 percent to $92.6 million. That organization - operated cooperatively by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod - had administrative costs of less than 1 percent of its income, the fourth lowest among the charities surveyed.

We members of the Religion Newswriters Association - who really are no better judge of this than you, probably - have decided that the Presbyterian Church (USA) battle over a sexuality statement was the biggest religion news story of 1991.
Other stories in the "top five" included the new role of religion in the nations of the former Soviet Union; the opening of the Dead Sea Scrolls to scholars; religious questions about the morality of the Gulf War; and the Kansas and North Dakota anti-abortion protests.
Don't you feel better knowing that you didn't miss those?

For years, those who objected to the limitations on church-state interaction in the United States could be reminded of the situation in Mexico.
Since 1917, churches have been forbidden to own property, operate schools or publicize themselves; and clergy were prohibited from voting or criticizing the government.
All that ended recently when the Mexican legislature extended official recognition to religious institutions.
There apparently no longer is the fear that the Roman Catholic Church - which has the nominal membership of 91 percent of the nation's population - will attempt to dominate the secular government.
Numerous sources now are declaring that Morris Chapman, president of the 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, has been tapped to be the next president of the convention's Executive Committee.
The appointment, which would have to approved by messengers to the next annual convention, in June in Indianapolis, would move Chapman into what Associated Baptist Press calls the denomination's "most influential post."
Chapman, 51, would preside over the Executive Committee, which drafts the convention's $140 million Cooperative Program budget and is empowered to act for the convention between annual meetings.
The current president, 67-year-old Harold Bennett, is scheduled to retire in October after 12 years in the job.
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by Archana Subramaniam by CNB