ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 30, 1996 TAG: 9607010073
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
As expected, members of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship voted Saturday to remain a "fellowship" and not become an independent Christian denomination.
Made up almost entirely of disenchanted Southern Baptists who disagree with the conservative leadership of that denomination, the fellowship has discussed this year - as it has every year since it was founded five years ago - the possibility of secession and independence.
But, once again, the prevailing sentiment was for the status quo.
"We're timid about such things," said Randall Lolley, chairman of a committee that studied the idea of forming a new denomination. Strong emotional ties continue to bind members to certain Southern Baptist programs - such as the Lottie Moon campaign to pay for foreign missionaries and the Annie Armstrong campaign to fund home missionaries.
"We're just not quite ready to do it," Lolley said.
Others worried that the fellowship - still new and relatively small - would lose overall in any confrontation with the 150-year-old Southern Baptist Convention - the nation's largest Protestant denomination.
The battle to determine which group that churches would choose would "destroy more churches than the fellowship would gain," one speaker predicted.
"We do not know yet what all we will be," said Lolley, whose compatriots seemed content, with him, to wait and see what the future holds.
Prospects seem bright in Virginia, a bastion of fellowship support with 258 churches contributing to its budget so far this year.
Jim Baucom, a Lynchburg pastor, led a meeting of almost 400 Virginia fellowship members on the opening day of the fellowship's national assembly.
With financial help from the national group, the Virginia fellowship hired Elmer West as a half-time state coordinator to help "spread the gospel of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship."
Virginia is unique among the states in the degree of cooperation between its Southern Baptist associational staff and the fellowship, West said.
It trails only North Carolina, which has 289 contributing churches, in membership support. Texas is the other stronghold state for moderates, with 231 churches sending money to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. The only other state with as many as 100 contributing churches is Georgia with 132.
The fellowship celebrated the registration of about 4,300 members for its General Assembly at the meeting, but the leadership had hoped for an even stronger showing since Virginia and North Carolina account for more than a third of the fellowship's total church membership of 1,450 congregations.
There are also some 2,700 individual members who contribute to the fellowship's causes independently of their churches. Each of them, as well as every member of each contributing church, is eligible to be a voting member of the annual general assemblies.
Though the fellowship has almost doubled in membership in the last five years, its numbers pale in comparison to the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims almost 16 million members in 14,000 congregations.
Undaunted by the comparison, however, these fellowship Baptists claim to be practicing a brand of that faith that preserves its traditions better than the new Southern Baptist majority.
Martin Marty, a University of Chicago professor widely recognized as the nation's premier church historian, urged the crowd Thursday night to aim for "restoration" of that Baptist tradition, rather than merely to "preserve" some vestiges of past glories.
He spoke after the audience was treated to a professional-quality dramatic presentation on the history of Virginia Baptists, written by state Baptist historian Fred Anderson.
The play depicted such women as Nannie Helen Burroughs, who became the first executive of the Women's Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, and Marjorie Bailey, the first Southern Baptist woman to be ordained in Virginia.
The fellowship's promotion of women's leadership and ordination has been one of the primary disputes between it and the Southern Baptist Convention. fellowship moderator Patrick Anderson of Lakeland, Fla., mimicking Southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy, said someone might be a fellowship member "if you have a deacon named Alice" or "if your pastor gets maternity leave."
But while the members could make jokes about such an issue, they also were urged to take seriously the "vital issues that are at stake," said the new Virginia coordinator, Elmer West.
Primary among them is a "crisis in theological education," West said. In the past, most of Virginia's Southern Baptist pastors have come from the denominational seminaries in Wake Forest, N.C., and Louisville, Ky.
Both of those are now training pastors in the conservative theology endorsed by the Southern Baptist leadership. That includes positions rooted in its view of the inerrancy of Scripture, meaning the Bible is without errors of science and history as well as theology.
These moderates say they also hold a high view of Scripture and its divine inspiration, but tend to allow greater leeway in matters of interpretation.
They preached a gospel of personal theological freedom, in which each individual believer is presumed to be competent to interpret Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit without the need for creeds, confessions or human mediators. They also contend that the current Southern Baptist leadership is imposing doctrinal tests for participation in leadership in a way Baptists never before have done.
"Twenty years from now, when your pastor retires, where are you going to find a new pastor?" West asked.
He fears that choices will be limited, with most of the potential candidates coming either from the North Carolina Southern Baptist seminary or from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Both are led by men "who would like to put a graduate in every Baptist church in Virginia," West said, but whose theology would be antithetical to that of the fellowship.
The organization faces other thorny issues as it decides just how independent of the Southern Baptist Convention it can be. Some churches, for instance, have in their constitutions "reversion clauses" that would hand their property over to their state conventions or the national Southern Baptist Convention should they ever vote to leave the denomination.
There also are questions as to how pastors with long investments in Southern Baptist retirement plans could be protected. And a subcommittee is trying to figure out how to get endorsements from the military and other agencies for chaplains operating out of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Despite those uncertainties and difficulties, however, retiring executive director Cecil Sherman left the members with some upbeat observations among some hard truths in his final address.
In the last five years, he said, the fellowship has grown from a grieving, reactionary, poor and scattered movement into a cohesive, financially stable and focused organization.
The still fledgling fellowship continues to face dangers, he said, including a pervasive regionalism that blinds some to national goals and concerns; a tendency to hang onto the past; clergy who put their careers ahead of principles; and churches that "quit on missions" and retreat into themselves.
"Continue to tell the truth," he said, but "resurrect kindness and civility in your discourse."
"The truth can be cruel," he said, but its delivery need not be. "There was a meanness and foul spirit loosed in the recent disagreement" with the Southern Baptist Convention.
That should end, he said, insisting that "kindness is not weakness."
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