Baptist news is a target-rich environment these days. We have a lot to talk about. New appointment guidelines for missionary candidates, the SBC will be asked to remove a trustee this summer, the SBTC has removed a church, and so on. Let me offer some thoughts on a variety of timely issues this week.
TRONG>The IMB & baptism
This issue is old news unless you read the “new media,” Internet blogs, specifically. Since the November International Mission Board meeting, private web logs have been abuzz with criticisms of the board’s guideline regarding the baptisms of missionary candidates. More recently these criticisms have centered on the supposed connection between Landmark theology and the IMB’s focus on a missionary candidate’s baptizing church.
The IMB is requiring that candidates be baptized in a church that immerses people after their profession of faith and that believes baptism to be symbolic rather than sacramental or regenerative. They further require that the baptizing church believes in eternal security. This means a candidate baptized in an Assemblies of God church or a Free Will or General Baptist church would need to be re-baptized before being accepted for missionary appointment.
A couple of points about this seem important. First, this is not Landmark theology. Nobody in this discussion has suggested that Baptists, specifically Southern Baptists, are the only legitimate expression of New Testament Christianity. In fact, the guideline does not stipulate that the baptizing church must be a Baptist church at all.
Second, the guideline defines “like faith and order” in the same way that most SBC churches do when they receive members. Right or wrong, this is the environment the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board must work within.
One reason for this policy is that some churches no longer examine prospective members. Another possible reason is that “big tent” evangelicalism appeals to some pastors so that members from other denominations are received by statement with little thought to their understanding of Southern Baptist doctrine. The churches need to do their work more thoroughly. Regardless, the mission boards can’t take anything for granted.
TRONG>The IMB & Wade Burleson
In a kind of aftershock to their November action, IMB trustees voted to ask the SBC to remove Oklahoma trustee Wade Burleson. Some of the trustees I talked to are pretty gentle souls. While they were careful to guard the confidentiality of board executive sessions, there was a general sense that Burleson is an intractable person. His voluminous blog entries would lead to that same conclusion.
Regardless, the IMB is going to have to make its case for the action they’ve asked the convention to take next June. Our messengers are going to have to know why they should take serious and unusual action against a trustee they elected only last June.
Trust does not enter into this. I think we do trust our elected board members. I have great confidence in the commitment and heart of the trustees I know. We’ll be asked to take action for ourselves, though. We will need enough information to make us believe what the board has come to believe—that Wade Burleson is unqualified in some way to complete his four-year term. I’m not saying they can’t but I’m saying they haven’t made that case in public yet.
TRONG>Creationism & Intelligent Design
While not a specifically Southern Baptist story, a Pennsylvania town’s smackdown of the teaching of any alternative to Darwinism has emboldened that religion’s partisans. Southern Baptists do find themselves embroiled in this debate at all educational levels, and on both sides. The most common error is to equate Creationism, the belief that the God revealed in the Bible made everything, and Intelligent Design, the belief that observable creation is too elaborate to be the product of random chance. The more clever of ID’s critics call it “Creationism lite.”
