c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ First Baptist Church of Greenville, S.C., has become the first church in the state to publicly leave the Southern Baptist Convention over its conservative direction, a trend that already has departures by eight churches in neighboring North Carolina.

Ninety percent of voting congregants chose to”prayerfully, voluntarily and deliberately”break away from the SBC and its conservative leadership on Sunday (May 2), said the Rev. Hardy Clemons, pastor of First Baptist. The church has 2,500 members on its rolls, but about 800 people attended the service.”It was clear to our church that Southern Baptists are going in a direction that is just not our direction,”said Clemons, whose moderate congregation was founded in 1831, 14 years before the creation of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Clemons said the vote, whose outcome was expected, came as a result of growing dissatisfaction with the”fundamentalist”conservative leadership that has gradually gained control of the denomination in a takeover that began in 1979. Since that time, to the chagrin of less conservative Baptists, ultra-conservative leaders have dominated the boards, agencies and seminaries of the SBC, which has about 15.7 million members.

Clemons said his congregation had grown more displeased with the SBC’s direction during the last decade. He pointed to last year’s decision to amend the denomination’s statement of faith to read that wives should”submit … graciously”to their husbands as just one of the issues leading to the disaffiliation.”One thing we’ve tried to say is this vote is not about who we’re not,”he said.”This vote is about who we are.” Clemons’ church, which stopped giving money to the SBC in 1993, has been particularly supportive of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a moderate group formed in 1991. Clemons was the moderator in 1993-94 and the Rev. Donna Forrester, the church’s minister of pastoral care and pastoral counseling, has been nominated to serve as moderator-elect later this year.

Clemons predicted other churches will follow the lead of churches like his.

Last year, when members of First Baptist Church of Raleigh, N.C., voted to end their relationship with the SBC, they unintentionally paved the way for other churches to follow.

To date, at least seven other North Carolina churches have formally cut their ties to the denomination. Two more are expected to make it formal within the next few months.

Herb Hollinger, press spokesman for the SBC, said First Baptist in Greenville and other moderate churches”were not really supporting us anyway,”so their formal decisions to break off relations do not come as a surprise.”The ones that are leaving are the ones we thought were going to leave anyway,”Hollinger said.”I would have expected First Baptist, Greenville, to have left a long time ago.” He said the SBC doesn’t keep statistics on the number of churches that drop their affiliation or the numbers that join, but some conservative churches have joined the SBC, based on their support of the denomination’s stand on moral issues.

Representatives of moderate North Carolina churches said the statement of faith revision was, for them, the”last straw”in what had been a deteriorating relationship with a denomination that no longer represents them.”There comes a point when you’ve just got to go on because staying has become too evil,”said the Rev. Michael Usey, pastor of College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro, which decided in January to disassociate from the denomination.”These churches that have left felt that not to say anything gives the impression the Southern Baptist Convention is what it used to be.” All these churches, which call themselves”moderate,”see women as equal partners in ministry. But their dissatisfaction with the denomination runs much deeper. Many of these churches say they silently disapproved when the Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions to evangelize the Jews and boycott the Walt Disney Co. And, they say, the conservatively-led convention has trampled over cherished Baptist principles such as the priesthood of the believer and the separation of church and state.

Well before the recent dissension over the statement of faith, North Carolina Baptist churches prized their independence. Two progressive Baptist churches were forced to leave the denomination in the early 1990s for performing a gay union ceremony and ordaining a gay divinity school student. And at least four other Baptist churches quietly abandoned the denomination long before the submission issue arose.

So far, churches that have left the SBC say they haven’t suffered any repercussions. First Baptist Church in Raleigh is thriving. The church recently embarked on a $2.7 million renovation campaign and it is drawing new members each month, said the Rev. Dan Day, its pastor.

And copycats too.

First Baptist Church in New Bern expects to vote on disassociating with the SBC in a few months.”It’s a statement of integrity,”said the Rev. Tom Denton, pastor of the church.”I believe there’s a fierce independence among local Baptist churches that causes them to make a decision for themselves.”

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