NEWS STORY: Texas Baptists Slash Funding for Southern Baptist Convention Seminaries

c. 2000 Religion News Service CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas _ Texas Baptists voted overwhelmingly Monday (Oct. 30) to slash state convention funding for the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention. The dramatic move is the latest stage in the moderate-conservative struggle over the soul of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. “There are truths and principles […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas _ Texas Baptists voted overwhelmingly Monday (Oct. 30) to slash state convention funding for the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The dramatic move is the latest stage in the moderate-conservative struggle over the soul of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.


“There are truths and principles worth speaking out clearly about,” said Charles Wade, executive director of the moderate-led Baptist General Convention of Texas. “We live in such a moment in time. Baptist principles have been ignored.”

By an overwhelming margin, more than 6,500 messengers to the state convention meeting approved the plan of a seminary study committee to place a cap of $1 million on next year’s funding of the seminaries. This year the seminaries received more than $5 million in funding.

Final approval of a budget that would make the seminary vote a financial reality was taken by secret ballot and not announced by the end of the Monday afternoon session. If approved, the budget also would decrease funding of the SBC Executive Committee from $706,000 to $10,000 and eliminate the $345,000 the state convention allocated to the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission this year.

Claude Thomas, chairman of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee and pastor of a Euless, Texas, church, criticized the vote reducing funding of the seminaries.

“I think what has been done in striking at the seminaries is very, very sad,” he said. “It is very grievous to me and I think that it hurts your missionary enterprise when you determine that you’re going to strike at the capability to provide the men and women who serve as missionaries and pastors of our churches and our mission fields.”

The budget discussion sparked emotional debate from both those long familiar with and those new to the controversy, which has embroiled the national denomination since conservatives gained control of the church’s administrative machinery in 1979.

Texans _ and interested Southern Baptists from other states _ packed the Bayfront Convention Center in a standing-room-only crowd that spilled into an overflow room.


Leaders of the 2.7 million-member Baptist General Convention of Texas say the most recent changes in the denomination’s Baptist Faith and Message led to the move.

They believe the faith statement has made the denominational creedal _ a charge SBC leaders deny _ because it includes language about “doctrinal accountability.” Southern Baptist seminaries require their faculty to sign the statement to retain their employment.

Former President Jimmy Carter said earlier this month he could no longer be associated with the Southern Baptist Convention because the faith message had become “an increasingly rigid creed.”

The money previously sent to the Southern Baptist seminaries will be used for three theological schools supported by the Baptist General Convention of Texas. The money traditionally sent to the Southern Baptist Executive Committee and religious liberty commission would be allocated instead to Hispanic ministries and other state mission causes.

Bob Campbell, chairperson of the seminary study committee that recommended the reduced funding of the seminaries, criticized Southern Baptist leaders’ explicit request for nominees to trustee boards who support the new faith statement. He, like other BGCT leaders, believes that request means many Texas Baptists would not be welcome on SBC boards.

“They want your money,” he said. “They don’t want you.”

Those less familiar with the ongoing controversy worried about the message the budget vote could send.


L.A. Murr, a layman from Sunnyvale, Texas, said it sounded like “indignation” about the conservative leadership of the denomination.

“We’ve got the greatest organization in the world,” said a tearful Murr. “Don’t disrupt it.”

His motion that churches be allowed a specific option that would continue funding of the seminaries at the 2000 budget level was defeated, in part because the BGCT financial plan already allows individual churches to do that if they choose.

A move to reduce the funding of seminaries gradually over a three-year period also was defeated.

While Texas Baptists seemed ready to reduce some of the funding they long have given to some Southern Baptist entities, they rejected a motion to completely remove funding from the Southern Baptist Convention.

The proposed budget calls for the state convention to support other entities of the Southern Baptist Convention. More than $17 million would be allocated to the SBC mission and annuity boards.


In other action, the state convention adopted a constitutional amendment that permits members of churches from outside Texas to serve on boards of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Some critics have suggested that this would lead to the creation of a moderate-led national denomination.

Phil Lineberger, of Sugar Land, Texas, who made the original motion, told the convention he did not suggest it so the BGCT would become a national denomination, but rather to have a place that is “hospitable” to whose who do not feel comfortable with their own state conventions.

“I do not suggest we recruit churches outside Texas,” he said.

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