c. 1997 Religion News Service
UNDATED _”Blest Be the Tie That Binds”is a favorite hymn to celebrate Christian fellowship in Baptist circles. But the ties between some Southern Baptist-affiliated colleges and their state conventions are gradually unwinding, a casualty of the ongoing struggle between moderates and ultraconservatives that has polarized the nation’s largest Protestant denomination for two decades.
The divisive issue repeatedly surfaced during the recently concluded spate of annual state Southern Baptist Convention meetings at which debates over longstanding relationships with Baptist schools were prominent.”Baptist colleges and universities find themselves caught between the no-longer and the not-yet in a deeply divided denomination,”said Southern Baptist education expert Robert Mullinax.”Many colleges see it as a struggle for the souls of their institutions.”The fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and the radical changes in most Southern Baptist seminaries are seen by some Baptist colleges as a serious potential threat,”said Mullinax, executive director of the Council on Christian Higher Education for the North Carolina Baptist Convention in Raleigh.”One apt generalization seems to be true: the more conservative the state convention, the more controversy there seems to be over relationships between conventions and schools,”he said.
Recent events concerning Mercer University in Macon, Ga., are a prime example of how this issue has altered longstanding state convention-school relationships.
Earlier this month, Mercer trustees voted 38-5 to accept a hard-won compromise agreement on governance with their parent body, the Georgia Baptist Convention, which addressed the issue at its November meeting.
The compromise lets the convention nominate at least one trustee each year; assures that Mercer’s next president will swear fealty to the Baptist Faith and Message theological statement, and requires the state convention’s executive director to be seated and heard at all Mercer trustee meetings.
The changes are considered historic in that, since 1939, Mercer’s charter had given trustees, alumni and administration officials sole discretion over nominating new trustees. The convention had been required to accept one of three Mercer nominees for each new vacancy or go back to Mercer for more names.
Mercer was the only Georgia Baptist institution of any kind allowed to control selection of its own trustees.
But long-simmering tension between Mercer and its Georgia Baptist constituency boiled over two years ago when school president R. Kirby Godsey wrote a book entitled,”When We Talk About God: Let’s Be Honest.”Ultraconservative critics said the book contained heretical doctrines and called loudly for Godsey’s ouster. Trustees supported Godsey.
In September, a special investigatorial committee _ chaired by the Rev. Nelson Price, an avowed fundamentalist from Marietta _ called Godsey’s views”heretical to most Baptists”and suggested that Mercer trustees either fire Godsey or the school would be dropped from the convention budget.
The convention’s executive committee softened that proposal to the compromise plan finally approved by Mercer trustees.
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Following the Dec. 4 trustee vote, Godsey told reporters:”By affirming the report, our trustees are seeking to advocate and nurture a historic partnership in a spirit of cooperation, believing that trust must be built upon respect and cooperation, not control.” Mercer and Georgia Baptists have been linked since 1833. How long those ties will remain is hard to predict.
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The links between Baptists and their schools in several other states are undergoing similar ultraconservative-moderate strains, in most cases over the issue of trustee elections.
Delegates to state conventions often want to elect schools’ trustees rather than have an institution select its own trustees. School officials prefer to elect their own trustees to keep boards from becoming overly conservative.
_ In Arkansas, Baptists thought they had worked out a two-year battle over selecting trustees for their largest university, Ouachita University in Arkadelphia. In 1996, a”reconciliation”plan was proposed, which would have allowed the convention to continue electing Ouachita trustees based on nominations by school officials.
But when the 1997 Arkansas convention met in November, delegates defeated all the constitutional and bylaw changes necessary to implement the reconciliation plan.
The convention’s executive director, Emil Turner, lamented:”Right now and in the immediate future, our relationship consists of the convention’s vote to fund Ouachita through our budget process and to elect Ouachita trustees for this year. … Future components of that relationship are not clear.” _ In North Carolina, the state Baptist convention loosened its historic ties with Raleigh’s Meredith College over the issue of trustee election. North Carolina Baptists also voted to”consider”ending their informal relationship with Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem because that school now allows sale of alcoholic beverages on campus.
Wake Forest was officially a Baptist school for more than a century until 1986, when the state convention broke its ties over the issues of dancing on campus, election of trustees and acceptance of federal funds.
_ In Alabama, Baptists struggled with another thorny control issue. In 1994, the University of Mobile was ordered to stop sending funds to its branch campus in San Marcos, Nicaragua, a campus the university had started without authorization from its parent body, the Alabama Baptist State Convention.
Tensions surrounding the Nicaragua campus and its financial management forced University of Mobile president Michael Magnoli’s resignation last summer. Many expected the state convention to cancel support of the Mobile school in November.
Instead, they accepted a financial report from acting president Walter Hovell, which admitted”financial deterioration”of the school but promised that the school would continue working on the just-begun process of healing relations with the convention.
Just a year earlier, in the heat of another battle over trustee election, the Alabama Baptist Convention affected a fragile compromise which narrowly averted severing cords with Samford University in Birmingham, the second-largest Baptist school in the country.
_ Louisiana Baptists also sought answers to tensions swirling around their flagship school, Louisiana College in Pineville.
For three years, moderates and ultraconservatives have fought over alleged”liberalism”among the religion department faculty there. President Robert Lynn retired last year in the midst of heated debate.
Ultraconservative ministers leveled such vitriolic printed attacks against the school’s religion faculty that four professors filed slander suits. Their joint case is still in the court system.
In a temporary rapprochement, all warring parties got together in August and agreed on a consensus candidate for the 1998 president of the Louisiana Baptist Convention. He is the Rev. Bob Anderson, a retired pastor who heads the Baton Rouge-based Antioch Affection Ministries, a counseling service aimed at helping churches and ministers in conflict.
The tensions over Baptists and their colleges, so raw in 1997, are not new to the 15.6 million-member denomination.
In the last 25 years, state Baptist conventions have cut historic ties with Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., Furman University in Greenville, S.C., and the University of Richmond in Virginia, in addition to Wake Forest University.
Meanwhile, the denomination’s six seminaries have gradually come under the control of ultraconservative trustees who have forced resignations of several professors and administrators who would not accept their enforcement of theological doctrines.”The basic questions in such situations are control, and the freedom for an institution to pursue its mission without undue outside influence,”said Mullinax, the Southern Baptist education expert.”When Baptist colleges and universities look at the Southern Baptist Convention seminaries … there is one question which haunts many of them: `Could we be next?'” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS. STORY MAY END HERE.)
The deep-seated theological conflicts peaked a decade ago when ultraconservatives made an open move to divorce Baptist schools from all educational accreditation agencies and to form their own exclusively Southern Baptist Convention accreditation agency. That effort stalled.
But early in 1997, when a major restructuring of the SBC was finalized, the SBC Education Commission in Nashville was abolished”in a move for efficiency.”Now, a new education commission has been formed by the presidents of the moderate Baptist colleges.
In addition, some are pushing for a new vehicle to keep ultraconservative and moderate Baptist educators talking to each other across state lines. What structure that will take is anybody’s guess.
MJP END HARWELL