Moderate Baptists Gather in Atlanta
Updated Jun 29, 2001
Wishing the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) a "happy 10th birthday," CBF coordinator Daniel Vestal welcomed participants to the organization's annual assembly, June 28-30, at Atlanta's Georgia World Congress Center.
Vestal leads the denomination-like organization that began in Atlanta a decade ago for Baptists disgruntled with the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist Convention.
As the Dallas Morning News noted: "Making sense of the alphabet soup of modern Baptist institutional life ... is a challenge. They include: the Southern Baptist Convention, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Baptist General Convention of Texas, Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, Baptists Committed, various Mainstream Baptist associations and several Baptist Laymen associations. Because they're all Baptist, each is completely independent. But many are entangled to some degree."
According to event coordinators, nearly 3,250 participants had registered for this event where CBF leaders remain critical about the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist Convention and of its leaders. In 1991, 3,000 were estimated at the first meeting.
This year's meeting is likely to attract unprecedented attention, reported the Dallas Morning News. Partly, it's because of the featured speaker scheduled for the second night: Jimmy Carter, the former president and the nation's best-known former Southern Baptist. "But partly it's because the once-obscure CBF has become more important to the nation's millions of moderate Baptists," the paper said.
Baptist Press reports that "with songs and prayers to Mother God, an auxiliary organization of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship also opened its annual meeting with a clear message -- the current controversy is about more than women pastors."
The annual Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM) breakfast reflected feminist God language, culminating in a litany read by BWIM members about their discomfort at calling God "Father," "Lord," and "King." During a litany, participants chanted in unison that they "can say" the words Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, "no problem." God the Father, however, is an altogether different story.
BWIM treasurer Sally Burgess told the crowd she believed more SBC women would be ordained to the pastorate "because I believe God is good, and She knows what She's doing." Speakers also referred to the Trinity as "Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer," language promoted by various feminist theologians in mainline Protestant denominations to replace the "patriarchal" language of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."
Randy Stinson, national director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, attended the breakfast meeting, interested in the CBF's hearty opposition in recent years to SBC confessional stands on male leadership in the home and in the church.
Stinson said he was "aghast" that the women's group had adopted so explicitly the theological agenda of liberal feminist theology. Stinson said the abandonment of God's self-revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has far-reaching implications.
"I was expecting some statements in support of women pastors along with some bashing of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, but I was not prepared to hear worship of 'Mother God,'" Stinson said. "This is not just a 'kinder, gentler Christianity,' this is an entirely different religion."
The meeting included CBF women sharing in a round-robin "dreaming" session about the future of Baptist women in the pulpit. Outgoing BWIM president Raye Nell Dyer said she dreamed that "a new generation will have the freedom to come up with a variety of inclusive images for God." Other "dreams" included the hope that "the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message was just a bad dream" and the hope for "men who will marry Baptist women in ministry."
The CBF exhibit hall bookstore displayed a new Methodist "gender inclusive" hymnal with numerous songs describing "mother God" as the "womb of creation," along with a hymn written from the point of view of the earth entitled, "I am your Mother."
In other business, CBF's Coordinating Council voted against a motion to rescind a policy on the issue of homosexual behavior and the Fellowship's funding arrangement with its partner organizations.
According to CBF Online, "The organizational value statement prohibits CBF funding of organizations or causes that condone, advocate or affirm homosexual practice."
After discussion, the council voted by ballot 38-13 against a motion by Dixie Lea Petrey of Knoxville, Tenn., to rescind the policy approved last October. In a written statement prepared by Petrey, she stated that she made the motion to rescind because she believed the council's earlier action "redefined the Fellowship."
"For a decade, we have had too much respect and appreciation for one another as brothers and sisters in Christ to be willing to cast one another as winners and losers by voting upon those matters of conscience about which we all care passionately and on which we each are earnestly seeking God's will but on which we have by no means come to a consensus," the statement said.
When it was approved last October, CBF Coordinator Daniel Vestal described the policy as "welcoming but not affirming" of gays. The statement would not be used to tell any church, individual or other organization what to believe, Vestal said. "I have no interest whatever in excluding or demeaning or minimizing any in this Fellowship who share a different perspective than this document," he added.
The statement says: "We treasure the freedom of individual conscience and the autonomy of the local church, and we also believe that congregational leaders should be persons of moral integrity whose lives exemplify the highest standards of Christian conduct and character."
During its June 27 meeting in Atlanta, the council did change terminology in the statement from "organizational value" to "personnel and administrative funding policy" in an effort to clarify that it is an internal document for the CBF Resource Center and does not speak for the CBF movement as a whole.
Compiled from Baptist Press News and other reports
Vestal leads the denomination-like organization that began in Atlanta a decade ago for Baptists disgruntled with the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist Convention.
As the Dallas Morning News noted: "Making sense of the alphabet soup of modern Baptist institutional life ... is a challenge. They include: the Southern Baptist Convention, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Baptist General Convention of Texas, Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, Baptists Committed, various Mainstream Baptist associations and several Baptist Laymen associations. Because they're all Baptist, each is completely independent. But many are entangled to some degree."
According to event coordinators, nearly 3,250 participants had registered for this event where CBF leaders remain critical about the conservative direction of the Southern Baptist Convention and of its leaders. In 1991, 3,000 were estimated at the first meeting.
This year's meeting is likely to attract unprecedented attention, reported the Dallas Morning News. Partly, it's because of the featured speaker scheduled for the second night: Jimmy Carter, the former president and the nation's best-known former Southern Baptist. "But partly it's because the once-obscure CBF has become more important to the nation's millions of moderate Baptists," the paper said.
Baptist Press reports that "with songs and prayers to Mother God, an auxiliary organization of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship also opened its annual meeting with a clear message -- the current controversy is about more than women pastors."
The annual Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM) breakfast reflected feminist God language, culminating in a litany read by BWIM members about their discomfort at calling God "Father," "Lord," and "King." During a litany, participants chanted in unison that they "can say" the words Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, "no problem." God the Father, however, is an altogether different story.
BWIM treasurer Sally Burgess told the crowd she believed more SBC women would be ordained to the pastorate "because I believe God is good, and She knows what She's doing." Speakers also referred to the Trinity as "Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer," language promoted by various feminist theologians in mainline Protestant denominations to replace the "patriarchal" language of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."
Randy Stinson, national director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, attended the breakfast meeting, interested in the CBF's hearty opposition in recent years to SBC confessional stands on male leadership in the home and in the church.
Stinson said he was "aghast" that the women's group had adopted so explicitly the theological agenda of liberal feminist theology. Stinson said the abandonment of God's self-revelation as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has far-reaching implications.
"I was expecting some statements in support of women pastors along with some bashing of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, but I was not prepared to hear worship of 'Mother God,'" Stinson said. "This is not just a 'kinder, gentler Christianity,' this is an entirely different religion."
The meeting included CBF women sharing in a round-robin "dreaming" session about the future of Baptist women in the pulpit. Outgoing BWIM president Raye Nell Dyer said she dreamed that "a new generation will have the freedom to come up with a variety of inclusive images for God." Other "dreams" included the hope that "the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message was just a bad dream" and the hope for "men who will marry Baptist women in ministry."
The CBF exhibit hall bookstore displayed a new Methodist "gender inclusive" hymnal with numerous songs describing "mother God" as the "womb of creation," along with a hymn written from the point of view of the earth entitled, "I am your Mother."
In other business, CBF's Coordinating Council voted against a motion to rescind a policy on the issue of homosexual behavior and the Fellowship's funding arrangement with its partner organizations.
According to CBF Online, "The organizational value statement prohibits CBF funding of organizations or causes that condone, advocate or affirm homosexual practice."
After discussion, the council voted by ballot 38-13 against a motion by Dixie Lea Petrey of Knoxville, Tenn., to rescind the policy approved last October. In a written statement prepared by Petrey, she stated that she made the motion to rescind because she believed the council's earlier action "redefined the Fellowship."
"For a decade, we have had too much respect and appreciation for one another as brothers and sisters in Christ to be willing to cast one another as winners and losers by voting upon those matters of conscience about which we all care passionately and on which we each are earnestly seeking God's will but on which we have by no means come to a consensus," the statement said.
When it was approved last October, CBF Coordinator Daniel Vestal described the policy as "welcoming but not affirming" of gays. The statement would not be used to tell any church, individual or other organization what to believe, Vestal said. "I have no interest whatever in excluding or demeaning or minimizing any in this Fellowship who share a different perspective than this document," he added.
The statement says: "We treasure the freedom of individual conscience and the autonomy of the local church, and we also believe that congregational leaders should be persons of moral integrity whose lives exemplify the highest standards of Christian conduct and character."
During its June 27 meeting in Atlanta, the council did change terminology in the statement from "organizational value" to "personnel and administrative funding policy" in an effort to clarify that it is an internal document for the CBF Resource Center and does not speak for the CBF movement as a whole.
Compiled from Baptist Press News and other reports
Originally published June 29, 2001.
