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Which explains why such corporate underwriters as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, SBC Communications and Philip Morris wrote big checks for both fetes. Total cost of the two parties: about $1 million...
This month's events, however, may not qualify as a true secession. Many Cooperative congregations cling to their SBC affiliation, if only in name. The 1,800 Cooperative-affiliated churches are a drop in the SBC's 41,000-congregation bucket. Nonetheless, they have set up separate missions, seminaries and publishing houses. Cooperative executive director Daniel Vestal predicts an eventual "exodus" from the Convention...
...Orleans' Cafe du Monde, two scandalized conservatives, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, hatched an insurgency. Packing the annual convention of 1979, they elected a conservative president and unearthed bylaws that amplified his power. "Baptist battles" consumed each convention until 1990, when the right wing prevailed decisively. The SBC then allied itself with the Republican Party, insisted on word-for-word biblical inerrancy and produced a drumbeat of provocative pronouncements on topics like wifely submission and the need to convert Jews. All that remained was for the losers to leave the field...
...mood in the nation's most Baptist state supports that threat. The Baptist General Convention of Texas is a 6,000-congregation powerhouse. No liberal refuge, it supported the outlawing of abortion and expelled a congregation that ordained a gay deacon. Nevertheless, it thinks nothing of ignoring SBC edicts. When the SBC demanded wifely subservience, the Texans simply took their own vote and let the women stand tall. And the Texans' patience seems to be wearing thin. Speaking of his organization's $40 million contribution to the national convention last year (roughly a quarter of the SBC budget), David Currie...
Currie was almost surprised to find himself at the SBC meeting last week. "I haven't been in 10 years," he says. He was there for what he considered a crucial battle. The Convention spent very little time debating its prohibition on women pastors--there are only 35 in the country anyway--but labored over a proposal to delete a sentence in the denomination's guiding document stating that "the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ," replacing it with language suggesting that Scripture, as God's direct revelation, must be regarded as the ultimate...