Reply #13: The purpse of the Southern Baptist Convention

[Paying Attention]

was to allow the churchs to share their resources to send missionaries out. (Sending out missionaries is central to Christian thought and practice). It had no authority, and still has no authority.

It's most powerful aspect, and the aspect that has created great disagreement amoung Baptists is that it controls a large amount of the money going to seminaries. (The money comes from the individual churchs, which individually decide how much to contribute to the Convention). A certain group in the Convention decided they didn't like what the seminaries were teaching, and wanted to use that money to control what professors the seminaries hired, and what they taught.

A lot of churchs didn't like what happening, so they left the Convention. Apparently, it is hard to leave the Episcopal Church "Convention" ( whatever their governing authority is called) or the Prespryterian Church (however you spell that). They just decided to leave, and left. They decided on a new Convention, and now they belong to the new one. Some churchs contribute to both Conventions.

So you can see, despite what your learned (and quite mistaken!) friend thinks, the Southern Baptist Convention proves out Baptist thought. What one church alone cannot do, Several can do together, But the resulting Organization can never be allowed to overthrow the authority of the individual church. When the Southern Baptist Convention did try to dictate their termss, the churchs did their equivalent of " what if someone threw a war and no one came to it?"

That is, someone thought they could leverage their monetary power against the independance of Baptist churchs, so the independant Baptist churchs just stopped giving them money.

There is something kindof American about all this.