The Uphill Climb for a Name Change

The name-change effort in the Southern Baptist Convention faces a long, uphill climb. Allow me to sketch out some of the obstacles it will have to overcome in order to succeed:

1. Voting Requirement

   Any change to the name of the Southern Baptist Convention will necessitate a change to the convention's constitution. To accomplish this, a supermajority of two-thirds of the convention messengers would have to vote in the affirmative for two consecutive annual meetings.

   As recently as 2004, it was not possible to find a simple majority (50% + 1) even willing to have a task force to STUDY having a name change. Has the makeup of the convention changed so dramatically in a mere eight years that two-thirds of the convention will now support what was such a minority position so recently?

   Perhaps it has, but I have seen no evidence yet of such a dramatic sea-change in the convention.

2. Annual Meeting Locations

   If one were interested in accomplishing this political feat, the time to have done it would either be two years ago or two years from now. This is the worst possible time to attempt this simply because of the location schedule for the annual meetings.

   If one had attempted this starting in Orlando, then one would be trying to win a supermajority out of crowds in Orlando and Phoenix. Winning in Orlando might have been slightly touch-and-go (and there was the risk that this divisive issue would have harmed the GCR push), but the odds for this proposal would have been far greater in Phoenix, simply because of depressed messenger count. In general, the less of a voice Southern Baptists have in this process, the better its chances of success.

   Two years from now, the convention will begin a two-year tour through Baltimore (2014) and Columbus (2015). Maryland and Ohio are probably places where convention turnout will be low and where the hurdle of obtaining a two-thirds supermajority will be much, much lower. A serious attempt to push the name-change through would have been wise to delay itself for two years. And, indeed, perhaps some strategy of delay is still possible for proponents to implement.

   But at this time, Bryant Wright's proposal will face messenger bodies in New Orleans (2012) and Houston (2013). Two worse locations could hardly have been imagined. Messenger turnout will be high and will contain large numbers of the same people who have defeated these measures over and over. I'm willing to predict the odds of clearing the 66% threshold in both New Orleans and Houston as being well lower than the odds of President Obama's attending the Collin County Lincoln Day gala.

3. A Poison-Pill Process

   The way that the will of the messengers has been sidestepped in the beginning of this process has been divisive. It divided the Executive Committee, with many EC members not learning about this until the press releases were being distributed in the public meeting, after the story had already gone out on Twitter. It has scandalized some of us to see how this initiative is being railroaded through. As was discussed in the Executive Committee meeting, this comes at a time when many Southern Baptists are still a bit bruised and tender from the way that the GCR report was pushed through with high-pressure political tactics that are still fresh in the memories of Southern Baptists and that are unprecedented in our polity.

   The GCR was not so bad of an idea (with the exception of Great Commission Giving) that it deserved such heavy-handedness from the platform. Good ideas can rise on their own merits. God's people can be trusted to seek God's will. Missing from the process seems to be faith in the action of the Holy Spirit to build consensus among SBC messengers around those things that are His will. Tell the truth and trust the people, I say.

   What President Wright ought to do, instead of bringing a report from this task force in New Orleans, is to backtrack and ask the convention to approve the formation of the task force to begin with. Such a humble, conciliatory, and congregationalist move would do much to counter criticisms and to pour oil on the waters of this process. The inherent delay would also, by the way, cause his proposal to come to more favorable locations for the annual meeting, as outlined above.

   That's not likely to happen. Apart from something like that, the procedural aspects of this initiative will make it less likely to gain a broad and dispassionate hearing. The discourse up to this point has included plenty of people who falsely presume that I got so worked up about this just because I don't favor a name-change. Not so. My previous post on this topic is the kind of post that I produce when we're just exploring the possibility of changing the convention's name. It is the disregard and disrespect for the convention's messengers that bothers me most about President Wright's task force initiative and that catapults me into a more energetic and confrontational mode of writing.

4. The Paucity of Alternatives

   Southern Baptists were eyeing the name "American Baptist Convention" back before the Northern Baptist Convention snapped it up out from under us in 1951. That would have been a good name, but it is no longer available. "Baptist Convention of the Americas" is also gone. Nothing with "Cooperative" in it will be feasible, because of the CBF. A few alternatives remain that still communicate a gathering of Baptists, but not many.

   Of course, a great many Southern Baptists will want to ditch both "Southern" and "Baptist" (and probably even "Convention"). "Convention" speaks of a business meeting, and anti-congregationalists will want something warmer and fuzzier. "Southern" is, of course, the most offensive label, and a strong argument can be made for ditching Southern. After all, our churches that happen to be in the South really aren't Southern any longer, by and large. As I wrote in a post last year:

   As a historian I would assert that the distinctiveness of Southern culture is at its lowest point since the Colonial period. Everything from media to chain restaurants and big box stores have made it more true than ever before that Boston = Atlanta = Houston = Los Angeles. Of course, these equations are not absolutely true, but they are more true than they have ever been before.

   Moving from culture-at-large to church culture, a Cowboy Church movement has arisen largely because the standard Southern Baptist church culture has almost nothing Southern about it. The music is Rock, the marketing is Madison Avenue, the platform dress is Abercrombie & Fitch, and the A-V technology is Times Square.

   What's Southern about that?

   So, with a convention full of churches in the South that are embarrassed of their Southernness, one can see a rationale for eliminating the word "Southern."

   But the word "Baptist" will be examined as well. Just yesterday a Southern Baptist from Idaho reported that, in his state, "Baptist" presents far more of an obstacle than "Southern" does. One cannot ignore the phenomenon that an alarmingly growing number of Southern Baptist churches is removing the word "Baptist" from church signs throughout the nation. Many of the agitators for change are people who have already taken this action in their local churches—not all of them, but many of them.

   Now, what makes all of this interesting is that we probably can't go about changing the name of the denomination every decade (although it seems that we can reorganize it on that timetable). The safe bet is to keep "Baptist" in the name and go for changing only "Southern" (or, at the most, do away with both "Southern" and "Convention"). And perhaps that would be a sufficient change for those who wish to do away with "Baptist" as well, so long as they thought they could easily work incrementally. But multiple changes of the denominational name are likely to weaken it over the long run, and so I think there's going to be an inclination to see this as the one, best opportunity to do this thing all the way.

   Moderation and incrementalism are often successful political strategies, but it remains to be seen whether a moderate, incremental change to the name will really satisfy anybody. A good alternative would need to be a name that enjoyed broader support than the present name enjoys. Maybe such an alternative exists, and we probably won't know until people are finished dreaming up the options, but the selection of the right candidate name remains one of the more difficult obstacles for this process to overcome.

For all of these reasons, I predict that it is going to be very difficult for the task force to succeed at their objective. Certainly, there are members of this task force who have accomplished the improbable before, and we do well not to count them out before the first bell has rung. Nevertheless, if they will change the name of the Southern Baptist Convention, all of these are among the more prominent obstacles that they will have to overcome.

SBC Name Change Proposal

Tonight at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, President Bryant Wright led the Executive Committee to appoint by fiat a task force to study a name change for the denomination (BP). In a matter of hours, Twitter is already alive with discussion over the proposal. People are likely to take sides on this matter based upon their opinions of the idea of changing the name alone. I'll give my opinion on whether we should change the name of the SBC at the end of this post. For now, I'd like to direct your attention to the procedural intricacies of this proposal.

First, it might be helpful to give a brief review of the history of this concept. The messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention are not as clearly on record in our opposition to Satan and Hell as we are in our opposition to changing the name of our denomination (not necessarily a good thing). It has been voted down and voted down and voted down, starting since long before I realized that I was either Southern or Baptist—since long before anyone discussing this matter today was ever born. In 1974, W. A. Criswell came to the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention and asked them to appoint a study committee to explore a possible name-change. The messengers approved the committee, the committee chose not to change the name, and Dr. Criswell honored the will of the messengers.

In 1999, an attempt was made by members of the Executive Committee to initiate the name-change process within the EC rather than on the convention floor. The Executive Committee declined to do so. An excellent report by Augie Boto outlined the advantages of retaining the historic name of the convention.

In 2004, SBC President Jack Graham asked the messengers in the convention meeting to appoint a task force to consider a name change. Graham, astute president that he was, noted that by 2004 this question had come to the convention floor "seven or eight times" and opined that our convention needed in 2004 "to stop meeting and just talking about this…We need to either put it to bed forever or get on with it."

The convention chose to "put it to bed forever" by a considerable margin.

Here's hoping that, when we use "forever" in speaking about the promises of the gospel, Southern Baptists mean something longer than eight years!

The question of a name-change arose during the GCR debates of recent memory, but no name change task force arose out of the GCR report.

And now, SBC President Bryant Wright has chosen to lead the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to take an action that the messenger body of the SBC has explicitly and repeatedly refused to take—to appoint a task force to study a name change. The normal course of affairs is for SBC Presidents who desire the appointment of task forces to ask for the approval of the convention's messengers before doing so, especially on questions of such importance. Why not follow that time-honored process now?

On Twitter, Dr. Albert Mohler reported that Wright had indicated that he followed this process "out of respect for the SBC Executive Committee." I can understand how it would be an indication of respect for the Executive Committee to make them the people from whom Wright sought authorization to take this action. And yet, if it is an action of respect to seek this consent from the Executive Committee, is it not therefore, by Wright's own definition, an action of disrespect of the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention to decline to seek their consent for this action, especially since the seeking of messenger consent is the standard operating procedure of the convention in matters such as this? Certainly, it may be inadvertent disrespect, but it is disrespect nonetheless.

Southern Baptists on various sides of the issues that we face in this day and time are demonstrating what I believe is a dangerous inclination to belittle and disrespect the messenger body in order to accomplish at all costs the will of the empowered few. This threat was evident during the GCR process when anti-GCR voices were privately expressing the opinion that the messengers of the convention COULD NOT instruct the Executive Committee to do anything—that the Executive Committee was not beholden to the messengers of the convention to follow their instructions. This threat was evident during the GCR debate itself in Orlando when the rules of order were violated and the rights of a messenger were trampled underfoot as he attempted to amend the GCR recommendations. But for the courage of a bold lady standing at a microphone, our convention might have done something possibly illegal that day. This threat is evident tonight, when rather than poll the convention messengers to see whether their opinion has changed on the question of appointing a name-change task force, the action has been taken to short-circuit the expressed will of the SBC and to have this task force after all, messengers be…disrespected.

Let no one supporting such a thing ever breathe a word of criticism about unelected, unaccountable activist judges wresting legislative authority out of the hands of the people where it belongs. Let no one supporting such a thing ever utter the slightest complaint about Presidential Czars and Executive Orders bypassing the will of the Congress. People on all sides of SBC debate have adopted an "ends justifies the means" approach to our denominational polity. We need to repent of it. We need to quit it. We need to start acting in good faith.

Now, I promised to offer my opinion of the name change idea itself. Here it is. If this process goes forward to the messengers of the convention, then I will fully support a name-change so long as it removes the word "Baptist" from the name of our denomination. When the will of the messengers has become an obstacle to get around by any means necessary rather than the sacred core of our polity, then we are no longer Baptists, and we no longer deserve to own that name.

On the Virtues of Closed Doors

It's not every day that I quote Amy Grant favorably (please direct your hate mail to...), but one interview she gave contained a real nugget of wisdom, IMHO. Asked about criticism she had received for something she had done (I think it had to do with her crossover project that she released with Peter Cetera), Grant offered a viewpoint of criticism that struck a good balance, I thought, between the foolish refusal to listen to criticism (which can often help us to grow) on the one hand, and the foolish practice of listening to all criticism immediately (which will paralyze us, robbing us of productivity).

It was Grant's analogy that I thought was truly profound. She compared her entertainment career to the painting of a great work of art. An artist, Grant said, can't set up the easel, squeeze out the paints onto the palette, pull out a brush, paint a single stroke, and then step back and ask the world, "What do you think?" before painting stroke two and repeating the request for criticism. No, Grant observed, sometimes you just have to dive into the canvas and paint. Then, later, when the painting is done, that's the time to request and evaluate criticism of the finished project. The painting of the masterpiece rightly takes place behind closed doors, and then its exhibition and evaluation come publicly when it is finished and ready for showing.

There's a good reason for this—every painting is a mess at some point in the process. I love to watch the PBS show "The Joy of Painting" with the late Bob Ross. He was a bit quirky and odd, but I think his show is entertaining. In a mere thirty minutes (minus network time), Ross paints an oil painting from scratch. There's always a point about ten minutes into the show where I find myself staring at the screen and saying out loud to nobody in particular, "Well, he's messed up! He didn't mean to pull that paint all the way over there. That's not going to look good at all."

Of course, when the end of the show comes, the painting always looks precisely as it should. That's why Bill Clinton would make a horrible painter—you can't build masterpieces with daily opinion polling.

Recently I began to work to build support for the Resolution on Regenerate Church Membership. RCM is a principle that matters a great deal to me. Although I am not the author of the resolution's wording, I am thankful to be able to do my part in carrying it forward. Malcolm Yarnell wrote the original draft of this resolution. When he did, he approached several people and asked them to suggest revisions or indicate whether they could support the resolution. This all took place in 2007, quite some time ago. As I began my efforts to bring the resolution forward this year, my first task was to contact all of the people who had already seen and tentatively affirmed the resolution in order to learn whether they were still in support of the resolution and willing to lend their support as the process went forward.

It is a selective culling of this conversation, carefully trimmed to put forward a false impression, that Wade Burleson released in a recent post. Later, Nathan Finn published a post declaring that there are no more secrets in Southern Baptist life.

I am posting today to say that, if there are no more secrets in Southern Baptist life (presuming that the email exchange I initiated qualifies as a "secret"), then we will be much the worse for it. There's a reason why authors don't publish their first drafts. There's a reason why you pastors out there work on your sermons in the privacy of your study before you proclaim them from the pulpit. There's a reason why Christ's own commanded procedure for the most serious bit of business a church might consider—the exclusion of a member by church discipline—is a process that begins very secretively before it becomes a public spectacle down the line.

The reason for all of these things is quite simply that ideas need to mature, facts need to be checked, proposals need to be vetted, and negotiation needs to take place, in the vast majority of cases, before the whole world gets caught up into some public show about something. I'm a big proponent of congregationalism, but the very worst form of congregationalism takes place when somebody stands up in a public meeting and throws upon the floor some question that neither the congregation, the moderator, nor he himself has ever really pondered before. These moments typify the phrase "the pooling of our ignorance." No, I'll take every time the person who has given careful thought to what he wants to do, has sought the advice of others, and has brought to the congregation a thoroughly considered and well-worded motion for the body's perusal.

Secrecy in the wrong places most certainly can be a problem. Other than exceptional cases, the convention and her entities ought not to be able to act in secrecy and ought not to be able to cover up past actions. Here's a brilliant idea: We ought to arrange to have a free and open meeting where all of our decisions are made in full view of the public with all of our churches having an opportunity to participate. People ought to be free to work privately before that meeting to decide what is the best thing to propose, the best way to explain a proposal, or the best person to advocate for one thing or another. But when the hour arrives and the time comes for Southern Baptists to make their final decisions, those decisions ought to take place in an atmosphere of open discussion and free debate. Now THAT would be a system that would combine the strengths of private preparation with the strengths of open discussion and decision-making. We ought to put together a system like that.

Oh wait a minute…that's the system we ALREADY HAVE.

Or at least it is the system we ought to already have. I'm troubled by rumors I heard in this discussion that, unlike at SWBTS, at some of our entities the salaries of entity heads may be a closely guarded secret kept even from trustees. Our public decision-making process and our past actions (such as the setting of salaries) ought to be made in openness and kept freely available to Southern Baptists, while we preserve the freedom of individual Southern Baptists to seek counsel, negotiate with one another, and develop proposals in whatever level of privacy they desire and wish to attempt to have.

As a final note on this topic, allow me to say that the most curious and comical aspect of this entire latest melodrama in Southern Baptist life is the fact that the three principals involved—Tom Ascol, Malcolm Yarnell, and myself—have gotten along so swimmingly well throughout it all. Others suggest that we would have a combined resolution rather than two resolutions if everything had played out on a blog from day one. From my perspective, I say au contraire, the very best and most productive collaborations we ever had have been the ones that have taken place with the greatest level of privacy (secrecy, if you wish). The more people who have been involved, and the more melodrama injected into the process by others, the more elusive has been the challenge of coming to a single unity of thought. In my opinion, Wade and Nathan's advice is precisely the way NOT to get anything productive done in the SBC (OK, Nathan's post wasn't precisely in the way of advice).

I think that I speak for both Malcolm and Tom when I say that both of these resolutions are good resolutions, and that we three are cordially and fraternally committed to seeing something good and productive on the topic of Regenerate Church Membership passed at this year's Annual Meeting. Were there nobody else in the Southern Baptist Convention, the three of us would already have something put together. Of course, if we were the only three people in the SBC, there would be neither any need for such a resolution nor any interest from the world in what we wished to say!

So here's the deal: I have in the past and will in the future continue to work "behind the scenes" any time I have anything that I wish to accomplish in the SBC. If you ever hear me offer a resolution, you can be absolutely certain that I had someone else look at it to see whether there was anything stupid in it before I stand up in front of the Jumbotron and start trying to read it through the five-second delay. I may have had fifty people look at it. I may have had five hundred people look at it. To do otherwise is just foolish, as is the expectation that I would have to CC: the sixteen million Southern Baptists on every email I send out in order not to be secretive.

After all, we don't even know where all of those people are.