Baptisms are hot topic for Southern Baptists

By BOB SMIETANAStaff Writer

Elisabeth Hilliard considers herself a real Southern Baptist.

She's a member of a Southern Baptist Church.

She married a Southern Baptist minister.

And she hopes one day, when her children are older, to become a Southern Baptist missionary.

Unfortunately, she was baptized in an Assemblies of God church.

And that, according to the International Mission Board, is not good enough.

"I thought I was a real Southern Baptist," said Hilliard, 32, a member of Newell Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., and a messenger to this year's Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.

Now, said Hilliard, she's not so sure.

In November 2005, the board's trustees ruled that only people baptized in a Southern Baptist church, or a church holding Southern Baptist views on baptism, can become missionaries.

The mission board policies, along with declining rates of baptisms and a shortfall in mission giving, will be among the hot topics at the Southern Baptist convention's annual meeting, which runs Tuesday and Wednesday in Indianapolis. The 16 million-member convention is second in size only to the Roman Catholic Church among U.S. religious groups.

A group of 36 former trustees has asked the mission board to overturn its baptism policy, calling it unbiblical and unnecessary. Of the six candidates hoping to succeed outgoing convention President Frank Page, only two support the board's policy.

David Rogers, a Tennessean serving as a Baptist missionary to Spain and son of former Convention President Adrian Rogers, says the baptism policy is un-Baptist. If a local church says a baptism is valid, Rogers says, that should be good enough.

"We don't need the institution to authenticate baptisms," he said.

The mission board demands that any candidate who received a non-Southern Baptist baptism be rebaptized in a Southern Baptist Church. While it sounds like a technicality, Rogers said, that demand has serious theological consequences. Instead of being a sign of conversion, he said, the board has reduced baptism to a membership ritual.

"It becomes just another hoop you have to jump through to satisfy a committee," he said, "and as Baptists, we take it much more seriously than that."

The controversy comes when the mission board is also facing financial challenges. It had hoped to raise $165 million during the 2007 Lottie Moon Offering. That offering came in at $150.4 million, a record, but still more than $14 million short. The board was alreadyfacing financial stress because of the weak dollar and rising fuel and food costs.

Still, in 2007, the board's 5,300 missionaries reported more than 600,000 baptisms, another record, at a time when U.S. baptisms are declining.

David Steverson, the mission board treasurer, said the agency has contingency plans in place. "We don't plan to back off on sending missionaries at all," he told Baptist Press. "We plan to press forward. We will evaluate all of our planned expenditures and forgo most of our planned capital investments for the remainder of the year."

During the annual meeting, Southern Baptist leaders also will unveil a new plan to reverse the convention's declining baptisms.

The number of baptisms dropped for the third year in a row, down 5.5 percent to 345,941 in 2007. That's the convention's lowest total in 20 years, according to the Annual Church Profile from Southern Baptist-affiliated LifeWay Research, and a decline of nearly 18 percent since 1999, when baptisms totaled 419,342.

Convention membership dropped by nearly 40,000 in 2007, the first decline since 1998 and only the second in more than 80 years. The convention's membership has stalled since crossing the 16 million mark in 2001.

"This is a dubious milestone," Ed Stetzer, head of LifeWay Research told The Tennessean earlier this year. "If the trend line continues, we'll have more declining years than growth in the next 10 years."

In response, the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board is launching a new evangelism program aimed at witnessing to every resident of the U.S. and Canada by 2020. The first step is a new image campaign called "We Are Southern Baptists." The campaign, which includes television spots and a Web site, www.wearesouthernbaptists.org, launched in Indianapolis.

Geoff Hammond, president of the North American Mission Board, said the campaign will include new church starts and plans to revitalize smaller congregations. More than half of the nearly 40,000 churches in the convention have fewer than 100 members.

"It's a big job," Hammond said, "But there are a lot of Southern Baptists. If we all work together, we can do it."