Illinois rejects 2000 BF&M as sole faith statement_111703

Posted: 11/14/03

Illinois rejects 2000 BF&M as sole faith statement

By Michael Leathers

Associated Baptist Press

MARYVILLE, Ill. (ABP)–Messengers to the Illinois Baptist State Association's annual meeting soundly rejected a last-minute attempt to make the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message its official faith statement.

Instead, they adopted the recommendation of a state association's committee to affirm six faith statements–including four versions of the Baptist Faith & Message–as a consensus of what most Baptists believe.

The IBSA's 97th annual meeting was held Nov. 5-6 in Maryville, a St. Louis suburb. Messengers voted on the six faith statements–the 1925 Baptist Faith & Message; its revisions in 1963, 1998 and 2000; the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742); and the New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833)–on the meeting's opening day.

The IBSA is now one of a handful of state Baptist conventions that have gone on record to reject the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message, which was approved at the national Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting as its official statement of faith. Three years ago, Illinois rejected by a four-vote margin amending the IBSA constitution to add an amendment on the family, which was added to the Baptist Faith & Message by the SBC in 1998.

Patrick Stewart, pastor of First Baptist Church of St. Charles, made the motion to insert into the committee's recommendation a sentence giving official status to the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message. It's good to affirm multiple faith statements, he said, but “we need to have a single standard.”

Stewart is a trustee of the International Mission Board, a national Southern Baptist agency that oversees missionaries serving in foreign countries. That agency recently required its missionaries to affirm the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message as a condition of continued employment.

By selecting an official faith statement, the state association would not violate the long-held Baptist beliefs in soul competency and local-church autonomy, Stewart said, but it would give direction to whom the association hired and how its committees worked. Having an official statement of beliefs is also important, he said, because it's not enough to “say the Bible alone is going to be our standard.” Episcopalians are being torn apart over the issue of homosexuality, he said, and both sides say the Bible represents their views.

Just because some misinterpret the Bible, countered Keith Stanford of Springfield, that should not prevent Baptists from making the Bible their sole standard. “We're not going to all agree,” said Stanford, an associate pastor of Western Oaks Baptist and former IBSA president, adding it was time to settle the issue and move on.

By affirming all six faith statements, the IBSA will build consensus among its member churches, said Lanny Faulkner, director of missions of Central Baptist Association. Faulkner was one of two messengers who presented a motion at the IBSA's 2001 annual meeting to affirm the six faith statements.

Speaking the next day, outgoing IBSA President Larry Richmond observed that “the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message may be an issue to some, but it is not an issue over which we should divide.”

In other annual-meeting developments, Don Sharp, pastor of Faith Tabernacle Baptist Church of Chicago and IBSA vice president, was elected president with no opposition. Sharp is the first African-American elected IBSA president since Eugene Gibson Sr. served in 1997. Fred Winters, pastor of First Baptist of Maryville, was elected vice president.