Missouri breaks ties with Jewell_111003

Posted: 11/07/03

Missouri breaks ties with Jewell

ST. LOUIS (ABP)–The Missouri Baptist Convention broke a 154-year tradition and voted Nov. 4 to stop funding William Jewell College in Liberty, citing the college's positions on homosexuality and morality.

The convention eliminated the Baptist school from its 2004 budget. Last year, the convention gave William Jewell $900,000, about 3 percent of the college's budget.

Roger Moran, a layman from Winfield whose guilt-by-association reports on state convention agencies and churches fueled a fundamentalist takeover of the Missouri convention, argued for cutting the college's funds.

William Jewell gave an award to a homosexual student and allowed a theatrical production some considered lewd to be staged on campus, reported Moran, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee.

The college's defunding came as no surprise to most Missouri Baptists.

“It was a foregone conclusion; the only question was when,” William Jewell President David Sallee told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In response to criticism, William Jewell's trustees voted in February to affirm the college's mission statement, which declares its Christian and Baptist nature. However, trustees declined to answer specific “personal” questions about the faculty and trustees and a question about the college's “official teaching position on the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the creation account.”

The convention previously defunded five other Missouri Baptist institutions that changed their charters to remove control of trustee appointments from the convention.

The convention sued those institutions–Missouri Baptist University, Missouri Baptist Home, Windemere Conference Center, the Baptist Foundation and Word & Way newspaper.