Global warming debate generates resolutions heat at SBC

Posted: 6/22/07

Global warming debate
generates resolutions heat at SBC

By Marv Knox

Editor

SAN ANTONIO—Southern Baptist Convention messengers generated some heat during their annual meeting as they debated the government’s responsibility to address global warming.

They also stood by the SBC resolution committee’s decision not to address how many people actually populate Southern Baptist churches.

The global warming resolution did not generate debate on its basic points: global temperatures have risen for decades, “scientific evidence does not support computer models of catastrophic human-induced global warming” and major steps to reduce greenhouse gases would unfairly impact the world’s poorest people.

But messengers disagreed over the SBC resolutions committee’s call for the government to do something about climate change.

The committee’s proposal encouraged “continued government funding to find definitive answers on the issue of human-induced global warming that are based on empirical facts and are free of ideology and partisanship.” It also supported “economically responsible government initiatives and funding to locate and implement viable energy alternatives” that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Messengers approved an amendment proposed by Bob Carpenter of Cedar Street Baptist Church in Holt, Mich., deleting the two sections of the resolution that called for government action.

“For 70 years, beginning with the Franklin Roosevelt administration, we’ve endured expansion of government,” Carpenter said, calling government “part of the cause of the problem rather than the solution.”

The government cannot provide simple solutions to problems, he contended, adding, “hundreds of millions of tax dollars already are being spent” by the government on global warming. He insisted private enterprise is a founding principle of the country. “We solve problems … when government stays out of the way.”

The only other extended debate featured a suggested resolution the committee declined to propose. Tom Ascol, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Fla., noted he submitted a resolution on “integrity in church membership” that did not get past the committee.

While the convention’s annual survey claims SBC-affiliated churches are composed of 16.3 million members, only 6,138,776 of them attend a worship service in a typical week, Ascol said.

Southern Baptists should “repent of our failure to retain responsible church membership and our widespread failure to lovingly correct church members” when they lapse from regular church attendance, he added.

If the convention does not take seriously its responsibility to retain a regenerate church membership and to discipline members, then a call to repentance—the subject of an approved resolution—“is meaningless,” he insisted.

The resolutions committee maintained Ascol’s proposal infringed upon the principle of church autonomy. The proposal failed to receive a two-thirds vote required to override the committee’s decision not to recommend the resolution.

All of the committee’s other resolutions passed without significant discussion or debate. They included:

• Child abuse. Messen-gers expressed their “deep level of moral outrage and concern at any instance of child victimization” and recommended reporting child abuse “in a timely and forthright manner.”

The resolution called for churches and convention organizations to perform criminal background checks on ministers, employees and volunteers, and it renounced individuals who commit child abuse and “individuals, churches or other religious bodies that cover up, ignore or otherwise contribute to or condone the abuse of children.”

• Hate crimes. While urging Americans to “avoid acts of hatred and violence toward homosexuals and transgendered people” and calling on Christians to love and show compassion for them, the resolution condemned the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007.

The proposed law, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives and has been introduced in the Senate, provides a level of protection for homosexuals and transgendered people, the resolution noted.

But it said hate crimes legislation “violates the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amend-ment guarantee of equal protection under the law” and “criminalizes beliefs as well as action, creating a form of thought crime.”

• Racism. Marking the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision—which declared African-Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—the resolution affirmed the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

Messengers repudiated the Dred Scott Decision and affirmed the SBC’s 1995 vote to “unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin.”

They also commended churches that reach out to all people, regardless of race, and they urged other churches to follow that example.

• Pastors, culture and civic duty. “There is a great need for a new generation of pastors to take the lead in courageously confronting an American culture and government that is hurtling downward to new depths of moral decadence,” the resolution noted.

It cited “continued threats to the sanctity of human life, the sacredness of marriage between one man and one woman, and the fundamental freedom to express our faith in the public arena.”

It called on pastors to “preach the whole counsel of God, not only passionately inviting people to Jesus, but also prophetically declaring biblical truth concerning the burning moral issues that are being debated in the culture and government.”

It also encouraged them to model and promote “informed and active Christian citizenship among the membership of our churches.”

• Personal and corporate repentance. Citing Scriptures that condemn vindictiveness, bitterness, slander, sexual immorality and “failure to obey God,” the resolution called for “all Southern Baptists to humble ourselves before God” and “embrace a spirit of repentance, pursue face-to-face reconciliation where necessary and enter into a time of fasting and prayer for the lost.”