Letters

Jul 29, 2003

Letters to the Editor may not reflect the views or opinions of the Witness. Letters may be mailed, faxed or submitted using our online form. Only letters marked clearly for publication, signed with address will be considered for use. Letters are subject to editing. Please limit letters to 250 words.

IMB missionaries

‘The world is waiting’

You may be aware that the International Mission Board, despite a record Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, had to make some serious cuts this year. Quoting from Baptist Press, the IMB made a June 5 announcement:

"Approximately 100 candidates who hoped to begin long-term missionary careers this year have been deferred to next year or put on hold. The number of new short-term personnel also will be reduced by 30 percent this year."

Facing a $10 million shortfall, the Board has felt it necessary to make these cuts, as well as eliminate 61 stateside staff positions and the Commission magazine.

Upon reading this news, your heart may have been as burdened as mine. The question now is: "What can we do?"

Baptist Press recently featured an article on a group of "missionary kids" at the MLC in Richmond [see story on page 8 of this week’s Witness], who suggested that $1 from each of the 16 million Southern Baptist would more than make up for the shortfall. "From the mouths of babes...!"

Is there any reason why every Southern Baptist church could not receive a special offering which would total at least ONE DOLLAR for every church member, and forward it to the International Mission Board, for the purpose of sending these missionaries? We have prayed for years for our mission force to grow, and record numbers are responding to the needs of the lost world. God forbid that this flood of mission workers would be halted because of a lack of funds!

This is not a good time to take a special offering in our church. We just finished kicking off a building program, and we are in the summer ‘giving slump’ that most churches experience. But we must act. It should be absolutely unacceptable to us that 100+ new missionaries are not sent to the mission field due to the lack of ONE DOLLAR per SBC church member! Is our commitment so low, and our priorities so skewed, that we cannot raise a dollar per member to meet this need?

Please join me by leading your church to send at least a dollar per member to the IMB as soon as possible. And encourage other pastors and churches to join you. The world is waiting.

Shawn Thomas
Moss Bluff, La.

Florida Baptist Witness

Budget subscriptions

Every active family unit of our church receives the Witness. The cost is included in our church budget, like the Cooperative Program. According to the rate scale, $105 per year would get 10 copies of our convention paper delivered to a church each week. What an effective, yet inexpensive way to expand the local church’s vision and her knowledge of the work of Florida Baptists.

Tom Winter
Bradenton

SBC president

Welch nomination

In response to a July 3 Witness article ["Welch ‘praying’ about 2004 SBC presidency’"] I ask: Are there other nominations? In case there are, we want you to know that they are just for show. Nobody is going to pay any attention to other nominations. The decision to nominate Dr. Bobby Welch as president of the SBC was made a year prior to the convention in 2004.

Let me say, I am certainly not opposed to Bobby Welch. I believe him to be a godly man. The bone that I am picking is with those who do not think that us peons have enough sense to make the right choice for president and to make right decisions.

I want to remind this bunch that the resurgence would have never happened if the little preachers hadn’t been there in 1979.

The battle now raging in the SBC is not over Liberalism, it is over ‘who’s going to be in the drivers seat.’ God delights in doing big things through little people, because then He gets all the honor and praise.

I am sick and tired of seeing the so-called most skilled, most articulate and the most wealthy being put out front of everyone else. If Paul the Apostle attended a Southern Baptist Convention, I am sure he would write another Epistle, and it would not be very nice.

Vaughn Denton
Olive Branch, Miss.

CBF

Clarification needed

I’m disappointed at the lack of editorial comment to the "CBF presenters: Absolute truth claims imperil religious liberty" (July 17). The selection of the Baptist Press news report for inclusion in the Witness should have a comment reflecting the continued commitment of Florida Baptists to absolute truth and to the validity of the statement that "all other religions" are false. The attack on Vines, Mohler, Graham, Falwell and MacArthur is to further a pluralistic and syncretistic position regarding the essence of the Gospel and the exclusiveness of Jesus. I wish there had been an editor’s comment to avoid confusion among your readers.

CBF’s statement is weak and sounds like something networks say before airing a Christian program, but not a report in a Baptist publication. Their dollars supporting Kimball’s book reflect a position of no small concern, i.e. "religious groups who make absolute truth claims might pose a danger to society." Why would CBF finance that kind of position and then deny "endorsement"?

Charles Koch
Penney Farms

Editor’s note: I’m grateful for the opportunity to state clearly our conviction concerning the existence of absolute truth. The fact that we reported on Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s doubt about and opposition to absolute truth claims is not an indication of any doubt and/or opposition on our part. The comments from distinguished theology professor James Leo Garrett provided important balance to the views of the CBF presenters. The Witness believes, however, that Florida Baptists have a right to know what other Baptists say about important topics. As another media organization would put it, "We report; you decide." JAS

BREAKPOINT

Affirms ‘wall’

Charles Colson, in his Breakpoint column featured in the Witness (July 24), offers a critique of the concept of a "wall of separation" between church and state. Colson spends most of his article positioning President Thomas Jefferson as a "vigorous critic" of "traditional Christianity," though he never bothers to define exactly whose tradition of Christianity. He further attempts to discredit Jefferson’s remarks by characterizing his position as one of "overt hostility to Christians." Again, no real supporting evidence for such a sweeping generalization is offered.

My real concern, however, comes at the point that Colson asserts that Jefferson’s 1801 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association is the sole source of the metaphor, "wall of separation," regarding the relationship of church and state. A claim such as this is disingenuous, at worst, and woefully misinformed, at best. As free and faithful Baptists, we know better.

In 1644, Roger Williams (Baptist founder of Rhode Island) sounded the call for a "wall of separation" between the civil function of government and the free exercise of religion by its citizens. In 1778, Isaac Backus disputed the right of the magistrates of Maryland to enforce membership in the state church for himself and his fellow Baptists; he was condemned for holding a dangerous attitude toward separation of church and state. Though not a Baptist, James Madison, the primary framer of the Constitution, noted in 1819 the benefit to our nation of "the total separation of church and state." Madison also wrote that such separation is "strongly guarded" in the Constitution. There are other references, but I believe that the point may be taken.

I am not sure whether Mr. Colson is a Baptist, so he can perhaps be forgiven for his shortsighted call to "end the radical separationism that keeps Christianity out of public life." Baptists have long held—and been willing to bleed and die for the claim—that no power on heaven or earth can, in fact, keep Christianity out of our public life. I am one Baptist who will continue to uphold the right of all men and women to have freedom of religion, for religion, and even from religion without the interference of any form of government. May the wall stand strong and free!

John P. Fairless
Gainesville

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