My father received salvation after I was born. I was so young that I cannot recall his salvation experience but I do recall his life certainly changed for the glory of God. After Daddy’s salvation he maintained his membership in the church in which he grew up. The church began to change in the late 60′s and early 70′s from being one that believed the scriptures were truth to one that believed the scripture contained truth. As a result, the church began supporting more moderate to liberal causes. When the Biblical Recorder, our state paper, became part of the church budget I remember a statement made by my father that was common throughout my life. He said, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” What that meant was completely foreign to me, but the result was that Daddy began negative designation of his tithe. He met with the finance committee and told them that he did not desire for any of his money to go to that portion of the budget.
The following paragraph was an OP that I first penned just before the Louisville convention, but never posted.
This brings me to the reason for this article. In a Baptist Press article, Dr. Hunt expresses his disagreementt with a letter sent to Executive Committee Trustees. The letter was from Dr. Morris Chapman, and it appears that he desires this Great Commission Resurgence to be derailed before it gets on the tracks. I believe Dr. Chapman is expressing publicly what state executives are expressing privately. According to Dr. Nathan Finn, in this article, there seems to be private conversation behind the scenes in email circulars of state executives and and various other state convention employees that do not want to see Article IX take shape. I appreciate the desire of Dr. Hunt to lead us into a Great Commission Resurgence and I also appreciate the desire of Dr. Chapman to protect the integrity of the convention’s documents. Because these two leaders are in disagreement, it presents serious issues for our convention to address as we move forward with a motion.
What happens if a motion comes back from a GCR committee requiring that a certain percentage of Cooperative Program (CP) funds be retained in the various state conventions? Let us say at Louisville that we elect a study group and that group returns to us a recommendation that the 1927 agreement, entered into by state conventions allowing them to determine the percentage, be changed to require an even 50/50 split of CP funds received from the churches? Will the state conventions leaders say to themselves, “There is more than one way to skin a cat”?
