IMB Trustees Back Off Burleson

A bit of breaking news.  The Florida Baptist Witness is reporting that the executive committee of the IMB's trustee board, "will recommend at the board's March 20-21 meeting in Tampa that trustees reverse a Jan. 11 motion asking the Southern Baptist Convention to remove Wade Burleson of Enid, Okla., as a trustee."

Here's more...

IMB trustee chairman Thomas Hatley of Rogers, Ark., told the Southern Baptist TEXAN the committee determined the matter of disciplining a trustee could be handled internally. Burleson has vocally--and allegedly improperly, according to the trustees--opposed the board's action to establish new missionary candidate criteria.

[...]

Misinformation disseminated through informal weblogs caused confusion in the minds of some Southern Baptists, Hatley said. He said he hopes a detailed accounting of the timeline and rationale for those standards will help separate those issues from the matter of Burleson's personal conduct as a trustee and answer questions that have arisen.

[...]

Since November, Burleson’s blog and several others have maintained frequent discussion of the issues. Many of the blogs include feedback from online readers rallying to the embattled trustee’s defense and calling for a large turnout at the annual meeting of the convention in Greensboro June 13-14 to vote against his proposed removal.

With the initial wave of e-mails and letters opposing the action against Burleson subsiding, Hatley told the TEXAN that he was beginning to receive many letters expressing appreciation for the stand taken by trustees.

The policy on private prayer language regards the habit to be outside the norm of Southern Baptist practice and states that candidates holding to the conviction or practice eliminate themselves from consideration. The guideline--not a policy--related to baptism expects candidates to have been baptized in a church that practices believer’s baptism by immersion alone, does not view it as sacramental or regenerative and embraces the doctrine of the security of the believer. In contrast to the misinformation circulated by critics, both the policy and the guideline feature an exception clause that allows for review by appeal.

Here's the BP article.  (HT: Tom Ascol)

Comments

[Bowden McElroy]

If I'm reading this right, it's not a "backing off", merely a change of tactics.

[myles]

why did it take two months for them to come out to "correct" what had been said? that's garbage. this is just a change of tactics, not a "change of heart". what Burleson did was completely appropriate, if the SBC truly believes that the heart of the SBC is the local churches and not indeed the trustee structure. If they implictly believe that the trustees should be heading the show, then it makes sense for them to see Burleson's actions as "inappropriate".

My friend Ben was the one outside Dallas who raised the motion to revoke the entire slate of trustees if this nonsense continued, and rightfully so. This is nothing but damaging.

[Steve McCoy]

Myles et al. Agreed. I don't think there is any question that the heat is on the Trustees, not Burleson (it backfired), and they retracted only to put out a "don't blog--don't tell" policy sometime later instead (or something like it). Am I glad there won't be a Wade vote? Sure. But this is politics, IMHO.

[myles]

what's IMHO?

[Steve McCoy]

"In My Humble Opinion" sorry :)

:) = smiley face