The Southern Baptist Convention voted yesterday to sever its 99-year relationship with the Baptist World Alliance on the grounds that it includes a Baptist denomination with openly homosexual members.
This is a huge controversy among the Baptists. It’s worth reading the whole article to get the gist of it. What they need is a universal magisterium and less autonomy. Though even with the gifts God has bestowed on His true Church, we’re still plagued with similar issues of faithfulness to Church teaching.
As an ex-Southern Baptist, and one who still follows them somewhat, the actual cause of this is not the fact that they have too much automony, but that the Southern Baptist Convention is taking it away more and more.
A bit of history, about 15 years or more ago, a group of leaders decided that the Convention was getting too liberal (I agreed,since I was dating some seminary students) but they way that they planned to return it to the fundamentals was wrong. They decided to work to gain control of the convention, and then by the choices of seminary presidents, leaders of the various Southern Baptist organizations etc, to consolidate their power and influence. The style and the strictness of how they did it, has left many more moderate Baptists, who do believe in the autonomy of the local church out in the cold. This has also led to some interesting situations, where a non-credal denomination has leaders in their foreign mission organization that gave veteran missionaries a choice. Sign a statement (acting as a creed) or not be allowed to return to their fields.