BAPTIST CHURCHES Alliance faces loss of largest member in rift over policies

The Southern Baptist Convention is to vote today on alliance membership.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- The Baptist World Alliance, a loose federation of some 46 million Baptists, is facing a critical test: the potential loss of its largest member body and, with it, a third of its income.
The Southern Baptist Convention was expected to decide today whether to quit the alliance because some participants in its events are considered too liberal in theology or "anti-American" in tone.
The annual meeting of the staunchly conservative SBC, America's largest Protestant body with 16.3 million members, will receive the pullout proposal from the SBC executive committee.
Such leadership proposals usually pass, which dims the alliance's prospects.
The SBC helped launch the Falls Church, Va.-based Baptist World Alliance in 1905 and it currently boasts Baptists ministering in more than 200 countries.
An SBC pullout would cost it a third of its income base.
New SBC leader
In other business today, thousands of attendees were to elect a new SBC president; the only announced candidate is the Rev. Bobby Welch of Daytona Beach, Fla. They also are expected to hear a video greeting from President Bush. And an evening program will urge Baptists to promote voter registration and work against gay marriage.
The potential world alliance split has been simmering for months.
A December report from an SBC task force complained that some alliance speakers questioned "the truthfulness of Holy Scripture," refused to affirm the necessity of conscious faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, promoted "women as preachers and pastors" and criticized the SBC and its foreign mission board.
Moderate group
Another breach occurred in 2003, when the alliance accepted as a member the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a rival group to the SBC formed by moderates who oppose the SBC's strict conservative leadership.
When the executive committee decided to propose the pullout to the annual meeting, the moderate editor of the Texas convention newspaper charged that "fundamentalists must control. What they cannot control, they abandon and undermine."
Officials of the alliance and the SBC conferred in April and said if a pullout does occur, they'll continue regular talks to resolve issues so the SBC can rejoin "in the not too distant future."
But relations are so tense that the SBC denied the alliance exhibit space during this week's meeting.
The annual meeting also may offer some new directions on various issues, with gay marriage among topics the resolutions committee could decide should be addressed.
One proposal, from two prominent hard-liners, would encourage Southern Baptists to remove their children from "officially Godless" public schools in favor of Christian day schools or home schooling. But observers expect any committee text about education to water down such language.
Name change
Another issue that could arise is outgoing SBC President Jack Graham's call for another study on whether the denomination should drop its "Southern" name to underscore its nationwide and international reach.
On Monday night, leaders celebrated the 25th anniversary of the campaign that moved the SBC rightward though electing a series of presidents whose appointees insisted on strict conservatism. The winning side calls it the "conservative resurgence." Moderates in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and elsewhere speak of the "fundamentalist takeover."
TV preacher Jerry Falwell prayed: "Our Father, we thank you for the 25-year miracle that achieved what most thought was impossible."
Richard Land, president of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told hundreds of believers that liberal scholarship on the Bible at Baptist schools was a "cancer" that "would have been lethal if it had been allowed to continue."