Missouri
Baptist Convention seeks
authority to borrow $1 million
By PATRICIA
RICE
(St. Louis) Post-Dispatch
The Missouri Baptist Convention will ask members this week to
put up some of its assets as collateral for a $1 million loan.
At its three-day annual meeting downtown, officers will ask representatives -
called messengers - from many of the state's 1,850 Southern Baptist churches to
approve the loan to pay legal bills.
The convention's legal expenses have been piling up since it went to court about
two years ago to exert authority to approve boards of trustees for five Baptist
groups: Missouri Baptist University in Creve Coeur; Missouri Baptist Home, which
has three sites for the elderly across the state; Windemere Conference Center in
Ozark, Mo.; and the Baptist Foundation and the Word and Way newspaper, both in
Jefferson City.
The dispute focuses on whether the state convention or the five institutions
have the right to approve the boards of trustees.
The convention is an organization of Baptist churches that supports Baptist
missions, schools and pastors' education. Baptist churches are independent, with
no bishop-like authority.
At the meeting, Monday evening through Wednesday at the Millennium Hotel,
leaders will ask for donations to the convention's legal fund.
"That will allow the largest churches to step up to the plate and continue
to support the (court) effort and will allow those churches who oppose going to
court not to pay," said Roger Moran, of Winfield, research director of the
six-member Missouri Baptist Layman's Association and a member of the Southern
Baptist Convention's national executive committee.
The Missouri Baptist Convention faces multiple financial challenges, including a
$3 million shortfall last winter.
At the annual meeting four years ago, a more conservative leadership that
demanded greater influence on various Baptist organizations was elected.
That fall, Moran, president of Moran Welding and Brooks Brothers Trailers of
Winfield, circulated his layman's research group's endorsements of conservatives
for Baptist state offices. His nominees have swept the elections ever since.
"We'll be back (at the hotel) where we started in 1999, but it will be an
uneventful meeting," Moran said. "The moderates don't come."
Until his leadership group came to power, the university and the four agencies'
trustees traditionally presented their board nominations at the annual meeting.
All were routinely approved. In 2000, the convention leaders wanted to insert
their own candidates to the boards.
The convention's proposed trustees sometimes lacked financial, academic and
legal experience that such boards require, said Kim Quinn, a Baptist Foundation
vice president. For example, the convention leadership has nominated individuals
lacking a college degree to the university board. Each of the five boards
eventually rewrote their institutions' charters and made their boards
responsible for trustee nominations.
In turn, the Baptist state convention stopped funding the institutions. More
than 100 churches now fund the institutions directly. Other churches formed a
new state organization, the Baptist General Convention of
This week the Missouri Baptist Convention will vote on nominees for trustees for
all five institutions. Its
Cole County Judge Tom Brown could rule on the first of the university's lawsuits
as soon as mid-month.
If the convention's current slate of nominees were allowed to be seated, all
women and minorities on the university's board would be eliminated.