Texas Baptist leaders voted Tuesday to financially assist foreign missionaries who refuse to affirm the Southern Baptist Convention's revised doctrinal statement and then lose their positions.
More than 200 members of the executive board of the Baptist General Convention of Texas also voted to establish a board to endorse chaplains for hospitals and military duty. The national convention's Chaplain Commission announced earlier this month it would not endorse ordained female chaplains.
Both steps are certain to heighten already tense relations between the national organization, which is controlled by conservatives, and the moderate-controlled Texas convention. With 2.7 million members and more than 5,000 congregations, Texas is the largest state convention in the denomination of 15.9 million people.
"Some will say that we are distancing ourselves from Southern Baptists," said Charles Wade, executive director of the Dallas-based state convention. "Let me say again, as I have said before, we stand ready to work with Southern Baptists. We have not wanted the things that have happened in the last few weeks to happen."
Wade was referring to action by International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin in asking the 5,000 overseas missionaries to affirm the Baptist Faith and Message.
A 1998 change to the statement encourages women to submit "graciously to the servant leadership" of their husbands. In 2000, the statement was changed to prohibit women from serving as church pastors. Language also was added to emphasize fundamentalist biblical authority.
Keith Parks, a retired head of the denomination's foreign missionaries now working with the state convention, said the Texas organization had been contacted by more than 60 missionary couples who said they could not sign the document.
Texas Baptist pastors and lay leaders have pledged $1 million to the new fund to support the missionaries if it becomes necessary.
A spokeswoman for the International Mission Board said Baptists in Texas were "manufacturing a crisis where none exists."
"We regret that activists in Texas have chosen to misrepresent what is happening between Southern Baptist missionaries and their leadership," Wendy Norvelle said.
Rankin has said no one would be fired or forced to resign if they could not affirm the document.
But Texas Baptist leaders are not so sure.
"We are preparing for what we hope will not happen," said E.B Brooks, coordinator of the church missions and evangelism section of the state convention. "It is our hope that the international mission board will not fire anyone and that the missionaries will feel comfortable staying because the board has indicated that they do not have to agree with everything in the Baptist Faith and Message."
Brooks said that the move was not meant to discourage Baptists in giving money to mission programs. He also said he did not expect that the state convention would contribute less money next year to international missions.
Norvelle said it was too early to tell whether any missionaries would resign in objection to the recent request to sign the statement. "We anticipate that most if not all of our personnel will meet the request to reaffirm their beliefs and move forward with the task of reaching a lost world," she said.