Southern Baptist missionaries who were fired or forced to resign last spring when they balked at signing a conservative faith statement that some say denigrates women may return to their overseas mission fields -- with the help of Texas Baptists.
The moderate-led Baptist General Convention of Texas, which has a $1.5 million transition fund for 77 missionaries who have lost their jobs, has proposed creating a funding channel through which churches and individuals can send missionaries back to their previous assignments.
"We feel a very strong need to help these folks who have been displaced," said E.B. Brooks, a missions executive with the Dallas-based state convention. "We are not starting a missions-sending agency. We would just be a conduit through which we can help churches and individuals finance missionaries."
Missionaries began departing months ago after they were pressured to affirm a controversial 2000 faith statement saying that women should not be pastors and that wives should submit to the servant leadership of their husbands.
Most of the more than 5,000 missionaries complied. The largest single exodus came in May when 13 missionaries were fired and 30 others resigned or retired when the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board made it compulsory to affirm the document.
While state convention leaders say they are not setting up a missionary agency to rival the International Mission Board, based in Richmond, Va., a Fort Worth pastor and trustee of the national mission board says that is exactly what is happening.
"Although they publicly deny what they are doing, this is more evidence that they are creating their own missions-sending agency," said the Rev. Bob Pearle, pastor of Birchman Baptist Church. "They are duplicating the work of the International Mission Board."
The Baptist General Convention of Texas rejects the 2000 faith statement in favor of a 1963 version that doesn't mention women.
Moderates believe that the newer statement is sexist and is being used as a creed, which Baptists have historically rejected.
Jerry Rankin, president of the International Mission Board, said that the 2000 statement reflects what Baptists believe and that all employees must show accountability by affirming it. He said it is not a creed because nonemployees and churches are not required to affirm it.
The funding channel proposed by the Texas convention would provide a way for individuals and churches from across the nation to funnel money to the ousted missionaries, allowing them to continue their foreign ministries with different sponsors.
"A number of these missionaries who have been dismissed want to go back to their regular work and have been invited to come back with the promise that national conventions in those countries will help finance them," Brooks said.
The Texas funding plan was approved Tuesday by the State Missions Commission and is expected to be endorsed by the state convention's executive board Sept. 30. The proposal would take effect Oct. 1.
Susie and David Dixon, two missionaries in Madrid, Spain, who were fired from the International Mission Board in May, have already received enough funding from Texas churches and other sources to return to their positions, Brooks said.
For several years, moderate leaders of the 2.5-million-member Texas convention have been at odds with the conservative wing of the national denomination. In reaction, about 2,000 Texas churches have joined a rival state convention, the Southern Baptists of Texas, which backs the national body, based in Nashville, Tenn.