| BAPTISTS TODAY
News Release www.baptiststoday.org |
February 3, 2006
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — When Judge Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson launched a revolution within the Southern Baptist Convention they found an eager soldier in Ron Phillips, who served as chair of the Home Mission Board (now North American Mission Board) in the early 1990s.
Phillips, 58, has been pastor of Central Baptist Church of Hixson, near Chattanooga, Tenn., since 1979 — the year when what proponents call “the conservative resurgence” and opponents call “the fundamentalist takeover” began within the SBC.
Today Phillips — who had “an experience with the Holy Spirit” in 1989 that changed his life and ministry significantly — sees himself on the excluded side of SBC life.
“I do believe Paige [Patterson] and others have betrayed every one of us,” said Phillips, whose ministry is now known as Abba’s House and draws about 4,000 worshippers each Sunday.
The congregation identifies itself as “a Spirit-filled Southern Baptist Church” that “operates in the gifts of the Spirit while holding to the Word of God.” Phillips said his congregation affirms biblical authority — what he thought was the sole issue in the SBC controversy.
“We thought it was a commitment to a higher view of scripture rather than a narrowing view of fundamentalism,” said Phillips, who helped carry out the radical reshaping of the convention as HMB chair.
Any criticism that he is now on the receiving end of what he helped create is certainly “fair,” Phillips confessed. He said he has apologized to many who were excluded from SBC life in recent years.
“I was much younger,” he said. “But I was very serious and sincere.”
Phillips was elected president of the Tennessee Baptist Convention in 1991 — after his “experience with the Holy Spirit.” There were no problems, said Phillips, because “I didn’t get up and talk about it.”
In his book, Awakened by the Spirit, released by Thomas Nelson Publishers in 2000, Phillips shares his emerging theological and historical perspectives as a “Spirit-filled” Baptist.
Phillips said his passion for evangelism and missions remains high but he is finding it harder to support the work of Southern Baptists. He said convention policies — including the one recently adopted by the SBC International Mission Board that excludes missionary candidates who use a private prayer language — are pushing more good Baptists away.
“We’re shocked and betrayed by what has happened at the International Mission Board,” said Phillips. “I feel like it is a precursor to a total booting out of Baptists with charismatic leanings.”
In response, Patterson said neither he nor anyone else to his knowledge ever made a promise to include charismatic persons in all aspects of SBC life. And his position on gifts of the Spirit, he said, has been public for years and is documented in a commentary he wrote on 1 Corinthians.
“The Bible says not to forbid speaking in tongues since the miracle of Acts 2, for example, was a miracle of God,” said Patterson. “However, Paul builds in so many restrictions in 1 Corinthians 14 as to make the practice of mere utterance, what is practiced mostly today, virtually of little value.”
Patterson said, as a Baptist, he would not forbid anyone from speaking in tongues, but would not call such a person to be his pastor or appoint someone with such leanings as a seminary professor.
“I cannot imagine why anyone could feel betrayed,” said Patterson, now president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. “Most of us don’t make deals; we try to understand scripture and faithfully preach it.”
Phillips, however, reads such a promise from page 158 of Judge Pressler’s book, A Hill On Which To Die, released in 1999 by the Southern Baptist publishing house, Broadman & Holman. In his personal recounting of the rightward shift in the SBC, Pressler writes:
“The liberals had said that after the conservatives finished with those who held different views of the nature of the Bible, they would begin attacking the charismatics (neo-Pentecostals). They also alleged conservatives would later attack various other groups until they ‘purify’ every aspect of convention life.
“They said conservatives wanted to make everybody think just as they do. Such a charge is ludicrous, but it did worry some people such as my friend Wally Henley [pastor of Encourager Church in Houston and former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention], who had charismatic leanings.
“I assured him the issue was not the charismatic movement. Although I am not a charismatic, I have referred people with charismatic convictions to his church, which leans charismatic.
“I assured him that Paige, our friends, and I would not turn on charismatics after the battle over biblical authority was won. He trusted us, and he and others have now seen that this issue will not be a test of fellowship.
“Charismatic worship and understanding of spiritual gifts is an interpretation of Scripture that was not our concern. Our concern was the nature of Scripture… All we wanted was for people to base what they believe on an intelligent study of what the Bible says.”
Phillips said he and Pressler serve together on the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) board. He believes Pressler was sincere in his statement.
That assurance, however, is not being kept by SBC leaders, said Phillips. And the growing restrictions within SBC agencies make it harder for him and others to stay connected.
“I think this is an effort to exclude ‘Word and Spirit’ people” from the SBC, he said.
Like others, such as Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson, whose removal as an IMB trustee is being sought by the agency’s board, Phillips sees the new restrictions on overseas missionaries as an assault on IMB President Jerry Rankin who admitted to having a private prayer language.
Phillips said if the trustees think such practices are biblically wrong, they should make the new restrictions retroactive to current missionaries and staff — rather than applicable to future candidates only. Otherwise, he said, it is a moot point.
“It [private prayer] should be nobody’s business,” said Phillips, calling the latest restrictions on missionaries “horrible.”
Phillips said he doesn’t know Rankin personally but has heard wonderful reports about his leadership from missionaries he has encountered around the world. He predicated the new restrictions on missionaries would hurt Southern Baptist efforts to become more ethnically diverse also.
“Many African-American congregations that are Southern Baptist operate with the leadership of the Holy Spirit,” said Phillips. “That’s got to be an issue.”
Phillips also claimed that members of his congregation are no longer able to serve as missionaries — even as volunteers — of the SBC agency whose trustees he once led.
NAMB spokesman Marty King, however, said the agency does not screen volunteers for possible Charismatic leanings. The board does have a policy, King said, that prohibits appointed missionaries and endorsed chaplains from practicing glossalalia (speaking in tongues), including a private prayer language.
Phillips said he and his congregation are relating to a wider group of Christians than before. Independent Baptists, and even so-called moderate Baptists within and outside the SBC, are more open to him than current Southern Baptist leaders, he said.
“I have spoken in some moderate churches and have had some great revivals,” said Phillips. “I think there is a greater hunger in moderate churches for the Holy Spirit.”
Just admitting that, said Phillips, would probably cause some Southern Baptist leaders to call him a liberal. Knowing so many good people on both sides of the Southern Baptist divide that he helped create grieves him, he added.
So does Phillips still consider himself a Southern Baptist?
“I do,” he said. “I think I’m the real deal.”
Phillips said he is not mad at those he helped to gain power in the SBC, just concerned that they have “embraced what I call McCarthyism.” Their philosophy, he said, seems to be “us four and no more.”
So Phillips said he and his congregation are partnering for missions and evangelism wherever they find acceptance and support.
“We want to go where we are celebrated, not just tolerated,” said Phillips.
(John Pierce is executive editor of Baptists Today, an autonomous,
national news journal based in Macon, Ga.)