Last week, Downtown Dallas hosted both the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) General Assembly AND the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Meeting.
No, there was no bloodbath in the streets, though I did hear of a few awkward encounters, in hotels & restaurants, between those wearing CBF badges and those adorned with SBC badges. In one such encounter, everything was cordial until the SBC messenger realized he was fraternizing with “the enemy,” upon which his warm tone suddenly turned ice cold.
I spent my week at CBF, as I have for years, beginning at noon Tuesday with our T. B. Maston Foundation CBF Scholars Retreat. It was a most refreshing week at CBF, on which I’ll reflect in Part 3 of this series.
Tuesday morning, I parked across from the Hyatt Regency, where CBF was meeting, around 9:30. Since the Maston Retreat didn’t begin until noon, I walked 15 minutes (in the Texas heat!) to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and “crashed” the SBC meeting. When I finally found the auditorium for the business meeting, I saw a sign 
– no, not a sign from the Lord, but one from the SBC, reading “ALL ATTENDEES MUST SHOW BADGE FOR ENTRY.” So I walked up to the door, confessed to a woman who was obviously one of the gatekeepers that I was not a messenger and did not have a badge, then asked whether I might at least observe from just outside the door. She replied, “You can go in. Go right on in,” and waved me on in. I wondered whether St. Peter, the keeper of the Pearly Gates (according to Hollywood, anyway), might be so gracious and accommodating to those who confess their unworthiness to enter.
Once inside the not-so-pearly gates, I stood at the back for the next hour-and-a-half, observing the business session, listening to several motions being presented and discussed.
After standing there about 10 minutes, I was reminded that Baptists can find friends at just about any meeting – even a “CBFer” like me at the SBC! As I looked around, I spotted my friend Lloyd Harsch standing only a few feet away. Lloyd is a New Orleans Seminary professor I met in 2012 at the annual Baptist History & Heritage Society meeting in Raleigh, NC. Lloyd and I chatted quietly for the next 15 minutes or so, stopping occasionally to observe the action. At an ice-cream fellowship during that 2012 meeting, I had introduced myself to Lloyd and challenged him over his willingness to sign the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message; he explained why he had no problem doing it, and we agreed to disagree. Then we spent the rest of the evening talking about Baptist history – a passion we share in common.
See? We CAN find things in common even with those with whom we have fundamental disagreements.
In the ensuing years, Lloyd has become a trusted friend. He leads the Institute for Faith and the Public Square at New Orleans Seminary; each year, the Institute hosts a symposium, and I either attend it in person or watch it on live-stream. It never disappoints. I was there in 2015, when Baptist Voices on Religious Liberty: Left, Right, and Center featured Suzii Paynter, Brent Walker, and Russell Moore among its speakers, and Lloyd graciously invited me to have dinner with him and the speakers that evening. Two years ago, its symposium on race featured Andrew Young, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN and a colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Yes, there ARE plenty of good people in the SBC. Do I have fundamental disagreements with them? Definitely! But we Cooperative Baptists have always been able to find common ground and work with those with whom we disagree. We Moderates were willing to stay in the SBC and cooperate on the things we held in common – our love for Jesus, our love for scripture, our love for people, our commitment to share Jesus with the world, and so forth. It was those who seized control of the SBC in the Takeover of the 1980s who said no, if you don’t agree with us on everything, then we can’t work with you. When Moderates formed CBF, it was not because they left the SBC voluntarily, it was because the SBC kicked them out.
For me, there was some symmetry in attending – if only for an hour-and-a-half – the 2018 SBC Annual Meeting, for the last such meeting I had attended was in Houston in 1968! A half-century ago! My dad, A. Jase Jones, was with the Home Mission Board at the time, and I was 17 years old and had just completed my junior year of high school in Kansas City, MO.
My two strongest memories of that week have nothing to do with the SBC meeting. Mother, Daddy, and I stayed with my Aunt Betsy (one of Mother’s sisters) and Uncle Frank Head at their home in Houston. One morning, Uncle Frank awakened my cousin, Frank Jr., and me with the news that Bobby Kennedy had been shot the night before. Another memory is of the evening (after the SBC meeting was over, I’m sure) that we spent at the Astrodome with the Heads, watching their Astros play my favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Bob Gibson of the Cardinals threw a 4-0 shutout against the Astros, the first of his five consecutive shutouts that led to a 1.12 ERA that season and both the National League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player Awards, and my parents got upset with me for lording it over the Heads that my team had beaten theirs (soundly, I might add).
At the SBC that week, W.A. Criswell was elected president. Daddy had known him well from 1957-1962, when Daddy was on the staff of the Dallas Baptist Association. Daddy held conferences at First Baptist Church, and he and Criswell had played paddleball at the YMCA on occasion. However, Daddy voted against Criswell for SBC president in 1968 over Criswell’s previous support for segregation.