There are no purse strings. Churches do not send money to the SBA except for missions. The SBA doesn’t send down pastors or anything else. The SBA makes and sells Sunday School materials to churches who may use them or not.
It’s not a firewall, it’s the way the churches are organized. The president of the SBA has absolutely no authority over any church whatsoever.
Report whatever you want to the SBA about anything you want, they have no authority to do anything to a church or an employee of the church.
So you are saying everything written by the Baptist News.Com is a blatant lie?
https://baptistnews.com/article/as-...ount-the-cost-of-this-work/#.YovE1EcpAzRTo the extent it disagrees with what I have said, yes. The SBC does not distribute funds to churches except for missions. That line about “making sure that efforts are not duplicated” tells the story. You know, like making sure four churches aren’t sending five missionaries to the same city while ignoring one five miles over.
The SBC has real estate holdings. It has funds from investments. Funds related to seminaries. Funds from published materials and other things like that. All of which will go “poof” like a fart in the wind.
It isn’t the Catholic Church. No congregation has to be a member. Baptists don’t recognize the authority of anyone, even their own pastors (lol), and certainly not some outside organization. Get rid of it today, and there would be a half dozen or more associations taking its place tomorrow. Baptists LOVE division. We’ve already got entire denominations differentiated on nothing more than weighty and eternally important questions like the nature of communion and whether a non member of that particular congregation can partake or whether each church should fund its own missions or cooperate with other churches or whether “church” means only ONE particular congregation or the body of believers as a whole and a hundred other similar questions.
And that’s one more thing. If a pastor or other worker is leaving a church and going elsewhere, I guarantee you that 99 time out of a hundred a congregation knows why and chose to hire him anyway. People cannot and will not keep secrets and since there is almost no hierarchy even within a church, individual member can and do pick up the phone and or talk to people they know from the other congregation.
Finally read the initial report linked. It said that out of one hundred names on the list, nine were still involved in ministry and two still in the SBC. So, that means that out of one hundred people on the list only two are still in the ministry at SBC churches. The SBC has no authority over its own churches but how in the heck is it supposed to have authority over non-SBC churches?
