Associated Baptist Press - 3/6/2008

Associated Baptist Press

March 6, 2008 (8-26)

IN THIS ISSUE:
Judge rules in Windermere’s favor, against convention
On March 4, Catholics boost Clinton; evangelicals can’t save Huckabee
Journalist Moyers’ son recounts journey from addiction to faith
Baptists Today to honor Knight at 25th anniversary celebration
Opinion: The battle for power and the spirit of Christ
Correction

Judge rules in Windermere’s favor, against convention
By Vicki Brown

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (ABP) -- Windermere Baptist Conference Center acted legally when it changed its articles of incorporation, Cole County (Mo.) Circuit Court Judge Richard Callahan ruled March 4.

The ruling was the latest action in a lawsuit the Missouri Baptist Convention filed against five formerly related entities -- Windermere, the Baptist Home retirement-home system, the Missouri Baptist Foundation, Missouri Baptist University and the newspaper Word & Way -- more than five years ago.

The convention plans to appeal, according to MBC lead attorney Michael Whitehead in an article on the website of the convention’s in-house newspaper, The Pathway.

“We are very thankful for Judge Callahan’s decision,” Windermere President Dan Bench said in a March 5 written statement. “After carefully considering the merits of the case, the judge made the decision we have always believed was right. We look forward to putting this unhappy event behind us and to have all the Baptists of Missouri rejoicing and serving together.”

The convention first filed suit Aug. 13, 2002, in an effort to force the five institutions to rescind changes they had made in their corporate charters. The Baptist Home changed its articles of incorporation in 2000 to elect its own trustees. The other four agencies took similar actions in 2001.

The March 4 ruling centered on two aspects of the convention’s argument: corporate membership and a contractual relationship with Windermere. The judge ruled that the Missouri convention is not a member of Windermere’s corporation and that no contract exists between the two entities.

Until August 2000, the convention had governed Windermere through its executive board. Messengers to the 1999 MBC annual meeting approved a reorganization plan that included incorporation of Windermere and Word & Way as separate entities. Windermere’s charter, drawn up in 2000, noted the new corporation would have no members.

The Missouri convention has acknowledged that the original incorporation articles declare that Windermere has no members. But attorneys argued that because Windermere had granted the convention permission to elect the center’s trustees, the action made the convention, de facto, the only member of Windermere’s corporation.

Callahan said Missouri law dictates that individuals can participate in election of an agency’s board without becoming a corporate member of that organization. A corporation without members does not become a corporation with members just because it grants limited rights to a third party, he ruled.

The first judge in the case, Thomas Brown, ruled on the Missouri Baptist University’s behalf in 2003. Brown lost his bid for reelection in 2006, and the case was subsequently assigned to Callahan.

Windermere also has the right to change its charter without convention approval, Callahan said. “The ‘rights and privileges’ given to the MBC and/or its messengers under Windermere’s original articles were not ‘fixed, unalterable, irrevocable’ rights, but were rights or privileges subject to amendment by Windermere,” the judge wrote.

He added that while the law protects the convention’s rights, trustee election is merely a privilege that Windermere’s original incorporating articles had granted to the convention. He also noted that as a drafter of the original charter, the Missouri convention could have clearly spelled out the rights to be granted.

The judge dismissed the idea that Windermere’s articles of incorporation and the MBC’s governing documents -- its constitution and bylaws, its business and financial plan, and the executive board’s articles of incorporation and bylaws -- created a contract between the two entities. The charter, he said, constitutes a contract only between the center and the State of Missouri.

The court also noted that a binding covenant agreement did not exist between the convention and Windermere because the agreement did not list obligations for both parties. The convention could change the agreement unilaterally simply by changing its governing documents, and the convention had the right to terminate a covenant agreement at any time, Callahan said.

Furthermore, Callhan said, no mutual obligation between the two existed because under the governing documents’ provisions, the convention was not obligated to support the center and could withdraw any support it provided at any time. The convention withdrew Cooperative Program funds because of the charter changes.

Judge Callahan recognized control as an underlying issue.

“Plaintiffs argue, without factual support, that the MBC only released control over the assets, operations and/or funds because it knew it would retain some degree of control; that it would make no sense for the MBC to enter into the arrangement unless the right of continued control was perpetual; and that the MBC believed it would retain some degree of control,” he wrote.

The court noted that any contract “depends on what is actually said and done … not upon understanding or supposition.”

Judge Callahan denied the convention’s request for a permanent injunction against Windermere. The injunction would have banned the center from any construction work, from borrowing funds or from selling or encumbering its assets.

The court has 30 days in which to make any changes to the order or to withdraw it. The convention will have an additional 10 days in which to file an appeal.

Whitehead said the convention is disappointed that the Windermere case did not go before a jury. Representatives from the Missouri convention said they plan to ask the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District to offer a ruling rather than to return the case to the circuit court.

In 2005, appellate judges sent the case back to Cole County Circuit Court after the state convention appealed Brown’s dismissal of legal action against the university. Brown had ruled that the MBC Executive Board and six Missouri Baptist individuals who filed the original lawsuit did not have the legal right to do so. The appeals court overruled the Cole County judge on the board’s standing and upheld Brown’s decision.

The Windermere case does not directly affect the other four institutions because each are listed as individual defendants.

“Windermere Baptist Conference Center is very pleased with Judge Callahan’s well-reasoned … judgment ruling in favor of Windermere and against plaintiffs with respect to each and every claim and issue raised in the lawsuit,” the center’s lead attorney, Jim Shoemake, said in an e-mail statement. “Windermere is confident that Judge Callahan’s judgment will be upheld by the court of appeals.”

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On March 4, Catholics boost Clinton; evangelicals can’t save Huckabee
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- In the March 4 election contests, Hillary Clinton reestablished her previous support among Catholic Democrats while continued evangelical support wasn’t enough to keep Mike Huckabee in the GOP race.

The upshot of religious voters’ effect in the elections may be a continuing racial and religious divide on the Democratic side and a continued lack of enthusiasm for the party’s presumptive nominee among Republican evangelicals.

Exit-poll data show that the New York senator and former first lady returned to her previous strong support from Catholics in the four states that voted -- Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont. Her rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, had begun to cut into that bloc with a string of wins between the Feb. 5 “Super Tuesday” states and the March 4 contest.

Obama had managed to erase Clinton’s advantage among Catholics -- or whittle it down to insignificant amounts -- in sates like Maryland, Virginia and Wisconsin.

But those gains seemed to be reversed in the March 4 primaries. In Texas -- the biggest prize of the night -- Clinton walloped Obama among Catholics by a 65-33 percent margin. Among Protestants, the split was even at 49-49 percent, more reflective of the overall picture of a state that Clinton won by less than three percentage points.

Clinton was likely helped by her overwhelming support among the state’s significant Latino population, who are mostly Catholic. Catholics make up 33 percent of Texas’ Democratic voters.

In Ohio, Clinton’s margin among Catholics was similar, at 63-36 percent. Catholics make up 23 percent of the Democratic electorate in that state. Among the overall population, she beat Obama more handily in Ohio than in Texas.

In both states, when voters’ preferences were sorted by how often they attend religious services, the Democratic candidates tended to be close in most attendance categories. However, there were two significant exceptions.

In Texas, the most regular worshipers -- those who said they attend church more than once a week -- supported Obama over Clinton 54-43 percent. That is in line with most previous states, where the most frequent church attendees have tended to favor Obama over his rival.

But in Ohio, Clinton beat Obama by 21 points among those who said they attend church only “a few times a year.” That category, at 31 percent, is the largest worship-based grouping among the state’s Democratic voters.

On the Republican side, Arizona Sen. John McCain clinched his party’s nomination by winning Texas. In response, Huckabee -- the former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister -- withdrew from the contest.

“It's now important that we turn our attention not to what could have been or what we wanted to have been, but what now must be -- and that is a united party,” Huckabee said in his concession speech.

But continuing ideological and stylistic fractures in the party were evident from the returns and the exit-poll results. In both states, even though for weeks it has been clear that it is mathematically impossible for Huckabee to win enough delegates to contend for the party’s nomination, he still won at least 31 percent of the vote.

In Texas and Ohio, Huckabee beat McCain by, respectively, 7 and 8 percentage points among GOP voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians. He also beat the senator in both states among voters who said the most important factor in determining their vote is supporting a candidate who shares their values. And, in both states, Huckabee won among the most frequent church attendees.

But McCain won Catholics by significant margins in both states. In Ohio, he beat Huckabee among Catholics by a significantly larger margin than he did in the general population.

In Texas, where McCain was criticized for courting the endorsement of a prominent evangelical pastor many consider virulently anti-Catholic, he nonetheless won Catholics 59-25 percent.

The endorsement by John Hagee, a prominent television preacher and Religious Right leader, may prove crucial for McCain. The Arizonan has had an uneasy relationship with many conservative evangelical opinion leaders regarding issues ranging from his stance on embryonic stem-cell research to passing an anti-gay-marriage amendment for the federal Constitution.

McCain was raised as an Episcopalian, but he regularly attends a Southern Baptist church when he is home in Phoenix.

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Journalist Moyers’ son recounts journey from addiction to faith
By John Hall

SAN ANTONIO (ABP) -- William Cope Moyers grew up believing the prayer his parents taught him: “God is great. God is good.”

But when his childlike faith in a good and great God died in a flash, he sought to fill the void in his soul with drugs and alcohol.

Moyers described his long struggle of recovery from substance abuse -- and recovery of his faith -- at the Texas Baptist Christian Life Conference March 4 in San Antonio. The meeting was sponsored by the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

Growing up, Moyers recalled having everything most children want. As the son of acclaimed journalist and Lyndon Johnson aide Bill Moyers, he considered his childhood idyllic. His parents loved him. They provided for all his needs physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually.

In return, he was everything most parents want. He excelled in school. He was active in his community and his church.

“I lacked for nothing growing up,” he said. “I had it all. I led a comfortable life.”

That changed in an instant on July 18, 1971, a date he describes as the day “God let me down.” While he and his family were vacationing in the mountains of New Mexico, he saw a lightning bolt strike a tree, travel through it and hit a nearby family. It killed the entire family and Moyers’ faith simultaneously.

“That was my introduction to death and the end of life, and the death of my faith,” he said. It also signaled the beginning of “questions that would haunt me for decades.”

Moyers struggled to rationalize how a God he understood to be “great” and “good” could allow -- or worse, cause -- something like that to happen. He tried desperately to reclaim his faith, even going to the extent of getting baptized, but felt no different. He would fall asleep whispering, “God, where are you?”

As the search went on, he began struggling with a sense of unworthiness and his imperfect faith. At 15, Moyers found what seemed to fill what he described as “the hole in my soul” -- marijuana.

“I developed a faith in a power greater than myself,” he said. “That was the marijuana that I voluntarily ingested in my body.”

At 18, he began drinking (which, at that time, was legal). In time, Moyers was binge drinking and addicted to hard drugs, including crack cocaine. He became more distant from others, including his family. He didn’t take care of himself physically. He was no longer active in a church.

“I was a walking wreck,” he said. “Alcohol and drugs stole my soul and hijacked my brain.”

At age 30, he hit bottom in a Harlem crack house. When his family discovered the extent of his addiction, they were shocked.

“My wife never saw it coming,” he said. “My parents were stunned.”

After three weeks in the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital and an extended stay at a residential treatment center in Minnesota, Moyers began the recovery process, but looking back, he sees it only as a tentative beginning.

“I began to make my dance with God again, but it was a dance to a tune I composed and sang -- a dance on my terms,” he said.

Moyers forthrightly described the false starts and relapses he has experienced. He reached a turning point during a major relapse that left him on the floor of another crack house, this time in Atlanta.

“I went there to die. I had been swallowed alive by the black hole of despair,” he said. The malt liquor and cocaine Moyers was consuming were no longer having the same affect on him, he added. They “were no longer the shield of deniability that I was going down.”

As suddenly as the lightning strike that began his downward spiral, a bolt of hope literally came knocking on the door of the crack house. A voice, Moyers said, called for “the white guy.”

“It was not me getting up off the floor,” he said. “My legs were moving, but it was not me moving my legs.”

“I said, ‘I’m done God, have me,’” he recalled. “In that moment, I was broken. And in that moment, I was delivered.”

From that point forward, Moyers has been on the road to recovery -- one day at a time, one step at a time.

He continues battling, saying that the recent days have been extremely tough and noting he’s “hit rock bottom” sober.

Asked to explain what that means, Moyers described it as “a painful moment when you realize how difficult life is.” But he insisted he is learning to “deal with life on life’s terms” without relying on drugs and alcohol.

In the recovery process, he rediscovered his faith. He’s betrayed his faith on occasion since becoming sober, he acknowledged, but he’s clung to it, as well. He trusts God will pull him through, a day at a time.

“Belief is one thing and trust is another,” he said. “I had to trust God could do for me what I could not do for myself.”

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-- Ken Camp contributed to this story.

Baptists Today to honor Knight at 25th anniversary celebration
By John Pierce

MACON, Ga. (ABP) -- Walker Knight, founding editor of Baptists Today, will be honored April 3 as part of the independent news journal’s 25th anniversary celebration.

Knight launched the national publication first known as SBC Today in 1983, shortly after he left the editorship of the Southern Baptist Convention Home Mission Board’s magazine, Home Missions.

Members of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., where he has been a member since 1959, supported his endeavor, and 45 fellow church members -- 12 with journalism experience -- offered their time and talents to the fledgling publication.

Oakhurst provided office space and $5,000 to purchase the needed equipment to begin publication. In 1983, Knight published the first issue of the journal. It aimed to serve moderates in the struggle over control of the Southern Baptist Convention, which in 1983 was at its peak.

Knight grew up around the newspaper business in Henderson, Ky., and worked as a reporter at night while completing high school.

After military service, Knight graduated with a journalism degree from Baylor University and worked as editor of a county newspaper in Marlin, Texas. In 1950, he became associate editor of the Baptist Standard, the Texas Baptist newspaper.

He finished his tenure as editor of what became Baptists Today in 1988, when Jack Harwell began a nine-year tenure as editor. Knight continued as publisher during the early part of Harwell’s service and returned as interim editor in 1997.

The April 3 award celebration will be in Atlanta. Daniel Vestal, executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, will speak at the event.

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Opinion: The battle for power and the spirit of Christ
By David Gushee

(ABP) -- In various ways I have been trying to pry open some space between our Christian understanding of the mission of the church and the work of earthly politics -- without creating such a gulf that we retreat entirely from civic engagement.

One of my foundational “anti-texts” for this emphasis is the statement by Jerry Falwell just after George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004: “The church won the 2004 election. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently.” My burden is to help Christians come to understand how desperately wrong that kind of statement is at a theological and ecclesiological level.

Perhaps a shift to the other side of the political world -- the current struggle between Sens. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) for the Democratic presidential nomination -- can help illuminate my meaning.

We have in this contest quite a rare situation in recent American politics. Not since 1976 have two candidates from the same party endured such a long-fought race for their party’s nomination. There is no sign that this contest will end soon. It may last until the Democratic convention.

There is something amazingly primal about this struggle. Both of these people really, really, really want to be president of the United States. Who can say what drives them? Surely it is some combination of personal ambition, moral ideals, policy goals, life experiences, and psychological attributes. Surely it is a mix of the thirst for power and significance combined with the desire to make this country and the world a better place.

All other Democratic candidates in this race have been defeated. Just two remain. Their policy differences are relatively trivial. Therefore they have to manufacture picayune campaign issues to argue about. Each day their contest continues makes the ultimate victory of either one in November a bit less likely. But those who think either one of them will step aside now for the good of the party do not understand human nature.

It’s like a cage match. Hillary and Barack are locked in a cage, and neither can leave until the other lies defeated on the canvas. If the survivor ends up a bloody mess and in no shape to take on Arizona Sen. John McCain, will it have been worth it? Is it better to go down in history as the (losing) Democratic nominee than never to have been that nominee at all?

In the long weeks that remain until the next major primary in late April, both of these candidates locked in their cage will have to decide how dirty they will fight. How dirty, how mean, how low, will they go -- in what they say about each other openly, in what they signal to their surrogates that they want them to say, in what promises they offer to superdelegates, and in what they do about the remaining disputed issues, such as what to do about Florida and Michigan’s lost primaries? Will either unilaterally “disarm,” even if it costs them the nomination? Not likely.

Jesus said, “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave -- just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

He also said, “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” And Paul said that Christ Jesus “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant.” He also said, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Look not only to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

Greg Boyd is right when he argues that there is something fundamentally different about this “power-under” Kingdom compared to the kingdoms of this world. It is true that the earthly kingdom centered in Washington, D.C., holds power that affects the well-being of all humanity, and therefore the decisions made there do have significance and relevance to the Reign of God. But the scrap for earthly power, with all of its vanity, pride, ambition, anger, low blows, and verbal (sometimes physical) violence, can never be identified with the mustard seed advance of the peaceable Kingdom of God.

I look back over these words of analysis related to the fight for power between Barack and Hillary. I think of the recent history of Baptists in the South. And I understand a little more clearly how deeply damaged our people became by the importing of the tactics and spirit of the earthly kingdom into institutions commissioned by Christ to advance the Kingdom of God.

No wonder some among us can identify the work of the church with the election of a favored politician. The difference between these two kingdoms had been lost long before.

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-- David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com.

Correction
By ABP Staff

There was an error the March 4 ABP story, “Kidnapped worker, Afghan driver apparently dead in Afghanistan.” Baptist Global Response did not found the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center or the Asian Rural Life Development Foundation, but is led by a man who ran both organiztions. Please change the 19th paragraph to read:

According to an April 10, 1997, BP story, the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center, led at the time by Palmer, launched ARLDF, which Palmer heads, in 1988.

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