Associated Baptist Press - 3/4/2009

Associated Baptist Press
March 4, 2009 · (09-31)

David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer

In this issue
BWA leaders hear sobering finance report, fill justice post (760 words)
Student newspaper, Catholic prof spar over indulgences (842 words)
Trustees keep Liberty University gun-free (488 words)

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BWA leaders hear sobering finance report, fill justice post
By Robert Marus (760 words)

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (ABP) -- Members of the Baptist World Alliance's executive committee heard a sobering financial report detailing investment losses over the last year, agreed to slash the group's budget, gave initial approval to organizational changes and met BWA's new director for freedom and justice during their annual meeting March 3-4.

Gathering at the organization's headquarters in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Falls Church, Va., BWA leaders agreed to slash the 2009 budget by nearly 30 percent, from an original figure of $2,973,155 to $2,111,155 -- a reduction of nearly $900,000 in expenditures.

Ellen Teague, finance director for the worldwide umbrella group for Baptists, said the cuts are necessary to maintain a decent amount of reserve funds, heavily depleted over the last year because of huge investment losses.

"This is the most difficult financial situation that we've encountered in the 15 years that I've been the director of finance and administration," Teague told committee members.

She noted that, giving-wise, BWA actually ended 2008 much better than many other non-profits -- with income from donors and member bodies less than 5 percent behind 2007's total.

But the organization was forced to draw heavily from its reserves to cover heavy investment losses owing to the world's tanking markets. BWA transferred more than $2.3 million in unrestricted reserves to the operating fund to cover the losses..

In order to stick to internal guidelines that require a minimum of $500,000 in reserves -- and even under a best-case 2009 income scenario of donation income similar to 2008's -- Teague said BWA would have to slash its spending dramatically.

"Basically what we've done is we've experienced the good years and the bad year. It's a lot of good years -- and in one year we've managed to wipe out most of it," Teague said. "This is very serious, because it means that we no longer have reserves that we've had in the past, that we've built up over a number of years."

BWA General Secretary Neville Callam said the organization's staff had already instituted pay-raise freezes and significantly cut their expenditures in anticipation of a reduced overall budget. He and Teague said that, after the committee approved the new budget figure, they'd go line-by-line to figure out exactly where the additional cuts should come.

Callam -- who became the organization's first non-white CEO in 2007 -- also said he hoped to identify new sources of revenue by beefing up BWA's list of potential contributors.

"The database of donors is too small," he said. "It is astonishing that the database of donors is so small."

After discussion, committee members approved the new budget figure. They also approved a separate resolution that empowered Callam and the rest of the staff to increase expenditures above budgeted levels during the year if revenues were significantly higher than expected.

BWA president David Coffey said that, while the financial report was sobering, committee members shouldn't waver in their faith. "God has been good to us over 100 years, and he's not going to abandon us now," he said.

The body also gave initial approval to a set of bylaws revisions necessitated by constitutional changes that are already in motion. The BWA General Council -- a larger governing body that gathers annually -- is scheduled to have a final vote on the recommendations at its next meeting, set for July 27-Aug. 1 in Ede, Netherlands.

Committee members also voted to recommend that the General Council approve Raimundo Cesar Barreto as director of the new BWA Division of Freedom and Justice. Council members created the new division -- which will focus on religious freedom and justice issues that affect BWA member bodies -- last year at the organization's annual gathering in Prague, Czech Republic.

Barreto, who currently is a pastor in Salvador, Brazil, holds a doctorate in Christian ethics from Princeton Theological Seminary. He also has degrees from Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology and the North Brazil Theological Seminary. He has taught at theology schools in Brazil and the United States.

Executive committee members also heard that the recipient of the 2009 Denton and Janice Lotz Human Rights Award is Indian Baptist activist Leena Lavanya.

Referred to by some as the "Baptist Mother Teresa," Lavanya's Serve Trust organization operates several charities among India's poor and dispossessed. They include HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention and other ministries to female sex workers as well as homes for the elderly and those suffering from leprosy.

Lavanya is the granddaughter and niece of prominent Baptist leaders. She will formally receive the award during the Netherlands meeting.

Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

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Student newspaper, Catholic prof spar over indulgences revival
By Bob Allen (842 words)

WACO, Texas (ABP) -- A Baylor Lariat editorial critical of the Catholic Church's newly revived practice of indulgences brought a strong rebuke from a prominent Catholic professor at the world's largest Baptist university.

The Feb. 27 editorial in Baylor's student newspaper criticized several Roman Catholic parishes in the United States for beginning to issue indulgences as part of a larger campaign to make Catholics more concerned with their spirituality.

The student newspaper called indulgences -- acts of contrition that Catholics believe help mitigate the punishment for sins -- "a dated solution to a problem that needs a modern-day, innovative strategy to truly raise awareness of sin and reconnect people with their religion and their God."

The editorial earned mention on the Catholic Culture website and prompted a letter to the editor from Francis Beckwith, a professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor.

Beckwith made headlines in 2007, when he resigned as president of the Evangelical Theological Society and announced that he had converted back to his original Catholicism.

Beckwith, who describes his faith journey from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism and back in a new book, criticized the editorial for "poor timing" -- appearing during the first week in the season of Lent -- and "poor taste" for an accompanying cartoon mocking Pope Benedict XVI. He also lamented what he called bad history and faulty theology.

"If the Catholic Church believes it has good grounds to hold this belief and its critics disagree on the adequacy of those grounds, then it would seem beside the point for the editors of a student newspaper at a Baptist university in Central Texas to suggest that the Catholic Church should abandon its belief because it is unfashionable," Beckwith wrote.

The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church defines indulgences as "a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints."

The Catholic Church claims the doctrinal prerogative to dispense indulgences as part of the authority of "binding and loosing" granted by Christ to Peter in Matthew 16:19. Catholics believe Peter was the first bishop of Rome, and that the spiritual authority of pontiffs since has flowed from Christ's charge to his disciple.

Indulgences can be partial -- removing some of the temporal consequences of past sins -- or plenary, removing them all. Catholics may obtain indulgences either for themselves or for souls in purgatory, but not for another person living on Earth.

Though not a sacrament -- a visible ceremony that Catholics believe imparts grace -- the tradition of indulgences dates back to the early church, when Christians who had fallen away from the faith during periods of persecution desired to be restored to full communion. Over the centuries, severe forms of penance prescribed in those cases transitioned to less-demanding works such as prayer, fasts or payment of sums of money to the church.

The earliest conspicuous use of plenary indulgences was in 1095 by Pope Urban II, who decreed them for all who engaged in the First Crusade.

Abuses arose during the Middle Ages, with unrestricted sale of indulgences to raise funds for capital projects. Aggressive marketing of indulgences to raise money to build St. Peter's Basilica in Rome provoked Martin Luther in 1517 to write his "Ninety-Five Theses," the primary catalyst for the Protestant Reformation.

The Council of Trent (1545-1563) affirmed the efficacy of indulgences, but decreed almsgiving should never be a necessary condition for receiving them.

Indulgences fell into disuse after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, but Pope John Paul II reinstated them in 2000 to celebrate the church's third millennium.

Benedict, a conservative sometimes criticized for turning back the reforms of Vatican II, has issued indulgences on several occasions -- most recently to mark the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the apostle Paul. The original decree was for pilgrims traveling to St. Paul's Basilica in Rome, but later was expanded to include other specified pilgrimage sites for Catholics who cannot afford to travel abroad.

The Lariat editorial opined that, because of their negative connotation, indulgences will hurt Catholicism instead of helping it.

"Catholics should on their own choose to go to confession because they recognize their sins and desire to truly atone," the newspaper said. "They shouldn't be motivated simply because the award of an indulgence makes it more appealing."

Beckwith, who first posted his reaction to the editorial on a blog promoting his new book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic, said as an official university publication, the Lariat's articles and opinions cannot be read apart from the university community's common good.

"[T]he next time the Lariat's editors choose to offer a theological critique, they should at least consult those within their midst who embrace the tradition they have targeted," he advised. "Anything less than that is uncharitable and unchristian."

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

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Trustees keep Liberty University gun-free
By Bob Allen (488 words)

LYNCHBURG, Va. (ABP) -- Liberty University will remain gun-free, trustees at the Baptist school founded by the late Jerry Falwell decided March 3.

Last year, Liberty's chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus asked university officials to change the school's firearm policies to allow people with concealed-handgun permits to carry weapons on campus.

"Liberty University prides itself in not adhering to 'political correctness' and is obligated to consider the facts instead of simply adhering to politically popular policies," the group appealed in an online petition.

The petition said current rules banning firearms on campus "only deter the honorable" and that anyone intending to commit violence "would have no concern for breaking a university rule."

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a non-profit group claiming 36,000 members nationwide, was formed immediately after the April 16, 2007, massacre that killed more than 30 at Virginia Tech University. The group claims to have no affiliation with the National Rifle Association or any political party.

Liberty Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. said last October he would take the request to Liberty's board of trustees. According to local media, trustees did not take a formal vote at their March 3 meeting but agreed by consensus of continuing the policy of allowing only police officers to bear arms while on campus.

"The feeling was that, unlike most private property owners, we have our own police force," the younger Falwell said, quoted in the Lynchburg News & Advance. "So the decision was made, since crime has not really been a problem at L.U., not to make any changes to the policy at this time."

Virginia requires that a person be 21 years old to apply for a concealed-handgun permit. Falwell said a major concern was that, if permit holders live in a dorm, their weapons might fall into the wrong hands. He also said some faculty members were uncomfortable with students carrying weapons while they handed out grades.

The Students for Concealed Carry on Campus group says on its website that legislatures in nine states are now considering changing gun laws to allow concealed carry on college campuses for permit holders.

The petition by the Liberty chapter said they were not asking for all students to be allowed to have guns, but only that those already trained and licensed to carry a firearm be allowed to do so while on campus like they do everywhere else.

In comments to media, Falwell left open the possibility of, in the future, allowing faculty and staff to carry concealed weapons if they determine they need it for enhanced security.

Recently the university opened its off-campus firearm ranges -- previously used primarily for police training -- to students for target practice with rifles, shotguns and handguns. When not in use at the range, students living on campus are required to store their weapons with university police, and commuters must keep them unloaded and stored in the trunk of their vehicle.

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.