The annual trustee meeting of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission opened Sept. 11 with ERLC president Richard Land expressing gratitude to the convention for increasing the percentage of Cooperative Program dollars the ERLC would be receiving in the new budget year.
Hal LaneDuring the meeting, Hal Lane, pastor of West Side Baptist Church, Greenwood, was reelected trustee chairman. Lane also serves as chairman of The Baptist Courier’s board of trustees.
Lane said the trustees “were pleased with all the staff has accomplished” since the board’s last meeting. He said he wished every Southern Baptist could be aware of how the work of the ERLC is “impacting and changing the culture.”
Funding increase
Messengers to the SBC annual meeting in San Antonio voted to approve the SBC Executive Committee’s recommendation increasing the ERLC’s share of CP dollars received at the national level from 1.49 percent to 1.65 percent.
“The ERLC will receive, on average, 60 cents out of every 100 Cooperative Program dollars given at the local church level, given the percentage increase,” Land explained. The commission is anticipating its CP receipts to increase by just over $320,000 in the new budget year because of the bump in its CP percentage.
Land noted that it would require Cooperative Program giving to increase by roughly $59.6 million at the local church level for the ERLC to see a budgeted increase in CP funds of $320,962, if the commission’s share of CP funds had remained unchanged.
“We are grateful for this increase,” Land said, “because clearly it would take a while for Cooperative Program receipts to grow by nearly $60 million.”
Six years since 9/11
Noting it was six years to the day when ERLC trustees were meeting when the World Trade Center was attacked, Land said, noting, “It was the morning that our world changed.”
He said he is thankful the nation had not been attacked again, noting it was not for a lack of trying by those who wish to harm the United States.
Yet Land said the nation is in need of a new level of civility in the way public policy is discussed, particularly when it comes to the war on terror.
“I am concerned about the debasement of debate in this country,” he told the trustees in his report to the board during their Sept. 11-12 sessions.
“We have divisions in this country, but they are exacerbated by the media thinking the best way to have a discussion is to get the two people with the loudest mouths and the smallest brains and let them yell at one another for 15 minutes,” he said, noting it was this fact that led him to write his newest book, “The Divided States of America? What Liberals and Conservatives are Missing in the God-and-Country Shouting Match!”
Land said the country is involved in a national debate that has “enormous consequences for us, our children and our grandchildren.”
Vietnam
Land told the trustees he would be traveling to Vietnam in late September in his role as a commissioner with the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Noting that Vietnam has a “bad record” on religious freedom, he said he would be on an official diplomatic mission to investigate the state of religious liberty in the Indochinese country. Land was elected vice chairman of the USCIRF earlier this year.
Few countries would recognize the religious freedom their citizens should have without the United States pressing the issue, Land said. He noted the USCIRF aids both Congress and the executive branch in understanding how foreign policy decisions can be used to enhance and promote religious freedom.
Religious liberty award
ERLC trustees named Bob Fu as the 2007 recipient of the John Leland Religious Liberty Award. Fu was a leader of the student democracy movement that ended in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
“Fu has been a tremendous witness for faith and a tremendous witness for the sanctity of human life and religious freedom,” said Land, noting Fu became a Christian in 1989.
Fu was imprisoned after Chinese authorities discovered he had started a Bible school in an empty factory building. Fu and his wife fled from China via Hong Kong in 1996, just days before China regained control of Hong Kong.
In 2002, Fu founded China Aid Association, an organization that seeks to draw international attention to human rights violations against house church Christians in China.
Billy Graham
ERLC trustees awarded evangelist Billy Graham the entity’s 2007 Richard D. Land Distinguished Service Award. Graham is the “greatest evangelist of at least the last century,” Land stated, suggesting Graham may well be the greatest preacher since the “apostles went home to be with the Lord.”
In honoring Billy Graham, the “ERLC honors itself,” Land said. The action “expresses the heart of our entire denomination in its gratitude for this crown prince of preachers.”
New Web site
Trustees learned more about a recently established ERLC campaign based on the biblical account of Josiah (2 Chronicles 34), including the launch of a Web site, josiahroad.com. The effort will blend a call to spiritual revival with an emphasis on the need for cultural reform, explained Harold Harper, the ERLC’s executive vice president.
“We need a movement of God. We need revival desperately,” Harper said, saying spiritual awakening will be “birthed in the hearts of people through scripture.”
Other business
In other business, trustees approved $32,000 in the 2007-2008 ERLC budget to be designated as seed money for the future establishment of a Center for Cultural Engagement, where “students could be trained to become ethics leaders and teachers.” They also signed off on a $3.5 million budget for the ERLC’s 2007-2008 fiscal year, a 12.8 percent increase from last year’s budget.