Two South Carolinians serving as International Mission Board trustees have voiced differing opinions about a recent IMB board decision that, among other things, prohibits the appointment of missionaries who practice a “private prayer language.”
Allen McWhiteAllen McWhite, director for global missions at North Greenville University and an IMB trustee for nearly three years, said in an open letter to South Carolina Baptists that he opposes a policy that would “disqualify otherwise eminently qualified missionary candidates because of excessively narrow theological views.”
In penning his self-described “minority voice” opinion, McWhite said he believes his “primary responsibility as a trustee is to my fellow Southern Baptists” and not the IMB board of trustees.
(For the entire text of McWhite’s letter, click here.)
Bobbie CaldwellIn contrast, IMB board member Bobbie Horton Caldwell, a layperson from Simpsonville who has served as first vice president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention and also is a trustee for Charleston Southern University, said she agrees fully with the IMB’s new policy.
An IMB board member for more than seven years, Caldwell said she voted for the policy because “we have had complaints from Southern Baptists … that we were not planting true Southern Baptist churches on the field,” and that “charismatic practices” were occurring. She said the complaints came from IMB trustees, missionaries, pastors and seminary professors.
Caldwell said the IMB policy change was not arrived at easily. “We have had a committee working on this thing for two years,” she said. “We don’t just randomly pull something out of the hat and do it. It’s done with prayerful study and consideration.
“The ultimate end of this decision, I suppose, was to try to stop some of these problems before they got to the field.”
Caldwell said she does not believe a “significant” number of IMB missionaries speak in tongues, “but undoubtedly there are some, because we’ve had complaints.”
The missionary agency already had a policy that prohibited missionaries from speaking in tongues, but Caldwell said she supported extending the prohibition to include private prayer language because she doesn’t see a difference between the two practices.
“I don’t care how people pray (in private), but the main problem is … when people profess to have a private prayer language … they don’t keep it private. They announce it, and when they announce it, it is no longer private.
“I see in Romans where it says that when we don’t know how to pray, the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings, but I don’t see anything in there that says I have to have a private spiritual prayer language.”
The new IMB policy says the New Testament speaks of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) as a gift that “generally is considered to be a legitimate language of some people group,” and adds that “prayer language as commonly expressed by those practitioners is not the same as the biblical use of glossolalia. In terms of general practice, the majority of Southern Baptists do not accept what is referred to as ‘private prayer language.'”
The policy also establishes that missionary candidates must have been baptized in a Southern Baptist church or in a church of another denomination that practices believer’s baptism by immersion alone. Also, the church must embrace the doctrine of the security of the believer.
Another South Carolina representative on the IMB board of trustees, Ron Bryan, pastor of Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Columbia, was not at the November 2005 meeting when the policy was approved. He declined to comment for this story.
Related stories:
IMB president speaks plainly with state editors about private prayer language