Jonathan Merritt, a 25-year-old student at Southeastern Baptist Seminary, captured widespread media attention March 10 in releasing a statement titled “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.”
The so-called “Southern Baptist” statement is not an initiative of the Southern Baptist Convention, which voiced its views on global warming last summer in a resolution, “On Global Warming.”
Frank PageHowever, the student’s project carries the names of a number of high-profile Southern Baptist leaders, including his father, James Merritt, pastor of Cross Pointe, the Church at Gwinnett Center, Duluth, Ga., and a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Frank Page, pastor of First Baptist Church, Taylors, and the current SBC president; and Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Tex., and a past president of the SBC, also signed the document.
Although he signed Merritt’s declaration, Page, in a statement to Baptist Press, voiced support for the 2007 SBC resolution and earlier SBC resolutions on the topic.
“Southern Baptists have long stood for a clear environmental message which takes seriously God’s call to guard and keep the earth,” Page said. “We have been balanced and responsive in our calls for care?…?.
“However, in a broader sense, many of God’s people have been timid about speaking out regarding issues which relate to environmentalism. Perhaps this timidity has been a fear that speaking out would tie us to the very extreme, left-wing, liberal environmental lobby. Some in this group are known for harsh political tirades. Others have issued irresponsible calls for economic change which would devastate the economies of some of the poorest nations in the world.”
In a teleconference with media March 10, Merritt said the idea for the initiative came to him during a theology class.
“In the lecture,” he said, “my professor made the statement that when we destroy creation, which is God’s revelation, it is no different from tearing a page out of the Bible. At that moment, God began to work in my heart and call me to do something. This document is the product of that nudge from God that day.” Merritt has been identified as the project director of the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative, which is behind the document.
The declaration, which carries 46 signatures, says Southern Baptists’ “current denominational engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice. Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. We can do better.”
The declaration released March 10 offers four main points:
– Human beings have a responsibility to care for creation and acknowledge their participation in environmental decline.
– Addressing climate change is prudent.
– Stewardship of the earth is required by Christian and Southern Baptist beliefs.
– Individuals, churches, communities and governments should act now.
The statement included the disclaimer that advocacy of environmental stewardship will not reduce the signers’ commitment to protecting unborn and other human life or to the biblical view of marriage.
“We will never compromise our convictions nor attenuate our advocacy on these matters, which constitute the most pressing moral issues of our day,” the statement says. “However, we are not a single-issue body.”
One of the most glaring missing endorsements was that of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
During the teleconference, Merritt mentioned that the ERLC had provided helpful inputs to reshape the statement but in the end did not endorse the final draft.
In a statement to Baptist Press, ERLC president Richard Land said he declined to endorse Merritt’s declaration out of respect for Southern Baptists’ autonomy.
“They reserve to themselves the right to decide through convention action what the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy positions are to be,” Land said. “The ERLC will continue to share the officially adopted positions of the convention with public policy makers and the media.”
Land also took issue with the signers’ statement that Southern Baptists have been “too timid” in addressing these issues.
“The convention has officially addressed the issues of creation care and environmental stewardship in its 2006 and 2007 conventions through resolutions adopted by the convention’s duly elected messengers,” Land said. Referring to the 2007 action, he added that the approved action “is as close to an ‘official’ position as the SBC is capable of making, apart from its formal confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message.”
“Consequently, in our convention-
assigned role to share faithfully with Washington and other public policy venues where the convention is on an issue, it would be misleading and unethical of the ERLC to promote a position at variance with the convention’s expressly stated positions.”
While some media reports interpreted the declaration as a major shift of position in Southern Baptist circles, the document actually builds on statements adopted in the past, Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Seminary, said during the teleconference.
Southern Baptist messengers, in speaking to the issue of global warming during the 2007 annual meeting in San Antonio, encouraged fellow Southern Baptists “to proceed cautiously in the human-induced global warming debate in light of conflicting scientific research.” It also called for public policies that guarantee “an appropriate balance between care for the environment, effects on economics, and impacts on the poor when considering programs to reduce” carbon and other emissions.
The resolution affirmed Southern Baptists’ responsibility to protect the environment while urging caution in the debate over humanity’s role in global warming.
Compiled by Baptist Press staff, with reporting by Washington bureau chief Tom Strode and BP assistant editor Mark Kelly.