Southern Baptist Leader Predicts Split

Paige Patterson, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has predicted that some kind of division is in the offing for the denomination--the nation’s largest Protestant denomination--but he expects less than a tenth of the group’s churches to depart.

Conservatives and moderates in the denomination are “much farther apart theologically than some people imagine,” said Patterson, who is one of the Baptist convention’s leading conservatives. “Why sit around and cripple what everybody’s doing?”

“Inevitably, there will come a divide in what is today known as the Southern Baptist Convention,” Patterson predicted.

Patterson said a possible result could be an entity composed of churches affiliated with the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship or “churches desiring greater allowance for diversity in doctrinal and ethical matters and reacting in part out of disenchantment with certain conservative leadership.”

Patterson’s comments came in an article he wrote for the millennial issue of the Biblical Recorder, the news journal of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, and in an accompanying interview in the newspaper.

About 40,000 churches are members of the convention, and Patterson predicts that 600 to 3,500 eventually will depart. The larger number would be likely if the Baptist General Convention of Texas, the denomination’s largest state affiliate, leads its churches out, Patterson said in an interview also published in the newspaper. The Texas convention is moving toward permitting churches from other states to join its organization.