By Tippi Rasp
Staff Writer
A local pastor serving on Southern Baptist Convention’s International Missions board said he is grateful the board’s chairman has asked for a reversal of his request to remove the Enid pastor from the board.
Wade Burleson, senior pastor of Em-manuel Baptist Church, said he thought last month’s recommendation to remove him from the board was “unsubstantiated, without pre-cedence and never should have been made in the first place.”
The executive committee of Southern Baptist International Mission Board’s trustees has decided to ask the full board of trustees to consider reversing a motion passed at its January meeting recommending Burleson’s removal from office of trustee, according to IMB’s Web site.
The trustee executive committee met in Atlanta Feb. 10 to review the Burleson action. The original motion passed in executive session during the Jan. 9-11 IMB meeting in Richmond, Va.
“I will continue doing everything I have done and will not change because I have done nothing wrong,” Burleson said.
After the January meeting, the board’s trustee chairman, Tom Hatley, stated the action was taken because of “issues involving broken trust and resistance to accountability, not Burleson’s opposition to policies recently enacted by the board.”
“We have determined that we have the ability to seek management of these issues through internal processes that were not known during our January meeting. We have never reached this stage of conflict before and did not know of all our options until recently,” Hatley said in a statement on the IMB Web site.
Burleson told his congregation last month he was bound by conscience to resist new policies of IMB related to baptism and a private prayer language for missionary candidates. The new policies violate scripture and go past the Baptist faith and message, he said.
He started a Weblog, or an online journal, after trustees approved the policies. The trustees thought Burleson, through his Weblog, was opposing them and not the policies.
“If the board passes a policy that a trustee cannot blog I will abide by that policy and stop my blog immediately,” Burleson said. “I follow policy and always will follow policy.”
Burleson said he spoke with Hatley three or four times since the January meeting.
“I’ve never felt unreconciled with the board,” he said, adding he has enjoyed the people he’s served with and wants to continue his work.
“I would just want the people to know we’re doing some of the greatest mission work in the world. My mission has only been to make us better, and I think we’re getting there.”
He said the new policies go far beyond the Baptist faith and message, and he has not violated any policy by taking opposition to them.
His goal, he said, “has been to make the mission field available to anyone in the Southern Baptist Convention who is called by God to serve as a missionary ... and to not restrict the qualifications beyond the Baptist faith and message.”
When the Southern Baptist Texan, a news publication, recently reported Hatley said Burleson would be disciplined internally, Burleson said he called Hatley to ask if the statement were true.
“I discovered that Tom did not mean to imply that the Board would discipline me,” Burleson wrote in his recent blog at kerussocharis.blogspot.com. “I would never agree to that (internal discipline) because this public matter now needed to be addressed publicly.”
The request to reverse the motion to remove Burleson will be heard at the March 20-22 board meeting in Tampa, Fla.
