Fundies

Just an interesting background piece on the S. Baptists and their (continuing) conservative revolution... the one driving at least part of the GOP:

GREENSBORO, N.C. - A rare contested election to determine the leader of the nation's largest Protestant denomination pits three candidates representing different styles for the Southern Baptist Convention.

Delegates known as "messengers" were scheduled to begin voting Tuesday afternoon, during the second session of the denomination's annual meeting. If none of the three candidates wins more then 50 percent of the vote, the top two were to advance to a runoff Tuesday evening.

Since moderates bowed out of SBC politics, conservative leaders of the denomination have often selected presidential nominees who ran without opposition. And in other years, Ronnie Floyd, an energetic church-builder from northwest Arkansas, might have been a consensus choice to lead the SBC and its more than 16 million members.

Floyd has successfully applied the "megachurch" model to a Southern Baptist context — a record that speaks to the denomination's concerns about stagnant growth and a decline in the rate of baptisms.

Floyd's First Baptist Church in Springdale, Ark., has spun off a second campus, the nearby Church at Pinnacle Hills, and the two churches claim some 15,000 members in a fast-growing region.

But Floyd has been criticized for his church's relatively low level of giving to the Southern Baptists' cooperative program, in which autonomous congregations pool money to fund overseas and domestic missions. Floyd says his churches spend plenty of money on domestic and international evangelism and outreach, but prefer to operate those efforts themselves; his detractors see an independent operator not sufficiently committed to the denomination's collective effort.

Frank Page, pastor at the small First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., has built much of his campaign around his church's commitment to the cooperative program, noting that his congregation sent 12 percent of otherwise undesignated offerings to the program last year.

Page is the choice of a group of pastors, many from a younger generation than the current SBC leadership, who have complained that the denomination suppresses disagreements over styles of worship and doctrinal details. Wade Burleson, a pastor from Enid, Okla., whose Internet blog postings about internal debates of the denomination's powerful International Missions Board spurred an effort to remove him from the panel, has endorsed Page.

Page has said he believes his candidacy is a long shot and that it would take a "miracle" for him to be elected.

Last week, a third candidate with impeccable conservative credentials entered the race. Jerry Sutton, pastor at Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tenn., and currently the SBC's first vice president, said he decided to offer himself for nomination as an alternative to Page and Floyd.

Sutton is the author of a 2000 book, "The Baptist Reformation: The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention," that traced the takeover of the denomination by conservatives beginning in 1979, and is editing the new "Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060613/ap_on_re_us/southern_baptists

separation of church and state during the 2004 election.

http://www.au.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6927&abbr=cs_