Baptist Church Cooperation, Part 4

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The Approval System

The year was 1934, and the fledgling General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC) was facing its first crisis. The elder statesman of the GARBC was Oliver W. Van Osdel from Grand Rapids. He had been active in Northern Baptist circles since the 1870s and had been especially prominent in promoting the work of missions. Van Osdel was the man who had erected the GARBC out of the ashes of the defunct Baptist Bible Union (BBU). More than anything, he wanted to see the GARBC establish a mission board of its own, following the associational principle.

Robert T. Ketcham of Gary, Indiana, was the young buck of the GARBC. Like Van Osdel, Ketcham had been involved with the Baptist Bible Union. He had even been on the board of the BBU when it took over the operations of Des Moines University. Events at that university had led to scandal, riot, and the collapse of both organizations. Ketcham was afraid that if the GARBC operated its own institutions, the link between the agencies and the association would prove as poisonous as the tie between Des Moines University and the BBU.

The debate was impassioned. Van Osdel pleaded the cause of missions. Ketcham insisted upon the dangers of the associationally operated agencies. In effect, the two men were replaying the debate between the associational model and the service organization model.

At the end of the debate, Van Osdel and Ketcham were put in a room together and told not to come out until they had a solution to the problem. When they emerged, they presented a plan that served the GARBC effectively for over sixty years. Their plan eventually came to be known as the “approval system.”

By the 1930s, liberalism was firmly in control of the Northern Baptist Convention. Consequently, Baptists had started innumerable independent institutions to take over functions that had once been performed by convention agencies. Examples include the Council on Cooperating Baptist Missions (also known as the Mid-Africa Mission, or later as Baptist Mid-Missions), the Association of Baptists for the Evangelism of the Orient (later, ABWE), the Sweet Baptist Mission to China, Leonardo Mercado’s Mexican Gospel Mission, and the Interstate Evangelistic Association (headed by Harold Strathearn).

These independent organizations were available to the churches, but they were so new that the churches had little information to judge which institutions were worthwhile. What Van Osdel and Ketcham suggested was that the GARBC executive committee (later, the Council of Eighteen) should offer to examine agencies that were seeking support. In particular the executive committee would evaluate the doctrinal position, organizational structure, and financial stability of each agency. The committee would then recommend the agencies that passed this examination.

In effect, the approval system was an attempt to combine the strengths of the associational model and the service organization model, while seeking to avoid the weaknesses of both. It was meant to provide a way of making service organizations accountable to a fellowship of churches. At the same time, it avoided the problem of a formal link to the institutions.

The approval system attempted to foster greater stability, balance, and focus than the service organization model. It also attempted to provide a structural guarantee of respect for the choices of individual congregations. After all, the association was not telling churches whom to support. Its executives were merely recommending certain agencies as worthy of support.

Like the service organization model, the approval system was meant to facilitate the rapid severing of ties if an institution went bad. Since approval was merely an executive recommendation, it could be withdrawn quickly and (it was thought) painlessly. In the early years, the GARBC actually did approve and quickly disapprove a variety of agencies. Furthermore, a variety of agencies sought approval only to drop it later on.

For decades it seemed as if the GARBC had hit upon the ideal compromise between the associational model and the service organization model. When Los Angeles Baptist Seminary strayed into a bit of Pentecostalism, approval was withdrawn until the aberrant theology could be purged. When Wheaton College agreed to fund a chair of Regular Baptist Theology, it was approved—for one year, until the plan proved unworkable.

Over time, however, the approved agencies came to be regarded (at least popularly) as the property of the association. The Council of Eighteen became very reluctant to pull the plug on any institution. Loyalty shifted toward the agencies, and the result was a de facto return to the associational principle in its most obnoxious form. For a time during the 1990s, the GARBC began to resemble a convention.

One reason for this change was that the visibility of the agencies gave them a disproportionate amount of influence over the business of the association. Agency presidents and representatives became popular speakers who occupied many platforms in the course of a year. Given their exposure, they were easily elected to the Council of Eighteen, where they became the individuals who were approving their own institutions.

By the 1980s, it was becoming apparent that some of the agencies no longer advocated the historic position of the GARBC. Even though the bond between association and agencies was supposed to be loose, it still provided something of an umbilical cord through which theological and methodological infection was transmitted from those agencies to the churches.

During the 1980s, conservatives within the GARBC attempted to address some of these issues, but the balance of loyalty lay with the agencies. A 1990 proposal to keep agency executives from approving their own schools met a resounding defeat. The balance of sentiment began to shift, however, as the agendas of some institutions became more publicly visible. The approval system was finally dropped in 2000.

The fact is, however, that every fellowship operates some form of approval system. Each group has to have some way of deciding who will be permitted to advertise at its meetings or publish in its official paper. Whoever makes this decision constitutes an approving body, and whatever criteria are established constitute an approval system. It may be called by another name, but virtually every Baptist organization operates an approval system of some sort.

The GARBC approval system was an attempt to combine the best features of the associational and service organization models. It was not the only attempt to merge these two models, however. In the next essay, we will look at another structure that combines features of both models.

Seek the Lord

Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

Seek the Lord, and in His ways persevere.
O faint not, but as eagles fly;
For His steep hill is high;
Then striving gain the top, and triumph ever.

When with glory there thy brows are crowned,
New joys so shall abound in Thee,
Such sights thy soul shall see,
That worldly thoughts shall by their beams be drowned.

Farewell, World, thou mass of mere confusion,
False light, with many shadows dimmed,
Old witch, with new foils trimmed,
Thou deadly sleep of soul, and charmed illusion.

I the King will seek, of kings adored;
Spring of light, tree of grace and bliss,
Whose fruit so sovereign is
That all who taste it are from death restored.

This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.