Dr Greenway announced the disposition of the rest of the motions.
Out of Order
Morgan Bush – urging churches to oppose pornography. It is a resolution.
Derin Stidd – ERLC to study ways to abolish abortion. The convention can only request not direct the trustees of an entity.
Caleb Lewis – request Council of Seminary Presidents to make BF&M only doctrinal statement for seminaries. The council cannot direct the seminary boards.
To EC by vote
Pam Richerson – wants to tighten BF&M to encode strict complementarianism in the BF&M.
Ryan Broers – request EC to create statement about the social gospel.
Automatic Referrals
Ben Cole to SWBTS – recovering seminary property
Dau Ayub to ERLC – equipping on marriage and sexuality
Dave,
Thanks for the good coverage you are giving us. And the rest of your crew also. Do you know where one can read the motions at?
If you get the app on your phone you can.
Possibly on sbc.net
Thanks, Dave. I’d missed what happened to Ben Cole’s motion.
Is there new legal counsel this year? “Request Council of Seminary Presidents to make BF&M only doctrinal statement for seminaries” isn’t a direction to a board, and seems to use the magic words. Seminaries can say “no.”
CofSP isn’t an entity, maybe.
They said the CofSp is an entity and it cannot tell the six seminary entities to do something if I understood him correctly. Yeah, I think the six seminary entities are saying, “no.” I can’t imagine SBTS dropping the Abstract of Principles.
You are correct.
The CoSP is a non-profit and laws as well as bylaws prohibit one nonprofit instructing another.
I can assure you SBTS and Dr. Mohler would oppose this. The abstract is part of the SBTS charter which predates the BF&M. Changing it is legally challenging.
Okay, I looked it up. The CofSP is basically the old Historical Library and Archives, not just the group of Seminary leaders. So you couldn’t request one entity (CofSP) to make other entities (SBTS, MBTS, SWBTS, etc) do something.
I’d oppose it too; just didn’t see why it was necessarily out of order. The Convention most certainly can request its entities to do something, and it usually gets automatically referred.
The language of the motion was to request the CofSP to “make” the seminaries do yadda yadda yadda. The CofSP can’t make them do anything, since they’re organizations independent of the CofSP. If the motion had requested the CofSP to request the seminaries to do stuff, maybe it could’ve been referred. Not sure.
Or he could’ve just directly requested the seminaries to do it.
Who knew the CofSP was a corporation anyway?