Will Baptists help the Women's Missionary Union?

The fundamentalists vs. moderates theology war tearing apart the Southern Baptist Convention has come to the SBC Women's Missionary Union as painful retrenchment.

Wade Burleson wrote on Dec. 12:

Day before yesterday, the employees of the Woman's Missionary Union were called to a meeting to announce difficult but preemptive measures that were being taken due to the economic downturn. The WMU is short two million dollars in revenue. The executive director of the WMU, Wanda Lee, is working very hard to keep all of the WMU's employees in place, not wanting to lay anyone off. To accomplish this, the employees of the WMU are having to take what amounts to a four week furlough, spread out over an eight month period, without pay.

The problem is as much by design as it is a result of demographic change and the effects of our current economic difficulties.

The theologically moderate WMU refused to come to heel when SBC fundamentalist leadership whistled, so funding has been progressively cut off and sustaining work taken elsewhere in a process which from the outside looks like deliberate destruction of a historically sustaining institution.

The WMU's Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and the WMU's Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, respectively.

In return the WMU until recently received reimbursements from both organizations. But after some maneuvering which included an attempt by the NAMB to strip the WMU of the Lottie Moon trademark, both contributions have been sharply reduced and one is being phased out.

Burleson details the history of WMU sustenance of key Southern Baptist institutions, a part of which was a Great Depression bailout of what was then the Home Mission Board.

He in effect calls for Southern Baptists to come home from the theology wars to their consciences in this matter when he writes:

I imagine the WMU will not publicly wave a flag, asking for Southern Baptists to step into the gap for them. However, in my opinion, this is a true test for those of us identified as Southern Baptists. Will we now turn our backs on WMU when they are at a low point, financially?

In the history of what has been called the SBC conservative resurgence, that apparently would be an unprecedented denominational turnabout.

It is unlikely.