Neutral Clergy Feel Pressure in Rift Among Southern Baptists : Doctrine: Many pastors have avoided siding with either the dominant fundamentalists or the moderates. But some foresee a split.

Despite 12 years of a fierce leadership battle among Southern Baptists between the triumphant fundamentalists and the defeated moderates, countless pastors in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination have professed neutrality.

The noncombatants say they can identify with the fundamentalist emphasis on the ardent belief in a historically reliable, error-free Bible--but they also like the moderate stress on traditional Baptist freedom of belief. The denominational fight is a distracting one over power and personalities, they say, and many outside religious observers agree.

But the apolitical middle path has become tougher to travel this year. Many Southern Baptists see a fork in the road appearing in a few years.

A fundamentalist president was elected decisively at the June national convention in New Orleans and, not long afterward, his backers fired two widely respected editors of the Baptist Press news service, which fundamentalists have long accused of favoring moderate viewpoints.

Illustrating the pressure to take sides, the Rev. Jess Moody of Chatsworth said he once responded to a fundamentalist minister that the denomination was not a square with sides, but a circle embracing everyone. The fundamentalist’s reply, Moody said, was: “There are sides to a circle. I’m on the inside and you are on the outside.”

But Moody, pastor of the 5,000-member Shepherd of the Hills Church and well known in Southern Baptist circles from earlier pastorates in Florida, circulated warnings through the denomination this month that a moderate summit of sorts in Georgia next week may lead to a split by 1992.

Hundreds of moderate leaders will meet in Atlanta for three days starting Thursday to consider donating selectively to moderate causes instead of contributing to broad budgets that fund institutions under fundamentalist control. The moderate pastors tend to come from churches that have been the biggest supporters of the nationwide cooperative budgets.

Such diversion of funds brought havoc to the Northern Baptists in 1945-46, Moody said. Judging from other denominational schisms, he wrote, “Once the newly formed groups elected their officers (and) set up new funding agencies, it was all over. Then each side began pulling on the neutral churches, causing internal rifts and fratricidal feuds between pastors.”

In the scenario sketched by Moody, which he sent to editors of Southern Baptist state newspapers, “None of the denominations ever became so great separately as they were together. Programs that worked wonders before the split didn’t work at all afterward.”

A solution proposed by Moody, however, seems very unlikely to reconcile the two sides.

Moody urged the moderates to make the Atlanta meeting one of repentance and to ask fundamentalists for forgiveness. The latter, in turn, must give moderates about 45% representation on institutional and agency boards, reflecting the moderates’ strength at most annual meetings of the denomination.

The Rev. Daniel Vestal, a suburban Atlanta pastor who lost the last two elections for Southern Baptist president while carrying the moderate banner, has indicated that next week’s meeting is open-ended and relatively modest in its goals. “We are not out to create a new denomination. We are not out to reconcile with fundamentalists,” he said in a statement.

Because the denomination, whose organizational name is the Southern Baptist Convention, is not hierarchal--and indeed prides itself on the autonomy of each church and agency--any breakup that occurs may come in scattered, disconnected fits rather than in concerted actions, if at all.

The six Southern Baptist seminaries, including the nation’s largest at Ft. Worth, once symbolized the self-assured, almost standoffish, desire of Southern Baptists to educate their own regardless of how many other good Protestant schools were around. Just as Southern Baptists are not members of the National Assn. of Evangelicals, their ministerial students have typically gone to Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries rather than leading nondenominational, evangelical institutions.

But the discord threatens to weaken the existing six. A new seminary was started a few years ago by one unsatisfied fundamentalist leader. But in recent weeks it is the moderate side that has looked ahead to the time when the six may be transformed into what moderates would regard as fundamentalist training centers.

Professors at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., have talked openly about a possible mass exodus to a vacant campus in Georgia by more than half the faculty and about one-third of the 3,200 students. And Baylor University, the largest Southern Baptist institution of higher education, this month registered a name for a new seminary with the state of Texas.

A Baylor press spokesman said the step was taken to serve notice to the fundamentalists. “We have the faculty; we have the library, and we think we would be flooded by applicants from seminary professors who are not happy in a totalitarian environment,” said press spokesman Michael Bishop.

But denominational splits have been compared to divorces. It is not easy for many churches to break the intricate bonds created within a denomination. The mid-1970s break of moderates from the fundamentalist-led Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod took away only a small percentage of churches.

In California, where nearly 400,000 Southern Baptists and their 1,200 churches outnumber any other Protestant denomination, little disaffection is expected from the main body.

“The vast majority of churches are pretty conservative and are going to stay with the cooperative programs,” said Herb Hollinger, Fresno-based editor of the weekly newspaper for California Southern Baptists.

While decrying the denominational politics, many California churches have been content with the results. “We don’t like what either side has done,” said the Rev. Glen Kraun, executive pastor of the Saddleback Valley Community Church in Mission Viejo, which averages 4,000 worshipers on Sunday. But the congregation is also “very conservative in theology” and will continue its heavy support of the denomination, Kraun said.

Aside from theological preferences, many California Southern Baptist leaders have been preoccupied with budget problems for Golden Gate Theological Seminary in Mill Valley and California Baptist College in Riverside as well as expanding the roster of ethnic congregations that so far worship in 46 different language groups.

But in the U.S. South and Southwest, where church divisions are sharper, the outcome is not so clear. Moody, in his scenario, predicted that by 1994 the present 14.9-million-member denomination would fall to “second-largest denomination,” below the 8.9-million-member membership of the United Methodist Church, and a breakaway element would be about sixth in size.