Southern Baptist Factions Feud Over Lobbying Fund : Dispute: Differences on church-state separation, religious liberty give rise to financial controversy.

The long dispute between fundamentalists and moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention has spilled over into a controversy affecting a fund used by a Baptist lobbying agency in Washington that represents 10 Baptist denominations.

Although the fund was established in 1964, it become controversial in the past year because of a decision by the fundamentalist-dominated Southern Baptist Convention to establish a separate agency to represent the 15-million-member denomination in the nation’s capital.

The controversy involves a capital-needs fund that was given by the Southern Baptist Convention to the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. The committee represents its member denominations before Congress on matters of religious liberty and church-state separation.

In recent years, the Southern Baptist Convention has taken a more conservative position on such issues than the joint committee. The shift in perspectives led the convention to vote last year to stop sending any money to the Washington agency, although it has not actually severed its membership.

The Southern Baptist Convention has transferred its religious liberty representation from the joint committee to the denomination’s Christian Life Commission. Last September, that agency asked the Southern Baptist Executive Committee, which approved the original allocation, to give it control of the fund, currently worth almost $400,000.

Both the Baptist Joint Committee and the Christian Life Committee agree that the money should go to the recipient intended when the fund was set up in 1964. But because the original allocation was designated simply to the “Public Affairs Committee,” it is unclear whether it was primarily designed for Southern Baptist use or for Joint Committee use.

The Executive Committee met Jan. 24 and heard arguments from both sides but failed to reach any conclusion. The dispute will be argued before the full Executive Committee when it meets in Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 17-19.

Meanwhile, executives of some of the 30 Southern Baptist state foundations have voiced concern that the dispute may lead some donors to delay giving because of suspicions that their gifts could be reassigned by convention officials.

In a Dec. 23 letter to an official of the Executive Committee, Harry Trulove, president of the Arkansas Baptist Foundation, wrote that “the main commodity our Baptist foundations have to offer is trust. Therefore, even if a technicality might conceivably allow a change in the use of funds, and if this change is perceived to have been made as a result of the political process, the results may very well be a substantial loss to Baptist causes.”