12 Objections to Baptist Conventions

OBJECTIONS TO BAPTIST CONVENTIONS AND LIKE INSTITUTIONS, by J. H. Milburn, from his book MISSIONS AND MISSION METHODS (1901)

1. Conventions with their Secretaries and boards supplant the work of the Holy Spirit.
2. Conventions with the Secretaries and Boards not only supplant the Holy Spirit, but they also supplant the churches of Christ.
3. Those institutions with their Boards Secretaries exalt their own wisdom above inspired example.
4. Secretaries who are the creatures of Conventions and the main-springs of those institutions are “middle-men” standing between the churches which do the paying and the missionaries who do the work.
5. Boards and Secretaries collect money from the churches for missionary purposes and then appropriate much of it to other purposes than that for which the money was collected.
6. Under the pretense of missionary work those Boards and Secretaries often “supplement” the salaries of pastors, and that, too, of the stronger churches, and call this “missionary work.”
7. In order to run the business of the Southern Baptist Convention to its liking, an unscriptural office has been instituted and this office filled with unscriptural officers on exorbitant salaries and some of those officers vested with power subversive of the spirit as well as the letter of the gospel. (In this he was referring to the Foreign Mission Board with Corresponding Secretary, Editorial Secretary, Educational Secretary, Field Secretary, and Recording Secretary. rlv)
8. This kind of work leads to making false reports which do not represent the facts in the case.
9. This kind of work leads to and tries to justify the immoral practice of buying and selling votes.
10. The Southern Baptist Convention appropriates much of the money collected by its agents, in the way of buying property and having the same deeded to itself.
11. Convention Boards and Secretaries are a law unto themselves while they hold ministers amenable to them yet they themselves are amenable to no one.
12. Baptist Boards and Secretaries constitute a secret organization; not even their constituents, those who do the paying, know or can know, all the facts of the case.