Religious Conventions

Moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention have consolidated their potential breakaway movement by electing national officers and a coordinating council, establishing a mission budget and approving three giving plans as alternatives to the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program.

Now that moderates have lost their drawn-out fight with fundamentalists for control of the Southern Baptist Convention, the biggest question facing the nation's largest denomination is whether a substantial separatist movement is afoot. Will moderates calling themselves the Baptist Fellowship be content to remain a dissenting body within the 15-million-member denomination or decide to break away?

With few exceptions, Episcopal Church bodies are following the denomination's leaders and will attend the 1991 General Convention in Phoenix, despite Arizona's failure to adopt a state holiday in honor of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. After Arizona's voters rejected the King holiday in November, a number of church groups and dioceses, including the Los Angeles Diocese, asked that the convention site be moved, and some threatened to boycott the convention.

In a three-year study released Friday, an Episcopal Church commission recommends that bishops be allowed to ordain openly gay and lesbian seminarians to the priesthood. The 2.5-million-member denomination, which will consider the report at its July convention in Phoenix, has generally followed a 1979 convention resolution specifying that it was "not appropriate" to ordain active homosexuals even though the issue remains hotly debated.

At the urging of evangelical leaders in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a Newport Beach pastor has decided to run for the post of moderator in his 2.9-million-member denomination, which faces a battle at its June convention over a controversial report on sexuality. The Rev. John A. Huffman Jr., pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, said in an interview this week that he believes "the task force report flies in the face of biblical teaching on sexuality."

Opposition is growing across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to a task force report that favors ordination of practicing homosexuals and endorses "responsible" sex outside marriage, according to a leading evangelical group in the church. Betty Moore, executive director of Presbyterians For Renewal, said she believes that opponents will file more than 30 formal proposals against the report at the General Assembly, the church's chief policy-making gathering, to be held in Baltimore June 4-12.

The Episcopal Church will hold its 1991 General Convention in Phoenix despite the defeat on Election Day of a referendum designating Martin Luther King Day as a state holiday. Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, who traveled to Phoenix last spring to lobby for the holiday, expressed disappointment at the measure's narrow defeat. Some Episcopal church leaders urged a move after the Nov. 6 vote.

U.S. Catholic bishops this week surprisingly rejected a proposal to let lay people conduct funerals in dioceses where priests are scarce, one of the wide-ranging issues they discussed during their fall meeting. They acted more predictably on matters ranging from sex education to aid for financially strapped Catholic schools. Prelates at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops also endorsed a Nov. 7 letter from Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony to Secretary of State James A.

After winning the Southern Baptist presidency for the 12th consecutive year, the fundamentalist camp declared this week that the rancorous battle was finally settled and that "spoilsports" ought to leave the country's largest Protestant denomination. The losers--the relatively moderate pastors and churches in the theologically conservative body--say they will not stage a mass exodus.

Rabbis in the Conservative movement of Judaism are training more specialists to prepare religious divorces and mikvot --ritual baths used for conversion--to overcome what they describe as a growing refusal by their Orthodox colleagues to share such services.