The Kentucky Baptist Commission's administrative committee has recommended that it not renew its relationship with Georgetown College -- a matter that will be the subject of a November vote.
Founded in the late 1700s, Georgetown College was the first Baptist college west of the Allegheny mountains. But over the last decade, the school has sought to increase the number and influence of non-Baptist board members, and in 2005 decided to end its covenant relationship with the KBC. That means the state convention would no longer be appointing trustees or contributing funding to the college.
KBC executive director Paul Chitwood describes a further change.
"Georgetown is a liberal arts college that has recently released a Christian identity statement, and that Christian identity statement qualified them in a more general and maybe more ecumenical way than [as] a Southern Baptist or Kentucky Baptist institution," he explains.
So the school will be defined in the future in a much broader way, meanwhile losing about $1 million in KBC funding.
"Of course, we have convictions about the Word of God and about our Baptist polity and theology, and so we want to invest those missions dollars into works, whether it's an institution or an individual, that are of like faith and practice and that are concerned about the things we're concerned about, interpreting scriptures the way we interpret them," Chitwood shares.
The Mission Board is expected to place the recommendation before the November 13 annual meeting of the Kentucky Baptist Convention.
Since "redefining" its formal relationship with the KBC, Georgetown College has established agreements with four African-American Baptist conventions, the Baptist World Alliance, and the International Baptist Convention.