Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler predicts the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will split over the issue of homosexuality. Meanwhile, Kentucky Baptist Convention Executive Director Paul Chitwood announced incentives for employees to take early retirement or resign voluntarily as part of a “strategic realignment” of staff.

All this raises an interesting question: Is it better to risk division over controversy or slowly shrink due to lost relevancy?

Last year Kentucky Baptists eliminated five full-time and 19 part-time jobs and froze salaries of the remaining employees. The current budget has been reduced twice already this year. Sure, economic times are tough for everyone, but for the once-hearty bulwark of Baptist life in the United States to cut its budget twice in one year should be a wakeup call.

While distinct from the Southern Baptist Convention, the KBC does have within its borders that Bastille of Baptistdom called the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. As a native Kentuckian, I remember and experienced first hand the reach and power of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. The fact that there’s not enough money to retain a huge staff surely signals a loss of that power, albeit slowly and subtly.

That loss of relevancy has happened time and time again. Recently it occurred when the KBC removed the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty from the list of cooperating organizations in guidelines used by the KBC Committee on Public Affairs. The rationale to delete the reference was because the BJC is not officially affirmed, endorsed or funded by the KBC or SBC.

Baptists not supporting a Baptist religious-liberty organization? Surprising.

Then there’s the issue of the Obama administration’s compromise for requiring women’s health insurance to cover contraception while respecting the religious liberty concerns of employers who oppose birth control on moral grounds.

“At the end of the day, this ‘compromise’ will resolve the issue only for those whose conscience can be resolved by an accounting maneuver,” Mohler said on his blog Feb. 10. This was after the White House gave Mohler and others exactly what they asked for.

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