Others have protested inclusion of speakers who are prominently recognized as Calvinists and the fact that the Pastors’ Conference is heavily subsidized by the SBC operating budget.

The president of the 2011 Southern Baptist Pastors’ Conference defended a program he’s put together for June 12-13 in Phoenix, Ariz., saying critics who find it outside the convention’s mainstream hold too narrow a worldview.

“The Kingdom of God is bigger than Southern Baptists,” said Vance Pitman, 2011 Pastor’s Conference president and pastor of Hope Baptist Church in Las Vegas, a church plant in partnership with First Baptist Church, Woodstock, Ga., and the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The main intent of our conference is to communicate the big picture of the Kingdom of God,” Pitman said in a telephone interview March 18. “God is alive and at work all over the world. We as the Southern Baptist Convention are one very small part of that.”

The Pastors’ Conference has long been a barometer for Southern Baptist theological weather patterns and a launching pad to the SBC presidency for its leaders.
Consequently, although it is not an official organization of the SBC, its direction is closely monitored.

Negative reaction has included placement on the worship team of Jamar Jones, executive director of music and fine arts at the Potter’s House Church of Dallas. That is because he is on the ministerial staff of T.D. Jakes, who critics claim holds to the heresy of “modalism.”

Modalism, a non-Trinitarian view that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three different aspects, or modes, of one God rather than three distinct, co-equal and co-eternal persons, was first condemned as heresy in the fourth century but is held by some Pentecostal and Apostolic churches today.

Dwight McKissic, an African-American pastor in Arlington, Texas, and former trustee of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who advocates greater inclusion of minorities in convention life, said that even though he doesn’t think Jakes is a heretic that the pastor was the real target and Jones “a casualty of not so friendly fire from fellow Kingdom soldiers.”

Jones, a boyhood friend of Pitman’s worship arts pastor, withdrew to avoid controversy, a move that McKissic called “tragic, sinful and shameful” because Southern Baptists “missed an opportunity to bridge an obvious racial divide and to fellowship with a Kingdom saint who is not of the SBC fold.”

People Pitman trusts tell him “Jakes is not a modalist.” Besides, Pitman said, his books are for sale in SBC bookstores. “How ridiculous is it that we can sell his books but his music guy can’t play piano at our meeting?” he asked.