'The message is clear. The enemy is real'

With three sharp raps of an historic gavel, the 172nd annual meeting of the Missouri Baptist Convention began Monday evening in Cape Girardeau. The Rev. David Clippard, executive director of the organization, opened the event by linking Baptist history with the church's mission: to conquer evil. Islam, he said, is an evil encroaching on the United States. Apathy among Christians, he said, appears to be another.

The Rev. Ralph Sawyer of Wentzville, Mo., president of the organization, opened the meeting attended by more than 1,000 people from around the state with a gavel made of cedar taken from the Old Bethel Baptist Church near Jackson, the first non-Catholic church built in the Louisiana Purchase area in 1804. Clippard noted that missionaries in those days worked hard to win souls to the church, but over the last 200 years the number of church members has not grown proportionately with the overall population of the state. Young people are growing disinterested and are leaving the church, he said. Fewer young men are going into the ministry, he said.

"The mission is clear. The enemy is real, the threat is real," Clippard said. "Don't praise all those dead English preachers. They're part of history. Make history."

Missouri Baptists, said Clippard, of Holt's Summit, Mo., are slipping in their mission efforts. While all Baptist churches are autonomous, he said, they are united in mission efforts. The church especially needs missionaries on its own soil, according to Clippard.

"The real threat we are facing today is that Islam has a strategic plan to conquer and occupy America," he said.

The Saudi Arabian Royal Family and the Saudi government have opened and funded 1,156 Moslem study centers in universities across North America, he said: 138 in the United States, 28 in Canada -- including three in the University of Missouri system, in Columbia, Rolla and St. Louis. The Saudi government offers to fund fully a faculty position in Islamic studies, and then builds a mosque on or near the campus.

"They are after our sons and daughters, our students," Clippard said.

The first step Islam took, he said, occurred a decade or so ago when it began recruiting soldiers from American prisons. The next step is the Islamic centers near universities. Citing a a recent USA Today article, Clippard claimed that the Saudi Arabian royal family is personally paying for 15,000 college students to come to North American colleges and universities, all with the intention of conquering the United States from within.

"They have a plan to take over," he said. "The first city is Detroit which has 600,000 people. Three hundred thousand are Muslims today."

Clippard likened this situation to that of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose priests were debating what color vestments they should wear as the communists were invading Russia.

"Can that happen to us?" he said. "You bet it can."

He said it's happening in Africa, in the Sudan and in Darfur where people are being driven from their homes and killed.

"A missionary in Africa told me 15 or 20 years ago that the Muslim faith is peaceful as long as they are in the minority," Clippard said.

Clippard said he sees churches arguing over trivial matters instead of confronting the issues threatening Christianity: in his view homosexuality, gambling, stem-cell research, and the Islamic threat.

Of the 1,195 people in attendance, 915 were registered as messengers, members of churches recognized by the convention as being in single alignment with the beliefs of the convention. The 279 remaining, either visitors or not in single alignment, were welcomed but not allowed to vote. Throughout the rest of the convention, the messengers will hear a report from the Legal Task Force concerning a legal effort to retrieve five breakaway agencies following last year's approval of single alignment. They will also hear a message from the Rev. Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, concerning stem-cell research. U.S. Sen. Jim Talent is scheduled to greet the group Wednesday morning.

lredeffer@semissourian.com

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