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SOUTHERN BAPTISTS MISSIONARIES RECEIVE A NEW CORONAVIRUS VACCINE MANDATE
By Sarah Pulliam Bailey
Today at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The Southern Baptist Convention’s organization that sends thousands of missionaries overseas announced last week that it will require missionaries and their children ages 16 and older to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The SBC’s International Mission Board said in its announcement that it has been requiring various vaccines since the 1980s, but the new mandate came on Sept. 8, a day before President Biden issued his mandate that businesses with 100 or more employees are required to have them vaccinated or tested weekly.

Southern Baptist leaders quickly condemned Biden, with some calling it an overreach and divisive in statements to the Baptist Press. Leaders said they are evaluating the new mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to see if it applies to religious ministries.

The new policy for Southern Baptist missionaries is not unusual, several experts on missions said. But the timing so close to Biden’s announcement has been awkward for Southern Baptists, especially since White evangelicals are less likely to get vaccinated than other religious groups.

Observers said it is too soon to tell whether the IMB’s mandate for missionaries will alienate people from serving with the SBC. The IMB, which is based in Richmond, often provides its missionaries with full funding instead of requiring people to raise their own money, a major financial incentive for those aspiring to go overseas.

Michael VanHuis, vice president of Missio Nexus, which serves as an umbrella-like association for missionary agencies, says he expects some people to be cautious in getting the coronavirus vaccine, but that many people will want to go overseas no matter what and will comply with IMB’s policies.

Mission agencies are generally reporting higher missionary recruitment numbers than in the past, he said, something that often happens after a major national or international event like Sept. 11, 2001.

“The missions world is similar to the Marines,” VanHuis said. “People are willing to do all kinds of things to go.”

The United States sends the most overseas missionaries in the world, about 135,000 people, according to a 2019 article in the International Bulletin of Mission Research. Missionaries typically fan out across the globe for limited amounts of time, but thousands reside on a long-term basis in some countries, including Russia, Brazil and South Africa.

The question of vaccination came up during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Nashville in June. After Paul Chitwood, president of the IMB, gave a report on June 15, a pastor confronted him during the question-and-answer period to complain about the organization’s vaccine policy, which at the time did not include coronavirus vaccines.

John Jones, pastor of Cadet Baptist Church in Cadet, Mo., said he did not want his children to receive other vaccines required of missionary families and asked Chitwood to investigate changing the policy. Chitwood said the organization has wrestled with vaccine policy, but he said they send people “to places where vaccines are literally a matter of life and death.”

Jones did not respond to requests for an interview. An IMB spokeswoman declined to respond to further questions about its new policy and said leaders were unavailable for an interview.

Nathaniel Jolly, pastor of Homer Reformed Baptist Church in Alaska, said he plans to write a letter to the IMB opposing the new rule because he thinks the IMB is adding to scripture something that should be up to each person’s individual choice.

“We shouldn’t be demonizing people who want it or don’t want it,” said Jolly, who has not been vaccinated because he believes he already had the virus. “We should respect the choice of each individual. What they’re doing is playing with people’s livelihoods and demanding something they don’t have the authority biblically.”

In a recent survey, the Pew Research Center found that the vaccination rate among White evangelicals lags behind other major religious groups: 57 percent of White evangelicals say they have at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, compared with 73 percent of White Protestants, 75 percent of religiously unaffiliated people and 82 percent of Catholics.

Joshua J. Heidelman, a lawyer based in the Chicago area whose clients have included missionary agencies, said that many agencies like IMB must consider the risk of not requiring vaccination for their missionaries.

“Part of what they have to deal with is, if their staff gets sick overseas, the burden and cost are really high,” he said. “They know no matter what you decide, some people will be upset. That’s been the life of every pastor or priest since the pandemic started.”

Issuing a sweeping mandate also spares them from having to evaluate individual countries’ transmission levels or public health responses and tailor vaccine requirements for each one.

Crafting a vaccine policy is one of many steps agencies have had to take to get more missionaries back out in the field after the disruption of the pandemic. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recalled tens of thousands of missionaries in 2020, and has been sending missionaries overseas again for about a year. Earlier this year, it said missionaries who are not fully vaccinated are unable to receive an assignment outside their home country.

The leadership of the LDS Church has been following the guidelines from public health authorities like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from the beginning of the pandemic. LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson, a former heart surgeon, got the vaccine in January and encouraged members to follow his example. Last month, church leaders renewed calls for vaccines and masking in public settings.

Ryan Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa who studies Mormons, said that when he served his mission in the 1990s, getting vaccines was simply part of preparing to go overseas. He said that the vast majority of Mormon missionaries expect to get the shots, but given that vaccines have been politicized more recently, it is possible that a few will weigh their desire to serve against the requirement to get a vaccine.

“The social pressure to serve a mission is really high,” he said. “You’d be staking your eternal salvation on the idea that vaccines are problematic. That’s a big deal.”

According to polls conducted this year by the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core, Mormons have shifted their views on coronavirus vaccines. In March, 50 percent of Mormons were hesitant or refused the vaccines. In June, 34 percent of Mormons expressed the same, a similar decrease to Black Protestants, who also dropped significantly in their skepticism and hesitancy toward the vaccine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/09/18/southen-baptist-missionaries-covid-vaccine/