Driving all night in their cars, riding by chartered or scheduled bus, by plane, on foot, they came. And came. The 45,431 voters, known as "messengers," spilled over from a convention center in Dallas to fill two other amphitheaters, all of the halls linked by closed-circuit TV for the biggest church business meeting in U.S. history.* The issue was momentous: ideological control of the country's largest Protestant denomination, the 14.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention.
At stake was the one-year presidency of the 140-yearold S.B.C., a rich denomination (1984 revenues: $3.7 billion) with 36,740 congregations across the U.S. The contenders for S.B.C.'s...
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