(AgapePress) - The Southern Baptist Convention continues to fund an organization that promotes the one-world church movement.

The SBC provides a substantial part of the budget for the Baptist World Alliance, which has ties to the United Nations and the World Council of Churches. But according to former SBC president Paige Patterson, the relationship between his denomination and the Baptist World Alliance is "tenuous" and "under continuous evaluation."

Dr. Paige Patterson

Patterson implies there are advantages to remaining part of the BWA. "If we vacate them, then we leave it to the 'wild horses' to tear the world apart," he says. "You always have that difficult decision to make … do you stay in and try to keep it from getting out-of-hand, or do you vacate it?"

"And of course the Independent Baptists' effort has always been to separate," Patterson notes. "Sometimes that's right, but I don't think it's always right. If we had done that, we wouldn't have won the Southern Baptist Convention back."

Patterson denies the BWA has been strongly influenced by communists, as some have claimed. "[The SBC's affiliation with the BWA] is under evaluation, [but] not because of their propensity to support communism, which in fact is not the case. That allegation is false and … comes simply because people in the Baptist World Alliance were coming out of communist countries in the days of the Cold War."

The Baptist leader says many of those people were accused of being communists, but that no one really knows whether they were or were not.

Patterson says in the last few years, the SBC has reduced its contributions to the BWA. He also says the BWA is not involved in New Age alliances, unless one considers the U.N. to be a New Age organization.

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