A gathering called “A Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant” brought together about 15,000 persons from 30 Baptist groups to Atlanta January 30 — February 1. Church members, pastors, denominational leaders, and Baptists with names prominent in American life came together to find a new way forward after more than a decade of factional infighting and after racial and cultural divides dating from pre-Civil War times. The attendees represented 20 million Baptists in their respective unions and conventions.
It was organized by a group of church members led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Mercer University President Bill Underwood.
Infighting, political posturing, and other signs of rancor and un-Christ-like words and deeds have come to identify Baptists. The meeting issued a call for a way forward out of divisiveness toward new initiatives based on Scripture and unifying Christian action.
Author John Grisham, a member of University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va., framed the public negation of Baptist witness. “For so long, so many Baptists have worked so hard to exclude so many,” he said.
Grisham offered Baptists three suggestions for seeking unity: Restore their good name by respecting diversity, stay out of politics, and “spend as much time out on the streets in ministry as in the church.” He added: “Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell. Shouldn’t that tell us something?”
Baptists were challenged from Scripture (Luke 4: 18-19) to action around unifying themes, including:
Caring for those in need. Marian Wright Edelman called for Baptists to unify around protecting children. She cited a litany of statistics that reveal the depth of poverty, neglect, and risk that describe the United States’ 13 million children in poverty, noting they add up to a national catastrophe.
Churches “ought to be the locomotive, and not the caboose, in speaking up for children,” she said.
Affluent American Christians need to see their material blessings as opportunities to fulfill Jesus’ mandate, said Tony Campolo, professor emeritus at Eastern University near Philadelphia. And churches should set an example of right priorities. How can churches challenge members to give sacrificially while modeling in their own facilities a self-centered consumerism?
“We’ve got to challenge young people because we are losing them,” Campolo said. “We have not lost them because we are making Christianity too difficult for them but because we are making it too easy for them. They want their lives to count. They want their lives to matter.”
Seek to care for strangers, those unlike us. Christians often try to care for strangers in the abstract, said Joel Gregory, professor of preaching at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. But God calls Christians to care for the stranger “in his concreteness, in his particularity, in his idiosyncrasies. Behind every generalization is God’s particularity — that person in front of me right now.”
Inequities of social justice and the HIV/AIDS pandemic were addressed. “I want to raise a loud gong of alarm today about America’s cradle-to-prison pipeline crisis,” said Edelman. “A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison during his lifetime, a Latino boy a one in six chance, and one in three 20-29-year olds — our fathers — are under correctional institution supervision or control.”
The spread of AIDS is a justice issue affected by poverty and incarceration, according to Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. “The issue is currently characterized by “an unholy trinity of silence, shame, and stigma.”
Care for God’s creation. Al Gore, Baptist, former U.S. vice president and environmental activist, brought his slides and statistics on global warming to confront Christians on the crisis that many of them ignore or disdain. Too many Christian leaders “who don’t really speak for me but claim to, have said global warming is not real, that it is just a myth. When did people of faith get so locked into an ideological position?” he asked.
He called on Baptists to face global warming as an opportunity to change human history — and to demand that political leaders do the same.
The purpose of life is to glorify God, he said. “And if we continue to heap contempt on God’s creation, that is inconsistent with glorifying God.” He stressed the need for action. “Scientists are practically screaming at us that this is not natural. … When scientists use words like that, there’s a signal on the mountain. The trumpet is blowing.”
Seek to love and respect those with whom there are disagreements. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton concluded the gathering with a call to change the attitudes and rhetoric of the diverse groups in Baptist life.
“I do not think the answer to this dilemma, which developed over decades … can be resolved in a day or a week or a year,” said Clinton. I think it is a journey. If we want them to take the journey with us, we have to do two things: We have to find things we can do together and we have to treat them with respect and honor and believe that they think they are right just as strongly as we do.”
Clinton said one of the most important verses of Scripture for him is I Corinthians 13:12, in which the Apostle Paul notes that he does not understand everything about God because, this side of heaven, no one has complete knowledge. That verse, Clinton noted, precedes the section extolling love as the greatest of all virtues,
A loving humility should permeate efforts to seek reconciliation with those in disagreement, he said. “The reason we have to put love above everything else is because we see through a glass darkly and know in part. … All of us might be wrong.”
As a step in this direction, Clinton praised the Atlanta meeting as “a wonderful beginning.”
