Tour helps Texas Baptists understand their heritage

Posted: 8/05/05

Tour helps Texas Baptists
understand their heritage

By Ferrell Foster

Texas Baptist Communications

TEWKSBURY, England–Thirty-five Baptists gathered in a “hidden” church meetinghouse in a picturesque English village, and they heard about the Baptists who met there more than 300 years ago.

Baptists who met there in the 17th century had to worship in secret, hidden from the authorities because it was illegal for “dissenters” from the state religion to gather.

Tewksbury was one of many stops for the 35 Ameri-cans, most from Texas Baptist churches, during a Baptist heritage tour sponsored by the Texas Baptist Historical Collec-tion and the Baptist Standard. Their tour was held before the Baptist World Congress in Birmingham, England. Another group toured the sites after the congress.

They visited places where Baptists were killed for their beliefs, where they worshipped in secret, where William Carey began the modern Baptist missionary movement and where dissenters like John Bunyan and John Wesley changed the world with their preaching and writing.

Stephen Stookey, resident fellow in church history with the B.H. Carroll Theological Institute, led the tour group.

“Our Baptist ancestors had tremendous courage to live out their convictions,” he said. “They were faced with the possibility of jail and scorn from their neighbors, and yet they remained true to their convictions.

“The easiest thing would have been to go with the majority and attend the state church,” but Bap-tists were “willing to risk their jobs and their lives for their convictions.”

The Baptist tour included the many popular attractions in London and Oxford, but it also went to more obscure cities and towns like Bed-ford, Olney, Tewk-sbury, Kettering and Moulton.

It ended in Birmingham for the 100th anniversary congress of the Baptist World Alli-ance.

Stookey said it is important for today's Bap-tists to reconnect with their “heritage of liberty–religious liberty, church liberty, soul liberty.”

That heritage of freedom is central to who Baptists are, Stookey said.

“Visiting such historic places reminds us of that heritage and challenges us to live out that heritage,” he said.

As Gail Herring of Sulphur Springs plays "Amazing Grace," a group of Texas Baptists join in song at Olney, the town where John Newton penned the beloved hymn.

“We have far too many Baptists who wear the label but do not act in a manner befitting the label.”

Through the years, Stookey said, he has been amazed at how few students could articulate Baptist distinctives. Churches have failed to communicate Baptist heritage to a new generation, he said.

Stookey suggested churches begin to reverse the situation by “revisiting the story” of Baptists through the centuries.

“History works best when it's personal,” Stookey said, and he encouraged churches to retell the stories, not only of famous Baptists and other believers, but also of local men and women who are “near and dear” to a congregation.

Such stories of believers who have gone before “helps to become a motivation to live out those convictions in the present,” Stookey said.