Posted: 2/01/08

Churches can provide significant
response to health care needs

By Carla Wynn Davis

CBF Communications

ATLANTA—When Jimmy Lewis was pastor at First Baptist Church in Morrow, Ga., he and another local pastor had a dream—to meet the growing unmet health needs in the county.

Six months later, with the help of volunteers and donated resources, he helped open a free health clinic.

That was 12 years ago. Lewis—now pastor of First Baptist Church in Jasper, Ga.— shared the story during the “Reaching Out to the Sick” special interest session at the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, Jan. 31 in Atlanta.

Founding leaders committed to treating anyone who was uninsured, regardless of race or other factors. They committed to a holistic approach that included access to counseling, as well as treating each person like “they were the most important person that came in the doors that day,” Lewis said.

It started slowly—only six people came in the first two weeks. But now the Good Shepherd Clinic sees more than 50 people a week and has seen more than 5,000 patients since its launch.

“I know we’re not taking care of all the needs in Clayton County, but we’re taking care of some,” Lewis said. “We’ve found things as serious as cancer. The uninsured is a growing number of people, and it’s not just the homeless. It’s increasingly becoming people like you and me.”

Addressing health care needs in the community did not go without significant challenges, but “it can be done,” Lewis said. “It’s not an overwhelming task. If you decide that’s something God is calling you to do, it can be done.”

Free health care clinics are only one way to respond to the country’s health crisis, Lewis said. Fleda Jackson, a professor at Emory University, offered other ways churches can help. As the health care system has grown, so has its complexity. Church members can help each another navigate the health system, such as understanding health insurance claims and benefits.

Jackson, who has researched high infant mortality and pre-term births among African-Americans, also advocated for health equity. African-American women have higher rates of pre-term births than Caucasian women, she said, and her research found higher stress rates and social determinants like poverty are partially to blame.

“There is increased evidence that racial stress matters,” Jackson said. “And gender stress matters, too. When you take race and then you take gender and then you put poverty together, we have major kinds of risk factors that can affect birth.”

Health equity means working toward all races being equally well, Jackson said. It requires working together, holding on to hope and building on assets instead of deficits. There’s also a need for a holistic approach where medical and psychological work together to treat the whole person, she said.

With the rising cost of health care now leaving more than just society’s poorest without access to health care, health equity is all the more important to fight for.

“It’s no longer just about the poor,” Jackson said. “It’s about the uninsured, which now can be any of us.”

“We must embrace health equity because it’s in God’s divine order,” she said. “We must go fearlessly into the healing waters….with knowledge of the ethical healing ministry of Christ… [who went] healing every disease and sickness of the people.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Seminary president suggests practices
to nurture ‘capacity for the sacred’

By Jennifer Harris

Missouri Word & Way

ATLANTA—Seminary president Molly Marshall urged Baptists to recognize the Holy Spirit as “God’s nearness to us.”

“The Holy Spirit is God’s means of formally indwelling us. And the Holy Spirit is our means of communion with Christ and access to God. So when I speak about the Spirit of the Lord, obviously I’m going to talk in a Trinitarian context,” said Marshall, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kan.

Marshall was joined by Joyce Bellous, a professor at McMasters Divinity College in Ontario, Canada, in leading the afternoon session on the Holy Spirit during the New Baptist Covenant celebration in Atlanta.

“We must cultivate a way to hone the soul through a set of practices,” Marshall said. “We must be intentional about nurturing our capacity for the sacred. Christian spirituality is both grace and effort.”

She then suggested seven practices:

• Attentiveness.

“Silence and solitude are helpful pursuits that we might learn to listen,” Marshall said. “We need to pay attention to the ways the Spirit of God will move within us and toward us.

• Discernment.

Christians must learn to sift, to discriminate so they might know where God is moving them, Marshall said. True discernment is hard, because feelings can elude us, she said. Learning to discern requires trust and asking hard questions.

Marshall noted that one key question to ask is “does what I am considering create more faith, more hope and more love?”

• Lectio Divina.

The Latin term for “eating the bread of the word,” is a practice of meditating on Scripture.

“If we do not know how to pray, Scripture gives us the words. If we don’t know words of grief, Scripture gives us words of lament. Spirit guides our reading of Scripture,” said Marshall. “It is the practice where the Spirit bears witness with our spirits. This is God’s word for us.”

• Being companions with one another.

“The spiritual life is to be undertaken in community’—it is personal, but not private,” said Marshall. The Spirit is always drawing us to one another—and through one another —to God, she said.

• Sabbath-keeping.

Sabbath is an invitation to balance the claims of work and celebration, to practice a different rhythm and to practice humility as if the whole world is not dependent on you, Marshall said.

• Care of the body.

“The means by which the Spirit is upon us is the embodied particularity that we are,” said Marshall, admitting that many Baptists are all too familiar with the buffet line. Our bodies are instruments of grace throughout the world. God takes bodies very seriously, that’s what the resurrection teaches us, she added

• Participation in community.

John Wesley, founder of Methodism, said nobody can be a Christian alone and he was right, Marshall said. When Christians worship and gather together, they are participating as an instrument for the Spirit.

Bellous suggested Christians need to allow their concepts of God to grow up. She shared that when she was a child, she was not allowed to dance but loved it. She would run home from school dances, sure that “Jesus was coming today and was going to catch me on the way home,” Bellous said. “Jesus had long white hair and a beard, peering at me like ‘I’m waiting to catch you.’”

Later, she turned to God, worn out from living different lives—the life at church and the life at school. She told God that she wanted to be his all the time. At that moment, her image of the white-bearded God changed, and she realized that God was smiling her, not waiting to “catch her.”

Bellous said the Spirit draws us through obedience, as well. “I am not someone who obeys God easily,” she said. “I rejoice in the fact that I do not easily obey God.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Panelists, participants
explore interfaith relationships

By John Pierce

Baptists Today

ATLANTA—Three Baptist leaders known for building ecumenical and interfaith relationships faced the issue of how to relate to persons of other faiths while holding to their own Christian convictions.

One panelist, pastor Gerald Durley of Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, referenced a “Peanuts” comic strip in which the character Sally brags about convincing a boy in her class to agree with her religious convictions—after she hit him with her lunchbox.

“We’ve got to quit beating up on people with our religious lunchboxes and bringing condemnation down on one another,” said Durley.

He told of a mutually beneficial relationship between his congregation and an Atlanta synagogue as well as personal participation in international travel with interfaith clergy.

Panelist David Currie, executive director of Texas Baptists Committed, confessed to encountering little religious pluralism while growing up in Paint Rock, Texas.

“There were no Muslims, Jews or Buddhists,” said Currie. “It was a fairly non-challenging place to grow up religiously.”

However, Currie, a board member of the Washington, D.C.-based Interfaith Alliance, said he believes relationship-building across faith traditions strengthens the protections of religious liberty.

“I’m involved in interfaith work because I believe we need the freedom to tell people about Jesus,” said Currie.

Currie said some Christians don’t understand the difference between acceptance of a person and approval of their religious beliefs and behaviors.

“I accept all kind of people I don’t approve of,” said Currie. “And I hope people accept me even though they don’t approve of everything I do.”

Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Neville Callam, the third panelist, affirmed that many complexities arise from interfaith endeavors.

“It is a very difficult subject because it touches a nerve in people’s deepest convictions,” said Callam, a Jamaican Baptist.

Callam said the overriding question is how people of diverse faith can cohabitate the earth.

“It is God’s will for Christians to relate to all creation—each and every human—in loving ways,” he urged. “Christians have an obligation of neighbor love.”

The discussion period focused on practical applications such as participation in interfaith weddings and community services.

Durley said his participation in interfaith services after the 911 and Katrina tragedies “did not demean” his own faith as a Christian.

In response to a question about the perspective that Jesus is the only way to salvation, the panelists said it was possible, even preferable, to hold to one’s convictions and share Christ with others while refraining from being hostile or judgmental.

Currie said he was “pretty conservative” is his belief that Jesus is the way to God but didn’t feel the need to tell friends of other faiths, “You’re going to hell.”

“I don’t think God sent me to give that news,” he said.

Durley challenged the notion that interfaith efforts lead to nothing more than good feelings for those involved.

“It’s not about feeling good,” said Durley. “It’s about doing my Master’s will and being a light on hill.”

When traveling abroad with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders, Durley said he finds some observers surprised that the diverse American clergy are friends.

“People in Antioch asked, ‘What’s this—people of different faiths on the same bus?’”

Callam asked and answered his own question. “Can we get along? We can and we must.”

Joe Lewis, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Petersburg, Va., moderated the “Finding Common Ground with Other Faiths” discussion.

Posted: 2/01/08

Workshop challenges New
Covenant Baptists to seek peace

By Bob Allen

Baptist Center for Ethics

ATLANTA—Humans are caught “in an inextricable network of mutuality” that requires nations to overcome differences to work together for peace, Baptist ethicist Paul Dekar said Thursday at a special-interest session on peacemaking at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta.

“There is no great technique that is going to bring peace,” said Dekar, evangelism and missions professor at Memphis Theological Seminary. “We bring peace when we begin living peaceably with our neighbors.”

“We are interdependent,” Dekar said. “We are not Americans or U.S. Americans or Canadians. We are part of a humanity which stands in a period of the greatest risk to human survival ever. We have to recognize we are all in this together and begin to live as though we cannot live without one another.”

Joining Dekar in the peacemaking discussion was Glen Stassen, Lewis B. Smedes professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. Stassen, who previously taught at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offered a new paradigm for resolving issues of war and peace.

Stassen said there are two traditional types of Christian ethics regarding war. Pacifists refuse to support any war, while other Christians says wars can be waged if in accord with “just war” criteria

“Many Christians are now saying those two ethics—pacifism and just war theory—are not enough,” Stassen said. “It’s not enough to wait until the government is ready to start a war and then decide whether it is just or not.”

Stassen proposed a third paradigm called “just peacemaking”—10 principles based on what he calls “transforming initiatives” from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

“We Baptists are a Jesus-following people,” Stassen said, citing examples from sermons preached in plenary sessions of this week’s New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta.

The peacemaking workshop was one of 62 special interest sessions on 16 topics ranging from immigration to sexual exploitation, interfaith dialogue, racism and HIV/AIDS during a three-day celebration of the largest, most diverse gathering of Baptists in North America in history with participation from more than 30 Baptist denominations and groups.

Stassen said the new ethic is spreading rapidly. His 1992 book, Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace, is soon coming out in a third edition. He edited a companion book written by 23 scholars, Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, in 1998.

“These are practices that work,” Stassen said. “They are not principles or ideas. They are actual practices that are working.”

Stassen said the first just peacemaking initiative—non-violent direct action—-was validated in remarks during Wednesday night’s opening session recalling Martin Luther King’s dream that “one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.”

“Don’t tell me nonviolent direct action is some kind of otherworldly ideal,” Stassen said, describing this week’s gathering of black and white Baptist from across North America. “It works. Here we are together at the table of brotherhood.”

Other just-peacemaking practices emphasize initiatives aimed at increasing trust, working for peace before there is a crisis, acknowledging one’s own responsibility for conflict and injustice, pursing justice and international networks to reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.

The final practice is to join grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations, like the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America or the largest grassroots peace organization, www.peaceaction.org.

“To make your witness clear on just peacemaking, you need to know just peacemaking principles and you need to be in a group,” Stassen said. “If you join a group, then you have information.”

Dekar, who based his concepts on writings of Martin Luther King, suggested four principles for pursuing action.

• Study the issue. “Listening to one another, coming to love one another, coming even to love our enemy, is a great challenge,” Dekar said, “but if we don’t begin to love our enemy, to listen to our enemy, to dialogue with our enemy, we aren’t going to address the large issues.”

• Begin to dialogue with those who differ. “Our enemies are the ones that we need to listen to, to dialogue with and to begin to build a different world together,” he said.

• Develop a spirituality that will lead to action. “Healthy peacemakers are people who practice spiritual discipline.”

• Engage in non-violent direct action.

“Despite considerable evidence to the contrary,” Dekar said, “I do believe if we take these four simple steps—of dialogue and listening and praying and acting—then we can be peacemakers.

Posted: 2/01/08

Prophetic preachers take varied approaches

By Ken Camp & Jim White

Baptist Standard & Religious Herald

ATLANTA—One preacher offered an oblique endorsement of a presidential candidate, and another firmly defended the separation of church and state. One urged Christians to link prophetic imagination to concrete practices, and another cited the specific example of tearing down walls that divide.

The four preachers—two African-American, one Anglo and one Hispanic—participated in a conference on prophetic preaching during the New Baptist Covenant celebration in Atlanta.

Getting banged up prepares one for prophetic preaching, according to Otis Moss, pastor of the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Taking Romans 5:3 as his text and referring to Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Version, Moss said that getting “banged up” produces Christian character. Character, in turn, creates hope. And one expression of hope finds fulfillment in prophetic preaching.

Using the New Baptist Covenant Celebration’s scriptural theme of Luke 4:18-19, Moss noted that Jesus’ sermon in the synagogue was shorter than his text. Still, it was poignant enough to create a strong reaction. “Prophetic preaching is dangerous,” he emphasized. “It cannot keep you from being killed, but it can keep you from being a killer.”

Alluding to a tree made strong by the storms it encounters, he said, “When I struggle, I become strong.” He illustrated the point from Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon at Riverside Church in New York the year before he was assassinated. In referring to his own struggle in deciding to condemn the Vietnam War, King called the ministry “a vocation of agony.”

Encouraging those who would preach prophetically to be true to their conscience, Moss challenged them to preach not based on what is popular or expedient or safe, but on what is right. “Conscience asks, ‘Is it right?’”

Preaching prophetically presupposes an assignment of suffering, service and sacrifice, he added. The prophetic preacher attends the “University of Adversity and graduates with a degree that enables you to say ‘I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course.’”

Moss exercised his prophetic prerogative by stopping just short of publicly endorsing a candidate for President. He said he would not use the platform of the conference to tell anyone whom he would vote for, but he would be glad to do it on Saturday, after the three-day Baptist meeting ended.

And, he added, when he did it, he would tell “his name and what city he’s from in the Midwest”—an apparent reference to Sen. Barack Obama.

On the other hand, Bill Self, senior pastor of Johns Creek Baptist Church in Atlanta, said, “I declared my church a politics-free zone.”

He emphasized his unwillingness to hook his church to any political wagon.

“My wagon is hooked to the cross of Jesus Christ,” he stressed.

As a pastor, Self stressed his responsibility to his flock. And he said part of that responsibility entails making sure the members are not “fleeced by Rome” or “fleeced by Pharaoh.”

Gina Stewart, senior pastor of Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis, Tenn., challenged preachers to exercise “prophetic imagination” like the Old Testament prophets and like what Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated in the “I have a Dream” speech.

“Prophetic imagination leads to concrete practice,” she said.

She noted the challenge of reconciling the tension between the counter-cultural vision of the dream and a crushing reality that often becomes a nightmare.

“We are a bundle of contradictions,” she said, noting that our lives resemble Isaiah’s vision of a lion and a lamb, but they are not lying down together. “We must recognize both the predator and the prey that is inside each of us.”

Christ came to tear down walls that divide people, South Texas pastor Ellis Orozco said. So, can Christians find any real security in a fence built along an “imaginary line” to separate two nations?

“Jesus didn’t come to build walls. He didn’t come to build fences. He came to tear them down,” said the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen.

“I live on the border,” Orozco said. “But then again, who doesn’t live on the border these days? The border keeps moving. We don’t cross the border anymore. The border crosses us.”

While they speak of a fence as a way of securing the nation’s borders, the unspoken reason many people support the building of a barrier along the United States’ southern border is because they fear “the browning of America,” he said.

For generations of poor males in Mexico, answering “the call to head north” to help support their families has become a rite of passage, Orozco said. Desperation drives them across the border, he insisted.

“We always call 1-800-MEXICO when we need more poor people to do work we don’t want to do,” he said. “Who do you think is rebuilding New Orleans? For that matter, who do you think is going to build the fence?”

The Spirit of Christ compels Christians to look at the immigration situation differently, Orozco insisted.

“Jesus comes to us in the eyes of the stranger,” he said.

Walls and fences alienate and separate people, dividing them into “us and them, in and out,” he said. But Jesus alone possesses power to do the impossible and “make the two one,” Orozco said.

Undocumented Mexican immigrants “are not the enemy who have come to take from us,” he insisted. “They are the neighbor who has come to help and to be helped.”

Some may quote an American poet Robert Frost, who said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Orozco offered a rejoinder to that assertion: “I know Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is a good friend of mine. And Robert Frost is no Jesus Christ.”

American treatment of Mexican workers and reaction to immigration from Mexico has caused “a loss of moral authority in the global community,” he asserted. Every nation has the right to secure its borders from attack, but walls do not contribute to peace or promote security, Orozco said.

“As long as there are walls, there will never be peace,” he said.

Posted: 2/01/08

Ethnically diverse churches look
like God’s kingdom, speakers insist

By Sue H. Poss

CBF of South Carolina

ATLANTA—A Baptist church only resembles God’s kingdom when it includes the diversity of people created in his image, according to participants in a special interest session at the New Baptist Covenant celebration.

“Whenever we are in a room where everybody looks like us, we are not in a room that looks like the kingdom of God,” said Chuck Poole, pastor of Northminster Baptist Church, Jackson, Miss.

Poole spoke at a special interest session on “Race as a Continuing Challenge,” along with Joy Yee, senior pastor of Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church in San Francisco and former moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and Denise Gillard, executive director of The HopeWorks Connection, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Cross-cultural experiences enrich churches by giving members a bigger perspective on God and the world.

Yee classified her church as “a church of the nations.” In addition to the English-speaking congregation, Nineteenth Avenue also includes congregations of Vietnamese, Cantonese-speaking Chinese, Japanese and Arabic ethnic groups. These congregations share space but worship separately in their own style. They come together for holiday services and other special events such as potluck suppers and seasonal festivals.

Recently, the have begun working together on international student ministry. “When you have a church that has all kinds of different people in it, your potential for ministry expands exponentially,” Yee said.

Gillard said that being in Christ is foundational to the way Christians relate to others.

“We are compelled to engage with each other,” she said. “Being in Christ provides us with an intersection and therefore can give us some courage.”

“As an Afro-Canadian, I need the courage to deal with the self-hatred of minority groups that want to be thought of as like the other group,” she said. “Our cultural heritage gives us our positions of forming assumptions about people. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal and challenge the practices of subordination that we facilitate or permit in our churches. “

The church should take a more holistic, grassroots approach to dealing with the issue of race, Gillard said.

“There’s a lot of language couched in toleration, but toleration is not what Jesus called for,” she said. She suggested seminary students be required to experience cross-cultural placement and supervision to gain a better understanding of dealing with issues of race.

Poole spoke about his early life growing up in Macon, Ga., in the segregated South in the 1960s where he could not offer a seat on the bus to a black woman. He compared that experience to a wedding he performed 40 years later in Washington, D.C., where he was the only white person in the wedding party and all the participants were better educated than he.

Poole also said that early in his ministry while still a seminary student, a discussion of race relations in a deacons’ meeting turned to the Ku Klux Klan.

“To my everlasting shame and as a reflection of the world in which I was formed, I said the Klan is not such a bad thing,” he said. “And though you weren’t in the room, you’re the only people in this room, and I ask your forgiveness for that.”

Several years ago, Poole said he spoke in favor of the state of Mississippi removing the Confederate battle flag emblem from the state flag.

“I said that the gospel requires us to remove every symbol reflective of injustice and hatred,” he said. “I tell you that today to say that people can be born again and the spirit of God can transform lives.”

The panel offered some specific tips on how churches and individuals can deal with the challenges of race because, as Yee said, “Like attracts like, but … that is not what we are called to be.”

• Establish cross-cultural sister church relationships.

• Share stories and experiences.

• Be careful and thoughtful in speech and theology.

• Build Habitat houses together.

• Get involved in local schools and other places where youth gather.

• Learn how to say “hello” and “thank you” in another language.

• Create safe environments for discussion.

• Approach one another in humility. Put the interests of others first.

• Conduct self-examination to see if any walls exist.

• Start with small steps, such as building friendships in the workplace and neighborhood.

• Don’t be afraid.

• Don’t give up.

Some of the challenges that Yee said she has experienced in her “church of nations” ministry include:

• Overcoming a desire to hold onto one’s culture over participating in Christ’s culture.

• Competition arising among language groups.

• Bridging the gap between youth ministries conducted primarily in English and ministries. to older adults primarily in their native language.

• Autonomous congregations holding onto their own worship practices and theological distinctives while also trying to cooperate with other groups.

• Classifying and treating members of a particular group as being all the same.

• Guarding against racial/ethnic humor.

• Willingness to give up power and place trust in colleagues.

• Avoiding ethnocentric thinking.

Posted: 2/01/08

Christians called to ‘welcome the stranger’

By Robert Dilday

Virginia Religious Herald

ATLANTA – Church members may disagree over political solutions to the immigration issue, but they can unite around ministry to immigrants who already live in the United States, a Texas Baptist immigration services advocate said Jan. 31.

“Immigration has become a political issue,” said Richard Muñoz, director of the Immigration Service and Aid Center (ISAAC) in Dallas.

“Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate political issues from mission issues,” he said. “We can disagree with a political decision but God has told us to minister to the ‘strangers’ among us.”

Muñoz and Houmphanh Vongsurith, pastor of a Laotian Baptist church in Texas, led a special interest session on “Welcoming a Stranger” Thursday in conjunction with the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant convocation in Atlanta.

“There is a tension between Romans 13, which urges us to obey our rulers, and Hebrews 13, which compels us to welcome strangers among us,” said Muñoz, whose service is an entity of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

“How can we reconcile the tension? As a Baptist I’m glad that the word of God doesn’t contradict itself and that our God is an awesome God. We can help people comply with the law while still welcoming those who come to our country.”

Muñoz said ISSAC’s goals are to provide churches with resources to help those who can be helped to comply with immigration laws. Among the opportunities:

• Churches can apply to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for permission to operate accredited immigration clinics, which help qualified immigrants navigate the rules governing their application for citizenship. Any nonprofit organization providing legal assistance—which essentially is what that kind of help is—must participate in training and received accreditation.

• Churches can help potential citizens prepare for the citizenship test, which last year became more difficult. No training or accreditation is necessary to provide that assistance, “and you don’t have to invent the question—the USINS will tell you what you need to know.”

• Churches can offer English as a Second Language classes.

• Churches can follow up on each member who has been deported for being in the country illegally and contact Baptists in the country to which their member has been returned.

Vongsurith, pastor of First Laotian Baptist Church in Grand Prairie, Texas, and president of the Laotian National Baptist Fellowship, said churches can ease immigrants’ fears with a friendly attitude when they visit, such as shaking their hand, offering a meal and introducing them to someone in church who is the same age and gender.

“If you know the language of the person, you can say something in it—even one word—and they will fall in love with you,” he said. “If you ask me how to say ‘good morning’ in Laotian, you are making me happy. In my heart I want to come back.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Global ills take center
stage at Baptist convocation

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

ATLANTA (ABP)—Baptists focused attention on social and global ills—materialism, climate change, HIV/AIDS and apathy—during the second day of a unity meeting in Atlanta.

Tony Campolo, Al Gore and John Grisham provided the notable speeches of the day, speaking at the New Baptist Covenant meeting.

Campolo, an author and social activist known for his brash northeastern brogue and socially progressive theology, told thousands of Baptists attending that they must “straighten out” their values when it comes to “which Jesus they preach.”

“It seems to me that all across America people have created a Christ very different from the one in the Bible,” he said. “He’s a cultural deity. … As I go across the country, the Jesus I hear most comes across as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, middle-class American. And the Jesus of Scripture is different.”

Campolo, 62, said Jesus preached good news to the poor—so church members should forsake materialism and give sacrificially.

The professor emeritus at Eastern University in Philadelphia didn’t leave his anyone out of his challenge, calling both young and old to live to glorify God.

“So many of you are retired, so what do you do with your time? Go out and play golf? … You have time and money to spend. You can spend it on something that really counts!” he said. After an eruption of laughter and applause, he added: “Rise up, you suckers, and go out and do the work of Jesus!”

In a two-hour lunch meeting, former vice president Gore found a responsive crowd for his message of global warming in the 2,000 Baptists who gathered to hear him.

Gore, 59, pounded out a message that related extreme poverty and global warming, addressed misconceptions regarding the climate crisis and offered hope for slowing and reducing carbon emissions.

He called on Baptists, including Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter, who were in the audience, 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.

“In every crisis there is an opportunity for a reawakening and for a reassessment and for a change of course and an opportunity to do things better, and that’s what the climate crisis is really all about.”

Trapped carbon holds the sun’s heat energy and warms the globe, Gore said. Some fluctuations in annual temperatures—even a brief warming period during medieval times —on Earth are normal, Gore said. But with nine of the 10 hottest years ever recorded appearing in the last 10 years, the current climate changes are anything but normal.

“Scientists are practically screaming to us that this is not natural,” Gore said. “I’ve never seen scientists in such a state of agitation, I’m telling you. When scientists use words like that, there’s a signal on the mountain. The trumpet is blowing.”

Grisham, a member of University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va., spoke in an address titled “Respecting Diversity.” He told the crowd the story of a young reporter interrogating him about his Baptist faith and how he had felt defensive about it.

“He thought we were all intolerant, narrow fundamentalists … and what really irked him was our willingness to be manipulated for political reasons,” Grisham said. “I really wanted to choke him, but I didn’t want to give him another bad example of a Baptist, so I let it go.

“I asked myself why. Why was I so defensive? What have we done? How and why is the Baptist name come to symbolize something that is wrong to a lot of people?”

The reason, Grisham said, is that Baptists have worked “so hard to exclude so many.”

The solution to “reclaiming” the Baptist good name is to respect diversity, stay out of politics and “spend as much time out there on the streets as we do in church,” Grisham said.

“As a church, our mission is to serve God through teaching, preaching and serving others. However evangelical politics have become a big business, and the results are disastrous for the church. When the church gets involved in politics, it alienates many of the people it’s supposed to serve,” he said.

Interspersed throughout the day were sessions expounding on Campolo’s, Gore’s and Grisham’s themes. Attendees at the meeting also joined Anglo and African-American preachers in a prophetic preaching conference that focused on applying the principles of Luke 4 to modern-day issues.

While Campolo urged Baptists to “challenge young people because we are losing them” because “we are making [Christianity] too easy for them,” panelists in an afternoon session said young people are bombarded with materialist and consumerist messages, but churches must respond by giving them a cause worth following.

Trevor Beauford, minister of youth and singles at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., said students are often “doing missions to get theirs”—volunteering for school credit or to embellish an application. But church workers must help youth take interest in missions out of a desire for social justice and compassion, he said.

And children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman said in the morning session that about 13 million children in America live in poverty—5.6 million of them in extreme poverty.

“The great German Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer … believed that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children,” said Edleman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. “Our nation flunks Bonhoeffer’s test every hour of every day.”

Poor children who are minorities are disproportionately at risk of losing their way in life, she said. The most dangerous place to grow up in America is “at that intersection of poverty and race,” she said.

“I want to raise a loud gong of alarm today about America’s cradle-to-prison pipeline crisis,” she said. If the cycle is not broken, “we’re going to see racial and social progress go backwards, and we cannot do that on our watch.

“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- to 29-year-olds—our fathers—are under correctional institution supervision or control.”

In a separate afternoon session titled “The HIV/AIDS Pandemic,” panelists called on churches to recognize the spread of HIV/AIDS as a justice issue that is also affected by poverty and incarceration. The issue is currently characterized by “an unholy trinity of silence, shame and stigma,” said Raphael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

The disease affects a disproportionate number of African-Americans, he said: African comprise 12 percent of America's population, but they account for more than 50 percent of people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

AIDS is “inextricably connected to America's growing prison-industrial complex,” Warnock said, adding that with more than two million people in prison, many men participate in homosexual encounters and then return home to infect their wives and girlfriends.

Grisham summed up the theme of the day best when he told the evening audience that Baptists who really want to follow Jesus’ example should work to help everyone in need.

“We should spend as much time out there on the streets as we do in church,” Grisham said. “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?”

Posted: 2/01/08

Novelist Grisham calls fellow
Baptists to respect diversity

By John Pierce and Tony W. Cartledge

Baptists Today

ATLANTA—Best-selling author John Grisham contrasted the Mississippi Baptist church of his childhood with the greater openness of his current congregation, University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va., in a rare public address concluding the Jan. 31 evening session of the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant.

In a message titled “Respecting Diversity,” Grisham told of how his childhood church was not open to racial diversity or the inclusion of women in leadership roles. The biblical cases for exclusion were based on literal interpretations of selected scripture passages, he said.

“Even as a child, I didn’t understand this,” he said.

Grisham acknowledged women as “the backbone of the church,” but they were not permitted to hold certain positions of spiritual leadership. He suggested, however, that not all members agreed with such literal interpretations.

“My mother may have played lip service to this submission stuff,” he said, “but she didn’t really believe it.”

In fact, he said, even those who found biblical justification for racial segregation and male dominance had limits to their insistence on literal interpretation.

“When Paul told Timothy to have a little wine…,” Grisham said to laughter and applause.

“Well, some things were not so literal. There was wiggle room after all.”

In choosing a church today, Grisham said, he expects more openness to diversity.

“If there is a hint of discrimination,” he said, “my wife would go somewhere else and take me with her.”

Grisham said the move toward openness has not occurred in all Baptist churches.

“Sadly, in many ways and in many places that church still exists today,” he said.

Grisham said the name Baptist is not widely respected in many circles because it is associated with exclusion.

“The reason is because, for so long, so many Baptists have worked so hard to exclude so many.”

Clearly alluding to but not naming the Southern Baptist Convention, which is not formally participating in the historic Atlanta gathering, Grisham said the “largest Baptist convention” affirms biblical inerrancy and gets most of the attention.

Grisham, who opened the address by telling of his frustration in trying to define and defend his Baptist faith to a reporter in New York City during a book tour, concluded with three suggestions.

To get off the defensive and to restore the good name, he said, Baptists should first truly respect diversity.

“God made all of us, loves us equally and expects us to love each other equally without respect to gender, race, sexual orientation or other religions,” he said.

Second, he said, the church must stay out of politics.

“As a church, our mission is to serve God through teaching, preaching and serving others,” he said. “When the church gets involved in politics, it alienates many of the very people we are called to serve, and those who push politics will pay a price.”

Third, Grisham urged fellow Baptists to spend as much time out on the streets in ministry as in the church.

“Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell,” he said. “Shouldn’t that tell us something?”

Christians are needed by the sick, the homeless, neglected seniors, scarred war veterans, impoverished children, refugees, immigrants and prisoners, Grisham said.

“We cannot pick and choose,” he said. “We need to get on with the business of serving others.”

Before Grisham’s address, Julie Pennington-Russell preached on “The Bible Speaks about Respecting Diversity” and former Baylor University football coach Grant Teaff gave a testimony. Teaff, now executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, is a member of First Baptist Church of Waco, Texas.

“We never see Jesus until we see him in every face,” said Pennington-Russell, who moved to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., from Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, last year.

Noting the broad racial, economic, geographic, cultural and theological differences present, Pennington-Russell said, “We are practicing the Baptist tradition of respecting each other’s differences.”

“Respectfulness” is a good gift, she affirmed, but then asked, “Is this really the gift we came so far to give this week?”

Respect alone “has no power to change something that is broken between you and me,” she said. “Only love can do that.”

Respectfulness is not a bad gift, “but it runs out of steam at the 50-yard line,” she said.

“But love, like Forrest Gump, runs all the way down the field, through the end zone and into the parking lot.”

We have the ability to be respectful of others while still holding them at arm’s length, Pennington-Russell said, but “love doesn’t let us get away with that.”

“Jesus is the face of love,” she said, the one “who showed us what the power of real love could do through us in this world.”

Jesus came reaching out to us, “and in light of such a love, maybe it’s time for you and me to do some reaching, too,” she said, challenging participants to think of someone they have difficulty loving.

“Let love take you by the hand and lead you like a child to a new way of seeing that brother or sister, and look for Jesus in the face of that person,” she said.

Posted: 2/01/08

Give students a cause worthy
of their devotion, panelists urge

By Brian Kaylor

Baptist General Convention of Missouri

ATLANTA—Young people are bombarded with materialist and consumerist messages, but churches must respond to the challenge by giving them a cause worth following, panelists told a Baptist gathering in Atlanta.

Mitch Randall, pastor of North Haven Church in North Haven, Okla., moderated a session on “Youth at a Crossroad” during the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant.

Trevor Beauford, minister of youth and singles at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., asked how churches can compete with a culture that is teaching materialist and consumerist ideals.

Those ideals even extend to volunteer service and missions, he noted. Often, students are “doing missions to get theirs”—volunteering for school credit or to look good on an application. Church workers must help youth take interest in missions out of a desire for social justice and compassion, Beauford insisted.

To reach young people, ministers must understand the culture students live in and then engage that culture, he said. Youth workers need to listen to the music of the young people and understand their challenges and struggles in order to build relationships.

“Relationship is more important than rules,” Beauford said.

Youth will gain a missional desire not by listening, but by seeing missions in action, he explained. Instead of merely handing out WWJD bracelets, youth workers must demonstrate how Jesus lived by living as he did.

Ken Dibble, youth strategist for the Virginia Baptist Mission Board, told about attempts to help youth gain multiple opportunities to lead, teach and serve. Students want to be given such challenging opportunities, he insisted.

“They want—no, they expect—challenge,” Dibble said.

But if the church did not provide those challenges, then young people would look for them elsewhere, he warned.

Dibble also urged churches to challenged members in worship services for people to make a public commitment related to understand their calling. Churches often only ask people to come forward to make a profession of faith, be baptized, become a member of the church or rededicate their lives. Every Sunday should be “Consider Your Calling Sunday,” he said.

“Is God calling you to something bigger than you can even imagine?” Dibble urged pastors to ask. “You don’t know what it is? Let’s talk!”

Joel Taylor, pastor of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, Ill., urged pastors and youth workers to be educational “with a mission agenda.” Through preaching and teaching, church leaders could help raise the level of mission consciousness in young people. As a result, he insisted Christian education for youth must be “more than just a babysitting service.”

Youth workers should take advantage of their environment by looking for opportunities to help youth engage in missions firsthand, Taylor said.

“We must lead by example and make them a part of our mission work,” he said. “This is a way of not only letting them hear what mission work is about, but they also will see it (by) doing mission work.”

Finally, Taylor argued that youth works must allow youth to be entrepreneurs and take “ownership of their mission agenda.” He explained that youth should be challenged to come up with their own solutions because they will “buy into it” if they helped create and plan the mission work.

Colleen Burroughs, executive vice president of Passport, Inc., contended youth workers must first “unapologetically teach the Bible” and then give student the opportunity to practice their book knowledge. This two-part strategy would help raise awareness and the desire to be engaged mission work.

“Learning how Jesus was love to the world takes Bible study,” she said. “Being Jesus’ love to the world takes action.”

Burroughs also talked about the challenge and opportunity of technology, noting youth know more about each other and share information quickly because of technological advances. This can be a challenge for youth workers because youth can become overwhelmed by information, she noted.

But the technology also could help young people make meaningful missions connections. Burroughs described American young people she took on a trip to Kenya who were deeply affected by seeing the poverty and challenges of their Kenyan peers.

As a result of the trip, “poverty has a name” for the American youth, she said. The students who went on the trip still keep in contact with those from Kenya through the Internet and text-messaging. This connection made through technology has made them more determined to be involved in missions and making a difference.

Posted: 2/01/08

Gregory admonishes Baptists to show
concrete concern for ‘the stranger’

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

ATLANTA—Obedience to God’s command means showing specific acts of hospitality to “the stranger before you right now,” not just abstract concern for the marginalized of society or for the oppressed of the world in general, Joel Gregory told a gathering of Baptists from throughout North America.

“We like to generalize. God likes to particularize,” said Gregory, professor of preaching at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. He addressed the morning session of the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, Feb. 1 in Atlanta.

From the oldest covenant code in the Hebrew Scriptures to the Gospel account of Jesus’ teaching about Judgment Day, concern for the stranger is at the heart of God’s message to humanity, not peripheral to it, he stressed.

“The stranger is central to God’s concern,” he said. “Everybody is a stranger sometime. So, be kind to the next stranger you meet.”

Baptists in particular should remember their rural, working-class roots and demonstrate a welcoming spirit to the poor, oppressed and uneducated, Gregory admonished.

“How easy it is when we get our piece of the rock to forget the rock from which we were hewn,” he observed. “We dare not forget where we came from when it comes to the stranger.”

Too often, Christians join society in general in building walls to keep out “the other,” Gregory noted.

“We often don’t harm the other, but we don’t acknowledge the other. We go past the other in the night,” he said.

Gregory pointed to the New Baptist Covenant gathering—which drew a diverse, interracial crowd representing 30 Baptist groups from throughout North America—as holding potential to help break down walls that allow Baptist Christians to insulate themselves from others.

“Could it be that the wind and the fire of the Spirit will move here and the walls come down?” he asked.

Hospitality to strangers characterized the early church, and it should mark Christians today, Gregory said.

God’s people should welcome the stranger not just because it is commanded, but also “because we need to and because we want to,” he insisted. “I need the stranger more than the stranger needs me.”

Concrete acts of hospitality to strangers break complacent Christians out of their routines, compel them to open their hands and their pocketbooks, and enrich them by putting them into contact with people unlike themselves, he added.

In Jesus’ teaching about final judgment, as recorded in Matthew 25, the criteria of judgment will not be adherence to the details of a creed, Gregory noted. Rather, people will be judged by how their faith was made tangible in acts of compassion to the weak, the marginalized, the stranger and the disenfranchised.

“May we not grow wary of the stranger but become strangers to our own wariness,” he said.

Posted: 2/01/08

College students unite to serve
Atlanta following Baptist celebration

By Patricia Heys

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

ATLANTA—More than 80 students from eight colleges and universities will participate in a day of service Feb. 2, the day after more than 15,000 Baptists gathered in Atlanta for the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant.

The students, who attended the interracial meeting that drew Baptists from throughout North America, are part of the Baptist Collegiate Fellowship.

The celebration of a New Baptist Covenant focused on the biblical mandates of Jesus, as recorded in Luke 4:18-19. The Baptist Collegiate Fellowship’s three-day event will focus on those mandates to care for the poor with small group activities, worship and service projects.

“This is an event that is historic in nature, but it’s also an opportunity to unite with so many other students,” said Tyler Ward, a junior at Campbell University and one of the event’s organizers. “We are taking the words of Jesus and really putting hands and feet to them. Over the next few days, we will be really focusing on the service aspect of following Jesus.”

Students will work at two homeless service centers in Atlanta—the Gateway Center and the Atlanta Union Mission—serving meals, organizing clothes and linen closets, leading activities for children and cleaning.

“As Baptists, there are many things that we can disagree on. But we can all agree on the biblical mandates to spread the gospel, promote peace with justice, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick and marginalized, welcome the stranger and liberate the oppressed,” said Hannah McMahan, a student at the Wake Forest Divinity School in Winston-Salem, N.C. and one of the event’s coordinators.

“One of the founding principles behind the New Baptist Covenant is that we can do more together than we can separately. This is our chance to unite around serving others and God.”

The students represent Mercer University in Macon, Ga.; Morehouse College in Atlanta; Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C.; Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tenn.; Stetson University in Deland, Fla.; University of Texas in Austin, Texas; Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. and Wingate University in Wingate, N.C.

Mercer University’s Atlanta campus will host the students, providing space for housing, worship and fellowship.

McMahan said she hoped the Baptist Collegiate Fellowship gathering would be the first of many partnerships between Baptist college students.

“These students are future Baptist leaders,” McMahan said. “We hope to find ways for these young people to come together, modeling the [New Baptist] Covenant, and discovering ways to better serve our communities.”