Posted: 1/30/08

Campolo asks Baptists,
“Which Jesus should we preach?”

By Jim White and Robert Dilday

Virginia Religious Herald

ATLANTA—Author Tony Campolo challenged Baptists from across North America to examine which Jesus they preach—the one who incarnates American values or the one who incarnates God.

Campolo, professor emeritus at Eastern University near Philadelphia, and children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman headlined a Jan. 31 morning plenary session at the New Baptist Covenant convocation. The session explored the devastating effects of poverty in America and around the world.

“We’ve got to get our values straightened out,” Campolo said.

Drawing on the church’s tendency to preach the Jesus that conforms to its priorities, he said: “We’re supposed to preach Jesus. There’s no question about that. The question is, which Jesus should we preach?”

Referring to a comment attributed to George Bernard Shaw, he said, “God created us in his image and we decided to return the favor.”

“It seems to me that all across America people have created a Christ very different from the one in the Bible. 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.”

Jesus pronounced his priorities in Luke 4, beginning with preaching good news to the poor, Campolo noted.

“Do you think Jesus meant what he said, or do you think he was kidding?” he asked.

Confronting the sin of materialism and America’s consumer culture, Campolo asked, “What kind of car would Jesus drive?”

Jesus would not drive an $80,000 car while 30,000 children a day die in quiet despair and many older people have to choose between medicine and food, he said.

• See latest photos and the latest video clips from the New Baptist Covenant Meeting. (And go here to see our complete coverage of the event).

“There is nothing wrong with making a million dollars. I wish you all would make a million dollars. There is nothing wrong with making it, but there is something wrong with keeping it,” he said. “My Bible tells me in 1 John 3:17, ‘If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need but shuts off his compassion from him—how can God’s love reside in him?’ ”

Neither did churches escape Campolo’s focus. Pointing to the expansive and expensive facilities churches build for themselves, he wondered aloud how church members could be challenged to give sacrificially when their own churches often model self-centered consumerism.

“We’ve got to challenge young people because we are losing them. We have not lost them because we are making Christianity too difficult for them but because we are making it too easy for them,” he said. “They want their lives to count. They want their lives to matter.”

Turning his attention to older Baptists, he asked: “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.”

Playing to the enthusiastic response of the crowd, he shouted, “Rise up, you suckers, and go out and do the work of Jesus!”

Edleman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, said 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,” she said. “Our nation flunks Bonhoeffer’s test every hour of every day.”

Statistics bear that out, she maintained:

• Every 36 seconds a child is born into poverty.

• Every 41 seconds, a baby is born without health insurance, “though we lead the world in health technology.” About 9.4 million children are uninsured and 85 percent of those live in working families, she said.

• Almost eight children a day are killed by a firearm. Since 1979, more than 101,000 children have died of gunfire—twice the American battle casualties in the Vietnam War.

• Every 75 seconds a baby is born to a teen mother. “We could fill up the city of Atlanta every year with children having children,” Edleman said.

• Every 19 minutes a baby dies in the first year of life.

• Millions of children start school unprepared for what they are to face and every nine seconds, a child drops out of school. “This, folks, is a disaster.”

“We lead the world among industrialized countries in military technology, in military exports, in gross domestic product, in the number of millionaires and billionaires, and in defense expenditures,” Edleman said.

“But we stand 20th among our 15-year-old science scores, 24th and last in child poverty rates among industrialized nations, 24th in low birth weight, 22nd in infant mortality, 25th in 15-year-old math scores and last in protecting children against gun violence. What would we be saying today if we thought we came out of the Olympics 20th and 21st and last? Why can’t we get our voices and acts together and make sure we are proud to be one in protecting our children?”

Poverty makes an impact on every race and family type in America, Edleman said. But poor minority children are disproportionately at risk, and the results are devastating.

“I want to raise a loud gong of alarm today about America’s cradle-to-prison pipeline crisis,” she warned. 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. An unlevel playing field from birth contributes to too many poor children of color being sucked into a cradle-to-prison pipeline that you and I must name and change.”

The most dangerous place to grow up in America is “at that intersection of poverty and race,” she said.

“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.”

Some 580,000 black males and 250,000 Latino males are serving sentences in state or federal prisons, Edleman said, while fewer than 40,000 black males and 30,000 Latino males earn bachelor’s degrees each year.

The impact of poverty has left most 4th graders—86 percent of black ones, 83 of Latino and 58 percent of white—unable to read at grade level.

“Folks, if you can’t read in this globalizing economy, you are sentenced to social death,” she warned. “I cannot understand how we can break the genetic code and send a spaceship to Mars and a man to the moon and we can’t figure out how to teach our children to read by fourth grade. What is wrong with us?”

These statistics add up to a national catastrophe, she warned. “They are not acts of God,” said Edleman. “They are our choices as citizens and as a nation. We created them; we can and must change them.”

Churches—“which ought to be the locomotive, and not the caboose, in speaking up for children”—can do two things, said Edleman, daughter of a Baptist minister.

First, adults must confront and stop their hypocrisy. “Adults are what is wrong with our children—parents letting children raise themselves or be raised by television or the Internet, children being shaped by peers and gangs instead of responsible parents and grandparents or anchor institutions like the church, children roaming the streets because no one is at home, adults making promises we don’t keep and preaching what we don’t practice, telling children to be honest while lying and telling children not to be violent while marketing and glorifying violence and tolerating gun-saturated war zones across the land. … Children need the integrity of your lived example of being a Christian.”

The sheer number of faith groups in the country could make a dramatic impact, she said. “There are 342,730 houses of worship of all faiths in America,” she said. “Of those, 330,000-plus are Christian churches with more than 156 million members. Over 77,000 of those are Baptist with over 34 million members. Imagine the impact on children’s wellbeing and on the cradle-to-prison pipeline if each church adopted one at-risk family or got one child a permanent adopted family.”

Second, churches need to rediscover their prophetic voices, she said. “Justice is what we’re called to provide.”

“Dr. [Martin Luther] King said that a nation which continued to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” she said. Last year American armed forces spent $600 billion a year on arms.

“We’ve got to figure out how to do a better job of finding a better balance between protecting children from the terrors within and protecting them from the enemies without.”

Posted: 1/31/08

‘Incarnation’ is key for Baptists
engaging policy, speakers stress

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

ATLANTA (ABP)—Christians should become involved in transforming public policy, a diverse group of Baptists heard Jan. 31, because Christ first set the example by transforming the world and bidding Christians to follow.

“God believed in incarnation so much that he hasn’t given up on it yet,” said Suzii Paynter, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission. “It didn’t end with Jesus. It continues.”

Paynter and two other Baptists engaged in social advocacy spoke in Atlanta on the subject of faith and public policy at one of a host of breakout sessions during the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant meeting Jan. 31.

Paynter, New Jersey pastor Buster Soaries and Canadian Baptist activist Lois Mitchell told listeners that understanding the proper relationship between the church and public policy can be complex, but that policy engagement is a natural outgrowth of Christian discipleship and ministry.

“We are not called to reform secular society or secular culture; rather, through Christ … we have the assurance” of self-reformation, said Mitchell, who works for Canadian Baptist Ministries’ Sharing Way program. “Transformation is not our agenda but the consequence of our obedience.”

• See latest photos and the latest video clips from the New Baptist Covenant Meeting. (And go here to see our complete coverage of the event).

Mitchell said that Christ’s followers are called to aid the downtrodden, which lends itself to influencing public policy.

However, she warned, “When we try to change the world using the ways of the world, we will always fail.”

Soaries noted that temptation. The pastor of First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, N.J., served from 1999 to 2003 as secretary of state under former New Jersey governor Christine Whitman.

Of the reactions after the news was announced, “On the one hand was the group of people who thought I would use my office to make the entire state of New Jersey Baptist,” he said, while the other half “thought I had abandoned by faith by taking office.”

But his experience engaging in public policy grew out of his church’s ministries, he noted. “Prophetic witness emerges from priestly endeavor,” Soaries said. “Our impact on public policy should be an outgrowth of our concern for people.”

For instance, his church became involved in financial counseling after he discovered that many of its own members were drowning in consumer debt.

“We discovered at First Baptist that one of the greatest threats to the economic stability of our church family … was the use and abuse of credit cards,” Soaries said. The church developed a ministry devoted to debt counseling and teaching budgeting and other good financial habits for households.

“In the process of doing that work, we discovered that the policies of our state allowed car salesmen, for instance, to charge up to 35 percent interest,” he said “Our involvement with policies in New Jersey that would regulate the amount of interest that lenders would charge … was a natural outgrowth.”

Paynter noted that her congregation —First Baptist Church in Austin—is beginning to see similar concern grow out of ministry. For 37 years, she noted,groups from the church have been taking humanitarian mission trips to poverty-stricken colonias along the Texas/Mexico border.

“Should we go to that same neighborhood for 30 years and never ask, ‘Why don’t they have running water?’” she said.

Posted: 1/31/08

Individual, church response
crucial to alleviating poverty

By Carla Wynn Davis

CBF Communications

ATLANTA—Breaking the cycle of poverty begins with taking seriously the Bible, people in need and the church’s call to respond. And speakers reminded participants at a Baptist gathering that addressing poverty isn’t optional for Christians and churches who are serious about following Christ.

These ideas, along with motives and models for alleviating poverty, were explored by panelists Jan. 31 during the “Breaking Cycles of Poverty” special interest session at the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta.

“I have begun to wonder whether we can follow Jesus without addressing poverty,” said Tom Prevost, who works with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s rural poverty initiative in 20 of the poorest U.S. counties. “I’m not even sure it is possible.”

Citing the example of Jesus and the biblical mandate to care for the poor, panelists urged individual and church responses to poverty.

Individuals can help alleviate poverty by working in impoverished neighborhoods, by forming relationships with impoverished people or by urging elected public representatives to support legislation that reduces poverty, Prevost said. Individuals can also motivate their churches to act on behalf of poor people.

“Responding [to poverty] is something at the very heart of what it means to be a congregation,” said Diana Garland, dean of Baylor University’s School of Social Work. “It’s the responsibility of every Christian. There’s nobody who is exempt. We’re all called to respond to the needs of our neighbors. We’re never exempt.”

The importance of addressing poverty and social justice must be preached and taught in churches, Garland said. It must engage all members of the congregation, whether they assemble baskets of food at Christmas or form a relationship with someone struggling to financially survive.

“Those one-time Christmas baskets are a great place to begin, but it’s not the end. It’s just the beginning,” Garland said. “Encourage the move from charity to justice. Start with those one-time events and move to the longer term … move to justice.”

While difficult, the move from charity to justice is possible, said Christopher Gray of FCS Community Ministries in Atlanta. Gray’s ministry began with a long-term commitment to a neighborhood troubled with crime, drugs and prostitution. One way the ministry restores dignity and promotes self-sufficiency is by selling clothes at an affordable rate instead doing giveaways.

The ministry also has about 15 people living in the neighborhood to incite change from the inside out.

“We try not to minister from arm’s length but rather live and serve among those who are challenged,” Gray said.

In this ministry and other poverty reduction efforts, taking risks is the norm, and failure is common, Gray said, but a long-term, undaunted commitment to holistic ministry is necessary to transform communities and lives.

“You have to think long haul and determined,” Prevost said. “These are not quick fixes.”

Change is slow because poverty is so complex and far reaching. Often what slows individuals and churches from responding is feeling powerless and hopeless to make a change, Garland said. But the success stories from FCS Community Ministries and others are a glimmer of hope to the change one person or church can make.

“We cannot bring in the kingdom of God, but we can point to it with our action and our lives,” Garland said. “We can do our best to make the way straight so … God can come in.”

“It’s not beyond the capability of [the people in] this room to make an incredible difference,” Prevost said. “We’re the ones who are supposed to be carrying our candles and rushing to the darkness.”

Posted: 1/31/08

Christians called to tear down walls,
not build them, South Texas pastor says

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

ATLANTA—Christ came to tear down walls that divide people, a South Texas pastor told Baptists at a prophetic preaching conference. So, he asked, 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 Ellis Orozco, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen.

Orozco participated in an afternoon session on prophetic preaching during the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta, Jan. 31, offering a biblical response to illegal immigration.

“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 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

Silence, shame and stigma—
the unholy trinity of AIDS

Tony W. Cartledge

Baptists Today

ATLANTA—Churches must recognize the spread of HIV/AIDS as a justice issue and overcome pervasive stigmas about the disease if they are to live out the gospel in their communities, panelists told Baptists in Atlanta.

The issue is plagued by “an unholy trinity of silence, shame and stigma,” said Raphael Warnock, pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Warnock was among the panelists who participated in a special interest session on “The HIV/AIDS Pandemic” during the New Baptist Covenant celebration Jan. 31.

Warnock said HIV/AIDS—once considered a disease of gay white men—affects a disproportionate number of both men and women of color. African-Americans make up 12 percent of America’s population, but they account for more than 50 percent of people newly diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, he said.

AIDS has become the leading cause of death among black women age 25 to 44, he said. But “as the epidemic has swung to people of color, the money has not followed the epidemic,” Warnock added.

The response would be different if there was a proportional increase among white women, he asserted.

The spread of AIDS is “inextricably connected to America’s growing prison-industrial complex,” Warnock said. With more than two million people in prison, most for nonviolent offenses, many men are leaving prison after participating in homosexual encounters, then returning to the general population to infect their wives and girlfriends, he said.

D. L. Jackson, pastor of Liberty Baptist Church in Chicago, said HIV/AIDS also has begun making inroads among senior adults, many of whom are uninformed and don’t think they are at risk.

Carla Nelson, education facilitator for Canadian Baptist Ministries, said churches should respond to the AIDS pandemic by simply “being the church”—accepting others and reaching out to them as Christ did.

“We must end the isolation and turn the stigma around,” she said, speaking of a Rwandan pastor on the outskirts of Kigali who led his congregation to make it a matter of pride to be tested for HIV and to sponsor “guardian groups” to care for those who suffer from the disease.

Malcom Marler, who has worked since 1994 as a chaplain in an AIDS clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, went beyond seeing HIV/AIDS as a needed field of ministry.

“I believe HIV/AIDS is not only a calling for the church to respond to in practical and caring ways,” he said. “This disease offers the opportunity for the renewal of the church” because getting to know people with HIV/AIDS can remind the church “what grace is all about.”

“If we’re going to find Jesus, we’d better go find people with HIV,” Marler said. “If we get it right on grace, everything else will fall into place.”

Participants talked about practical means by which churches can minister to those who suffer from HIV/AIDS. Church leaders need to take the lead in getting tested, the panelists said, as a way to encourage others who need the testing but might be afraid to get it.

“Ministers have to set the example,” said Warnock. “Deacons and trustees and people who’ve been married for 60 years—if they all go, then people at risk can get lost in the movement.”

Jackson described a residence facility his church founded for persons and families affected by AIDS. Called “Vision House,” the ministry provides housing at reduced cost, a wholesome environment and counseling services, he said.

All four speakers emphasized the importance of education, and not just in special seminars. Nelson cited a Ugandan study showing that children who do not attend school are three times more likely to contract AIDS by their early twenties than children who are educated.

Warnock said being informed is essential. “We need to educate our children and not be afraid to talk about sex in church,” he said.

Marler echoed his thought, “We’ve always had a hard time talking about sex or drugs in the church, but we need to talk about the people we are called to be with, to rediscover where Jesus already is.”

People need to know that they don’t have to be afraid of people with HIV, Marler said. They need to know “you can’t get it from sitting beside them, hugging them, being baptized in the same water with them, or taking communion together” he said.
When people are well informed, they don’t have to suffer from “AFRAIDS,” he said— “A Fear Related to AIDS.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Baptists called to combat
ignorance about religious liberty

By Jeff Huett

Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty

ATLANTA—In an increasingly pluralistic culture, ensuring religious freedom for all requires more education about religion, further understanding about the proper relationship between church and state, and an emphasis on the historic Baptist principle of religious liberty, said a panel at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration.

Cheryl Townsend-Gilkes, professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Colby College in Waterville, Me., suggested that the very definition of religious liberty in America “fosters and sustains tremendous religious and cultural diversity.” However, she warned, “the tremendous religious and cultural diversity sometimes challenges our commitment to the separation of church and state.”

Bolstering the commitment will require combating ignorance about religion in America, she said, even to the point of creating a class taught in colleges and universities called “religion appreciation.” She said the course should be taught much like a music appreciation course, where students are required to listen to a symphony, all the while learning to recognize individual instruments.

Brent Walker, a constitutional law expert and executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, agreed that the “time-honored” principles of religious liberty and church-state separation are threatened today, made worse by a pervasive belief that religious disputes should be settled by the majority.

“The bill of rights is, by definition, counter-majoritarian, Walker said.

“America is one of the most religious and most religiously diverse nations on the face of the earth,” he said. “But despite our religious passion and pluralism, we have been able to avoid the religious conflicts and wars that have punctuated history and plague much of the world today.”

Walker put forth what he called the golden rule for church-state separation: “I must not insist that government promote my religion if I don’t want government to promote somebody else’s religion, and I should not permit government to harm someone else’s religion if I don’t want religion to harm my religion.”

Cynthia Holmes, a St. Louis attorney and former moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, warned that the future of the historic Baptist principle of church-state separation hinges on our treatment of the principle today.

“We can’t guarantee that our kids will be free to practice their religion if we deny that freedom to any other group,” she said.

“As Baptists, we must champion the historic Baptist position on religious liberty. … As Baptists, we must understand that freedom to exercise religion does not mean our freedom to impose our religion on everyone else by government favoritism.” Holmes said.

Panelists were quick to point out that the proper relationship between church and state does not divorce religion from the public square.

“Church-state separation does not keep religious voices from influencing public policy or acknowledging our religious heritage in the public square,” Walker said. “But it does mean the government should not be able to pass laws or take official action that has the primary effect of advancing or prohibiting religion.

“The best thing government can do for religion is to leave it alone,” he said. “Neither should do the work of the other.”

Holmes echoed Walker’s sentiments on the rightful place of religion the public square, but suggested the problem occurs when Christians believe that their position is “the” Christian position.

Walker added that the work of the 71-year-old Baptist Joint Committee in extending and defending religious liberty for all is a prototype for the kind of “Baptist togetherness” espoused by the New Baptist Covenant. The BJC is comprised of 15 Baptist bodies, including American Baptist Churches USA, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., and Progressive National Baptist Convention, each partnering organizations in the New Baptist Covenant.

Posted: 2/01/08

North American Baptist plan
to work together on disaster relief

By Steve DeVane

Biblical Recorder

ATLANTA—The 30 Baptist organizations in the North American Baptist Fellowship plan to form a network to coordinate disaster relief efforts.

Terry Raines, disaster relief coordinator for the Baptist General Association of Virginia, announced the initiative Jan. 31. He made the announcement during a special interest session on responding to natural disasters that was part of the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant.

The Baptist groups in the fellowship, one of the six regional affiliates of the Baptist World Alliance, are meeting this week with the theme “Unity in Christ.”

Organizers met two weeks ago to discuss the formation of the network, and sketch an outline for the network, Raines said. Two representatives from each of the 30 groups will be invited to the next meeting on the effort, he said.

The network will give Baptists a way to help and a way to seek help during disasters, Raines said. During the workshop, panelists discussed how their organizations reach out to people during emergencies.

Millard Fuller, who founded Habitat for Humanity and now heads the Fuller Center for Housing, said people who respond to disasters often give away their help, which is appropriate in when the situation is desperate.

“There are so many other situations where there’s a much better way to do it,” he said.

The Bible teaches it is better to give than receive, and Fuller suggested that those who receive help should be given a way to give back.

Fuller held a small wooden box he called a “greater blessing box.” He said his group asks those who are helped if they’d like to give back. If they agree, the organization asks how long it would take them to repay for the help. If they say five years, the group put 60 envelopes in the box and asks them to send a contribution each month to the Fuller Center. The money is used to help other people, Fuller said.

“We don’t give them a legal obligation,” he said. “We give them a box and the opportunity to pay the money back.”

Fuller urged other groups to adopt similar practices, saying the idea is not copyrighted.
“When the people you help are able, you can give them the opportunity for the greater blessing by giving back,” he said.

Samuel Tolbert, the pastor of Greater Saint Mary Missionary Baptist Church in Lake Charles, La., and general secretary of the National Baptist Convention of America, talked about disaster relief efforts since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region.

The National Baptist Convention of America and the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society formed “resurrection centers to help people rise again” in several cities. The centers include a social services worker, a mental health worker, a pastor and programs for children. The facilities have helped about 15,000 families, Tolbert said. The group also gives people Bibles.

“Many people coming to the centers had not been to church in years,” he said.

Gordon King, the director of The Sharing Way for Canadian Baptist Ministries in Ontario, Canada, focused on hunger. He said poverty and famine are related, noting that about 2.8 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day.

“The number of hungry people in the world will increase significantly in the coming decade,” he said.

While many people in the world are hungry, many Americans are overweight or obese. King suggested a distinctive vision of relief efforts based on justice, compassion and faith.

“This is a vision of the church that requires us to act the gospel and not just proclaim it,” he said.

Baptists cannot count on governments to stop hunger, King said. Even so, he said he believes the hunger crisis can be averted.

“I think this lack of government commitment creates a place where Baptists can respond,” he said.

Posted: 2/01/08

Gore Urges New Covenant Baptists
to Take Up Mantle of Creation Care

Bob Allen

Baptist Center for Ethics

ATLANTA—Former Vice President Al Gore challenged 2,500 fellow Baptists at a Thursday luncheon with prophetic zeal to take up the mantle of reversing global warming.

Speaking to a luncheon crowd at this week’s New Baptist Covenant Celebration, Gore recalled words of an old Sunday school teacher who taught the purpose of life is to glorify God.

“If we heap contempt on God’s creation, that is inconsistent with glorifying God,” he said.

Most of Gore’s speech was an adaptation of the slide show that was basis for his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, presenting evidence an impending climate crisis if governments do not act to reduce greenhouse emissions. Along with new data, the customized presentation featured new slides peppered with Bible passages to “put it in the context of my own faith as a Baptist.”

“The evidence is there,” he said. “The signal is on the mountain. The trumpet has blown. The scientists are screaming from the rooftops. The ice is melting. The land is parched. The seas are rising. The storms are getting stronger. Why do we not judge what is right?”

Gore expressed hope that creation care would become a major initiative of a new coalition of Baptists across North America united around issues like justice and concern for the poor.

“I think that there is a distinct possibility that one of the messages coming out of this gathering and this new covenant is creation care—that we who are Baptists of like mind and attempting in our lives to the best of our abilities to glorify God, are not going to countenance the continued heaping of contempt on God’s creation,” he said.

Gore joked about losing the controversial 2000 presidential campaign, but insisted the environment is neither a Democratic nor Republican issue.

“This is not a political issue,” he said. “It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue.”

• See latest photos and the latest video clips from the New Baptist Covenant Meeting. (And go here to see our complete coverage of the event).

America has the power to do something about global warming, but what is lacking is the political will, Gore insisted.

“Don’t tell me we can’t solve this climate crisis,” he said. “With one week’s worth of the money spent on the war in Iraq, we’d be well down the road.”

Politicians in Washington will get serious about addressing the issue when public opinion reaches a tipping point and demands it, Gore said.

“Come let us reason together,” he challenged Baptists, “and tell one another the truth, inconvenient though it may be, about the crisis, including the opportunity that we now face.”

“The ancient prophet laid the choice before the people,” he said: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore choose life so both thou and thy seed may live.”

Gore recounted numerous large challenges that Americans have overcome in the past, from the Declaration of Independence to the “greatest generation” during World War II.

“We have to take a different perspective on this crisis,” he said, “because never in the past has all human civilization been at risk.” That perspective, he said, is the one taught in the Scripture, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have set in place, Lord what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?”

“This is our home,” Gore said of planet Earth. “We will make our stand here. It is at risk.”

“It is not ours,” he continued. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

“We have everything we need to do the right thing to save its grace and beauty for our children and their children,” he said, “everything, that is, with the possible exception of political will.

“But ladies and gentlemen, as Americans we know that political will is a renewable resource.”

Gore said he was disappointed that some Baptists have tried to undermine his message of stewardship of natural resources.

“Too many spokespersons—who don’t really speak for me but who claim to—have said global warming’s not real, this is just a myth and etcetera,” he said. “When did people of faith get so locked into an ideological coalition that they’ve got to go along with the wealthiest and most powerful—-who don’t want to see change of a kind that’s aimed at helping the people and protecting God’s green earth?”

Mercer University President Bill Underwood, an organizer of the New Baptist Covenant Celebration, thanked Gore for a “prophetic voice” on global warming, which he described as “the great moral crisis of our age.”

Former President Jimmy Carter stepped to the microphone to announced, “We’re going to be considering what to do as a result of this New Baptist Covenant meeting.”

“How many of you think we should join Al Gore in being one of the strongest voices on earth?” Carter asked to resounding applause. “Does anyone disagree? OK, now you see that was a unanimous vote. Thank you very much.”

Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center of Ethics, introduced Gore with a plaque honoring him as 2007 Baptist of the Year and a symbolic Bible with a green cover.

“The Bible is God’s green book,” Parham said. “The green Bible gives us the responsibility to guard the garden. The green Bible calls us to love our neighbors. And my friends the only way we can love our neighbors across time is to leave them a decent place to live.”

Parham said he hoped Gore would carry his green Bible with him in his travels. “I think that with this green Bible and good science he will awaken and activate goodwill Baptists to become active in caring for the earth,” he said.

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.