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.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Mainstream Baptists hear Shurden, honor Lolley

By Brian Kaylor

Baptist General Convention of Missouri

ATLANTA—The New Baptist Covenant meets an important need, and historian Walter “Buddy” Shurden told Mainstream Baptists why and how.

Shurden addressed the Mainstream Baptist Network at a Feb. 1 breakfast held in conjunction with the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta.

Shurden, who called the interracial conference involving representatives from about 30 North American Baptist groups “the most significant Baptist meeting I have ever been to,” outlined four reasons why the New Baptist Covenant is needed:

• Origin.

Shurden began at the beginning for Baptists in terms of denominational life in the United States—the formation of the Triennial Convention in 1814. Luther Rice worked not only to raise money for missions, but also for denominational unity through that early 19th-century gathering.

Although clergy spearheaded the Triennial Convention, the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant was led by two Baptist laymen—former president Jimmy Carter and Mercer University President Bill Underwood.

Shurden called Carter “our Luther Rice” and praised the former president for his attempts over the last couple of decades to reconcile Baptists.

He also argued that the Atlanta gathering was sparked in large part from a desire to protect Baptist higher education. He credited former Mercer University President Kirby Godsey with helping start discussions that led to the event.

• Nature.

The New Baptist Covenant event was not an attempt to create a super-denomination, Shurden stressed. Although Baptists in 1814 needed a new denominational structure, Baptists today already have numerous denominational entities.

“The New Baptist Covenant Celebration is not an effort to form something together,” Shurden explained. “It is an effort to say something together about what we ought to be doing together.”

• Composition.

The celebration of a New Baptist Covenant marked a significant moment in Baptist life because it could become “a major step in racial reconciliation and gender recognition among Baptists in North America,” Shurden asserted.

The Triennial Convention was started by “33 white guys” and remained “a white guys’ club,” but the New Baptist Covenant event included from the beginning African-Americans and women.

“One of the reasons this program has been as good as it has been is because there were voices other than our voices—white voices—around that table,” he said.

• Purpose.

Pointing to the New Baptist Covenant’s focus on Luke 4, he declared that the celebration is helping Baptists “take seriously what Jesus took seriously.”

He lamented that most churches and denominations spend very little of their budgets addressing the areas addressed in Luke 4—good news for the poor, freedom for captives, recovery of sight for the blind, release for the oppressed—which Shurden said were “what Jesus took seriously.”

“This is not Democratic stuff or Republican stuff,” Shurden asserted. “This is Bible stuff. This is New Testament stuff.”

Also at the breakfast meeting, the Mainstream Baptist Network honored former Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Randall Lolley.

Lolley, who was unable to attend because his wife was recovering from an illness, was honored at the breakfast for his stand for traditional Baptist theological education.

Serving 14 years as president of Southeastern, Lolley resigned in the fall 1987 to protest trustees whose fundamentalist policies he said at the time were “contradictory to the dream which formed Southeastern.”

At the breakfast, David Key, director of the Baptist Studies Program at Chandler, and Larry Hovis, coordinator for Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, offered personal reflections and praise for Lolley.

Key asserted that when the history of the moderate Baptist movement is written, one chapter should be titled, “Randall Lolley’s bold Baptist stand.” Lolley’s example should be remembered as Baptists work to support the future of theological education, he added.

Hovis called Lolley a “great, courageous Baptist preacher, prophet” and said Lolley served as a catalyst for many “free and faithful institutions and ministries” that network together today.

Hovis announced CBF of North Carolina’s creation of the Randall and Lou Lolley Fund for theological education that will be launched formally in April.

Hovis also read a statement of greetings from Lolley, who said he was “honored beyond words.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Public servants & preachers challenge
Baptists to welcome ‘the stranger’

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

ATLANTA—The biblical command to “welcome the stranger” encompasses support for all of those on society’s margins, prominent preachers and public servants told participants at the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant Feb. 1.

In the Friday-morning plenary session of the Atlanta event, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, Texas preacher Joel Gregory and former Surgeon General David Satcher insisted the plight of immigrants, the hungry and people lacking proper health care should be of utmost concern to followers of Christ.

“Behind us, in front of us, ahead of us we meet the face of the stranger in the word of God,” said Gregory, a professor of preaching at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. “It is not a marginal issue. It’s a central concern.”

Gregory and the other speakers spoke on one of the Baptist meeting’s broad themes—fulfilling the biblical mandate to embrace the other. Gregory noted that the oldest part of the Hebrew Bible —the Covenant Code—commands God’s people to welcome outsiders.

“It is interesting that no other ancient Near Eastern law said anything about the stranger,” he said. “But this odd God who chooses the Jews as his own people throughout (Scripture) addresses them about the stranger.”

Christians often try to care for strangers, foreigners and outsiders in the abstract, Gregory said, but God calls them to care for the stranger “in his concreteness, in his particularity, in his idiosyncrasies.”

“Behind every generalization is God’s particularity—that person in front of me right now.”

Gregory told the crowd that he and the vast majority of them, as Baptists, had not so long before been on the margins of culture themselves.

“For most of us it’s been little more than a 100 years ago when we were a rural, agrarian, proletarian, uneducated people. God has done something for us,” he said. “We dare not forget where we came from when it comes to the stranger—of all people, Baptist people cannot forget.”

Grassley, a Baptist who has used his position as ranking minority member of the Senate finance committee to focus on issues of hunger and economic justice, told listeners part of welcoming the stranger involves helping the world’s hungry.

“As descendants of Abraham, we’ve inherited the earth. We’re morally obligated to leave it better than we found it,” he said.

He cited statistics estimating that 1 out of 7 people in the world goes to bed hungry each night, and 400 million of them are children. Grassley also noted that food shortages and competition over food resources can create instability and conflict between nations and people groups.

“It’s said that society is only nine meals away from revolution,” he said. “Food security is fundamental to human existence. It’s amazing that something of such monumental importance is overlooked or underestimated by many.”

Grassley said the world—for the first time in history—began producing enough food to eliminate hunger altogether in the 1960s.

“Unfortunately, this condition, this increased food productivity has not solved hunger throughout the entire world,” he said. “Poverty, war, natural disasters contribute to the cycle of hunger. But we also confront 21st-century complexities that affect a wholesome, stable and deliverable food supply.”

Grassley said increasing free trade will help alleviate hunger worldwide, but Christians in the United States should begin focusing on practical ways of alleviating hunger themselves.

For instance, he cited the current Farm Bill making its way through Congress. Grassley attempted to include provisions that would cap the agricultural subsidies paid to large corporate farmers. Those lead to overproduction of subsidized crops, which in turn floods the markets in other nations and hurts farmers in poor countries.

“A 20-million member alliance would certainly create a formidable beacon to illuminate the darkness,” he said, referring to the collective membership of the various Baptist bodies participating in the meeting.

“If ever there was a time for unity, now is the moment—building consensus between agriculturalist and conservationists and building the food supply can create sustainable farming methods that protect the environment.”

Another group of disenfranchised outsiders even closer to home, according to Satcher, is the estimated 47 million Americans who have no health insurance.

Satcher noted that he nearly died of whooping cough as a toddler in rural Alabama because his parents were poor and no hospitals in his area would admit blacks.

Inequities persist in the United States’ health-care system, he noted.

“An African-American baby is 2 1/2 times as likely to die in the first year of life as a majority baby,” he said. Globally, child-mortality disparities between the wealthiest and poorest countries are far worse.

“For me, that is not a political issue; it’s a moral issue,” he said, to applause.

Grassley was also asked to speak about the subject of the immigration crisis in the place of his Senate colleague, South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham. Organizers said Graham had to withdraw from the celebration at the last minute because he was stumping on the campaign trail for Arizona Sen. John McCain.

“I have come to the conclusion after two years of debate on immigration without success that it’s going to take the love of Jesus Christ to bring people together,” he said.

Grassley predicted that comprehensive immigration reform wouldn’t be able to pass Congress until after the next president takes office, and that it will continue to be an issue in the campaign.

“Now, I hope that in the presidential election … that the rhetoric of it doesn’t make the problem worse. It has that capability of doing that,” he said. “That’s why there has to be a lot of prayer for the two candidates.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Covenant participants close gathering
with determination but few specifics

By Greg Warner

Associated Baptist Press

ATLANTA—“We don’t want this to be a wasted moment,” Jimmy Carter said, describing the excitement and concern he said he found among participants in the first-of-its-kind New Baptist Covenant, which wrapped up its three-day gathering in Atlanta Feb. 1.

As the unprecedented event came to a close, participants and organizers alike pondered the challenging task of turning energy and enthusiasm into tangible action.

Former President Carter, a Baptist layman and the catalyst for the New Baptist Covenant, said many of the estimated 15,000 participants stopped him in the hallways of the Georgia World Congress Center to urge organizers to capture and build on the positive spirit of the gathering—the first collaborative meeting of more than 30 Baptist denominations and groups in North America.

No plans have been laid yet for another convocation, organizers said, and there is no need for a new interdenominational structure. But organizers committed to meet again in March to set a course for follow-up ministries.

Carter invited participants to submit ideas for future collaboration, but the organizers acknowledged getting 30 groups with different cultures and histories to work together would not be easy.

“The diversity of this group represents both its potential and its problem,” said William Shaw, one of the event organizers and president of the National Baptist Convention U.S.A., the oldest of the predominantly African-American Baptist denominations.

The diverse participants have “a sense of expectation” that the meeting will lead to a new era of collaboration and unity among Baptists who have been divided along racial and theological lines since before the Civil War.

“We’re not on a picnic here. We’re on a journey,” said program co-chair Jimmy Allen. “And we’re going to be working hard to overcome these cultural barriers.”

Carter said participants had already demonstrated a consensus to work on environmental stewardship, civil rights, equality for men and women, and ministry to immigrants.

Even the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denominational group not involved in the New Baptist Covenant, might cooperate with the new coalition, he said, despite its initial opposition to the movement.

Bill Underwood, president of Mercer University and event co-chair with Carter, said the gathering will have a positive impact on the public witness of Baptists.

“People are seeing Baptists talking about working together and doing positive things together, rather than bickering,” he said. “I think that is a very positive thing for Baptists.”

“The next steps have already begun,” added David Goatley, president of the North American Baptist Fellowship, an umbrella group encompassing all the organizations in the New Baptist Covenant coalition. The relationships formed among the sponsoring groups and their leaders have paved the way for future collaboration, he said.

Shaw said the movement could have international impact as well. “There have been Christians around the world taking notice that we have been doing something unprecedented,” he said.

Shaw said the New Baptist Covenant movement represents “the moving of the Spirit of God within the religious community.” That Spirit “has moved us to respond to what we all agree is a central claim of the Kingdom of God,” summarized in Jesus’ sermon in Luke 4, which provided the framework for the New Baptist Covenant meeting and future collaboration.

Allen, the last moderate Baptist president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, agreed the Covenant is “reflecting a movement of God that is bigger than any participating group.”

Allen said the Covenant leaders are not interested in organization, structure or control. While follow-up plans will come, he said, the leaders are welcoming suggestions from attendants and counting on grassroots involvement. “Everything is going to be considered that is suggested,” he said.

“We’re not trying to find ways to say no. We’re trying to find ways to say ‘go.’”

Daniel Vestal, executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, said the relationships formed among his fellow organizers will pave the way for whatever follows. And one role for the leaders is to foster relationships among grassroots participants.

“There’s nobody in a room over here planning this out,” Vestal said. “There is a desire among all of us not to control it.”

“I think the New Baptist Covenant is a gift from God,” he concluded. “Now we are responsible for how we steward and manage that gift with great care.”

Posted: 2/01/08

Need for church response grows as
HIV/AIDS pandemic continues to spread

By Carla Wynn Davis

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

ATLANTA—About ten years ago, when Wayne Smith stepped into his first HIV/AIDS education class, the other students started applauding. A member of Central Baptist Church of Bearden in Knoxville, Tenn., Smith didn’t realize how significant his church affiliation would be. For those gathered, Smith’s presence sent a message.

“The church had come. It wasn’t Wayne Smith. It wasn’t Central Baptist Church Bearden. It was somebody from some church in this town has come,” Smith said.

Smith shared his story Feb. 1 during a special interest session about the HIV/AIDS pandemic at the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta. Now directing a Knoxville-based HIV/AIDS ministry called Samaritan Ministry, Smith helps provide education about the disease; meet food, clothing and shelter needs; and offer support groups for people living with the disease.

Despite advances in treatment and care, panelists said the HIV/AIDS pandemic still is growing, and churches still need to respond. The statistics remain staggering, with more than 42 million people living with HIV/AIDS and more than 22 million lives claimed by the disease. Each year in the United States, about 40,000 people are infected.

“My heart is pierced by the numbers. Those statistics will help to determine what we as a church believe our mission to be,” said Robin Brown-Haithco, who works in chaplaincy at Emory University hospitals in Atlanta.

And that mission, she said, is to embrace and accept people living with HIV/AIDS, developing a pastoral response that treats people with compassion instead of judgment.

When HIV/AIDS first began impacting the United States 25 years ago, it was a “gay man’s disease,” Smith said. People didn’t worry about it because they didn’t think it would affect them. It was easy to judge. Now, HIV/AIDS is a disease of the human family, Smith said.

Part of the reason churches have been slow to respond is that they have never developed a theology of sexuality and haven’t been willing to “come out of the shadows and talk about sex,” Brown-Haithco said.

The church must also become more hospitable and inclusive to people whose lives are changed forever by the disease. Brown-Haithco experienced this need firsthand after her niece died of AIDS-related lymphoma.

“My family had 4 months and 7 days [after diagnosis] to reconcile and bless her—all of her—until she died,” she said. “Many [people with HIV/AIDS] die without ever reconciling with their community or family. It’s time that the church invite [these people] to come home.”

Beginning a church ministry to HIV/AIDS victims doesn’t have to be daunting, Smith said. Partnering with the local health department or secular non-profits already working in the HIV/AIDS community can be a strong first step to getting involved. He also advised churches to start small, exploring ways to use gifts and resources they already have.

“You don’t have to invent a new project. Go to your local AIDS service organization. Find out what your church already does well and then offer that up as a gift to the HIV/AIDS community,” Smith said.

Educating church members about the disease, including the ways it’s transferred and the ways it’s not, is one way to combat common fears that typically slow church response, Smith said.

“There is no other disease that we can say we have this irrational fear of being around people with HIV/AIDS,” he said. “This HIV/ADS epidemic has been around 25 years, when are we going to get ready?”

“We do have a tendency to walk by, to pretend we don’t see and to be in denial,” Brown-Haithco said. “I think what we need to do is see people as humans and all persons as valued and worthy and that God calls us to tend to their pain and suffering.”