NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) – A task force appointed to study a possible name change for the Southern Baptist Convention has completed its work and will bring recommendations to the SBC Executive Committee Feb. 20.

The study is available as a pdf file here.

“We are excited to make these recommendations believing that we have come to decisions that will please the Father and greatly strengthen our ability to reach more people with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” task force chair Jimmy Draper, former head of LifeWay Christian Resources, said in a statement released through Baptist Press. “From the beginning we have desired only to discern God's will in this matter.”

SBC President Bryant Wright appointed the advisory group without Executive Committee action last fall. Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., said he believed the current name is too regional and that a new identity might make the convention more effective in church planting.

Southern Baptists have rejected proposals to rename the convention eight times since 1965. The last was in 2004, when messengers to the convention voted 55 percent to 45 percent against then-President Jack Graham’s suggestion to appoint a committee to study a new name to better reflect the convention’s geographical scope.

Conventional wisdom holds that the “Southern” designation – a holdover from North-South separation prior to the Civil War – is a hindrance to appealing to converts beyond the Bible Belt. A new study by LifeWay Research, however, found that Southern Baptists have a more negative image in areas where they are better known.

Polling by the research arm of the SBC publisher LifeWay Christian Resources found that a majority of Americans – 53 percent – have a favorable impression of Southern Baptists. Forty percent, however, said they have a negative impression, ranking Southern Baptists behind Methodists and Catholics in popularity but ahead of Mormons and Muslims.

Americans in the South (40 percent) and West (44 percent) were found more likely to have an unfavorable opinion than those in the Northeast (34 percent) and Midwest (36 percent).

Americans age 18-29 were least likely to have a somewhat favorable opinion (26 percent) and the most likely to have a very unfavorable opinion (25 percent).

LifeWay Research President Ed Stetzer said many would likely see the research as “a bit of a Roscharch Test – people will see in it what they want to see.” He opened the comments section on his blog to discussion of what the findings might mean.

Ideas ranged from the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church giving Baptists a bad name to “our stubborn resistance to change/increasing methodological irrelevance.”

“If I were a betting man, I'd say part of it is the impression that Baptists are fighting and ‘against’ things,” Stetzer offered. “Then, I would add that some of it is that Southern Baptists believe things that the world does not like…. You can fix the first part but not the second.”

Draper didn’t offer many hints to what the task force, which has no formal authority and will report to the Executive Committee by invitation of the president, might recommend, but he told Baptist Press that no one on the 19-member task force believed the word “Baptist” should be removed from the convention’s name.

—Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) – A task force appointed to study a possible name change for the Southern Baptist Convention has completed its work and will bring recommendations to the SBC Executive Committee Feb. 20.

“We are excited to make these recommendations believing that we have come to decisions that will please the Father and greatly strengthen our ability to reach more people with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” task force chair Jimmy Draper, former head of LifeWay Christian Resources, said in a statement released through Baptist Press. “From the beginning we have desired only to discern God's will in this matter.”

SBC President Bryant Wright appointed the advisory group without Executive Committee action last fall. Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., said he believed the current name is too regional and that a new identity might make the convention more effective in church planting.

Southern Baptists have rejected proposals to rename the convention eight times since 1965. The last was in 2004, when messengers to the convention voted 55 percent to 45 percent against then-President Jack Graham’s suggestion to appoint a committee to study a new name to better reflect the convention’s geographical scope.

Conventional wisdom holds that the “Southern” designation — a holdover from North-South separation prior to the Civil War — is a hindrance to appealing to converts beyond the Bible Belt. A new study by LifeWay Research, however, found that Southern Baptists have a more negative image in areas where they are better known.

Polling by the research arm of the SBC publisher LifeWay Christian Resources found that a majority of Americans — 53 percent — have a favorable impression of Southern Baptists. Forty percent, however, said they have a negative impression, ranking Southern Baptists behind Methodists and Catholics in popularity but ahead of Mormons and Muslims.

Americans in the South (40 percent) and West (44 percent) were found more likely to have an unfavorable opinion than those in the Northeast (34 percent) and Midwest (36 percent).

Americans age 18-29 were least likely to have a somewhat favorable opinion (26 percent) and the most likely to have a very unfavorable opinion (25 percent).

LifeWay Research President Ed Stetzer said many would likely see the research as “a bit of a Roscharch Test — people will see in it what they want to see.” He opened the comments section on his blog to discussion of what the findings might mean.

Ideas ranged from the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church giving Baptists a bad name to “our stubborn resistance to change/increasing methodological irrelevance.”

“If I were a betting man, I'd say part of it is the impression that Baptists are fighting and ‘against’ things,” Stetzer offered. “Then, I would add that some of it is that Southern Baptists believe things that the world does not like…. You can fix the first part but not the second.”

Draper didn’t offer many hints to what the task force, which has no formal authority and will report to the Executive Committee by invitation of the president, might recommend, but he told Baptist Press that no one on the 19-member task force believed the word “Baptist” should be removed from the convention’s name.

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Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.

MINNEAPOLIS (ABP) – A group of evangelical scholars has released a statement labeling an increasingly popular teaching about gender roles a revival of an ancient heresy concerning the nature of God.

Released Nov. 7, “An Evangelical Statement on the Trinity” says a generation of conservative Christian scholars is promoting “subordinationism,” the notion that God the Father is in charge of the Trinity, while Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit have subordinate roles.

Scholars at the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood often apply Christ’s “eternal submission” to family relationships. Just as the Son is coequal with yet subordinate to the Father, they say, woman is created equal to man but has a subordinate role in the home and church.

While that may not seem important to the average layperson, a collection of scholars on both sides of the gender debate deemed it important enough to issue a corrective.
 
“The doctrine of the Trinity is the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith,” Kevin Giles, author of Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity, said in a news release. “No other doctrine is more important. It is 'our' distinctive doctrine of God. If we get this doctrine wrong, we are bound to get other doctrines built on it wrong.”

Drafted by William David Spencer, an adjunct theology professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary with input from a team of experts, including one-time Baylor professor Millard Erickson and Mimi Haddad of Christians for Biblical Equality, the statement voiced concern “that an ancient mistake was creeping back into conservative Christianity.”

Noting the Bible describes Jesus as “begotten” of the Father, a 4th century cleric named Arius posited there must have been a time when the Son of God did not exist. Jesus, therefore, was not “one” with the Father, but rather subordinate and less than fully divine.

The controversy became so intense that in 325 the Emperor Constantine assembled bishops in present-day Turkey for the First Council of Nicea. It was the first of seven ecumenical councils that over time developed the historic creeds of the Catholic Church. The Nicene Creed described Jesus Christ as “Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.”

The new evangelical statement on the Trinity says if the three persons in the Godhead are not equal in rank, then the Trinity really functions as three gods, ranked first, second and third. “This is more similar to tri-theism than to a Trinity,” the scholars said.

They said the idea that the Godhead is layered in greater and lesser parts has led thinkers over the centuries to conclude that humans are fragmented in the same way, justifying second-class status related to gender or race.

“The Bible never suggests that any one Person of the Trinity has eternal superiority or authority over the others, or that one is in eternal subordination to another,” the scholars said. “The Son’s submission and obedience to the Father were voluntary and related specifically to the time during which he humbled himself, took on human nature, and dwelled among us as a servant.”

The scholars said Christians disagree about God’s intention for gender relationships in the church and home, but the topic “should be included under the doctrine of humanity and not of the Trinity, since God is neither male nor female.”

“No direct and specific analogical correspondence exists between one male and one female in relationship or in church service or all females and all males in relationship or in church service and the perfect love relationships within the monotheistic Godhead of the Trinity,” the statement maintained. “Further, the attempt to ignore the Holy Spirit and forge some sort of corresponding relationship to human gender out of the incarnational, metaphorical designations of ‘father’ and ‘son’ is at best logic fault and at worst heterodox.”

Scholars who maintain that distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order and not a result of the Fall say they aren’t the ones tinkering with the Trinity. They say the ones guilty of innovation are feminist theologians, who argue for egalitarian relationships between men and women based on mutual submission among the persons of the Trinity.

—Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.

Previous related story:

Trinity debate trickles down to gender roles

SAN ANTONIO (ABP) — Ardelle Clemons—a founding board member of Associated Baptist Press, student minister and veteran pastor's wife—died Nov. 26 after a long illness. She was 93.

A graduate of the University of Oklahoma and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, she worked as a Baptist student minister at Rice University, Baylor Medical School and Texas Tech University.

Ardelle and Hardy Clemons

For 57 years she was married to Hardy Clemons, a past moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Clemons was former pastor of First Baptist Church in Georgetown, Second Baptist Church in Lubbock and First Baptist Church in Greenville, S.C. He also served several years as executive pastor at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio.

In 1990 she joined the first board of directors of Associated Baptist Press, an autonomous news service formed in response to censorship concerns stemming from the firing of two top editors of the Southern Baptist Convention’s denominational news service, Baptist Press. She was the longest-serving member of ABP’s board when she rotated off in 2004. ABP directors established an endowment fund in honor of her and her husband in 2008. 

She is survived by her husband and their daughter, Kay Watt of San Antonio; two grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Her memorial service is scheduled at 11 a.m. Monday, Dec. 5, at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio.

In lieu of flowers, the family invites friends to make a contribution in her memory to the Ardelle Clemons Endowment Fund at the Associated Baptist Press, P. O. Box 23769, Jacksonville, Fla., 32241.

Virginia Baptists elect first black president. For the first time in its 188-year history, the predominantly white Baptist General Association of Virginia has an African-American president. Mark Croston was elected to the top spot during the BGAV's annual meeting in Richmond, Va. Croston, pastor of East End Baptist Church in Suffolk, Va., had been serving as first vice president. Messengers at the meeting also agreed to restore ties with Averett University, which were ended in 2005 in a dispute over homosexuality, and adopted a 2012 budget of $12.4 million, a 7 percent reduction from 2011.

American Baptist leader named NCC president-elect. Roy Medley, general secretary of American Baptist Churches USA, was elected president-elect of the National Council of Churches at a meeting of the NCC governing board in Chicago. Medley will lead the ecumenical group representing 45 million people in more than 100,000 local congregations starting Jan. 1, 2014, following a two-year term by Kathryn Mary Lohre, who was installed as president. Medley was executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of New Jersey, and he is a former pastor of First Baptist Church in Trenton, N.J. He is a member of First Baptist Church in Freehold, N.J.

Baptists, Orthodox consider formal dialogue. Teams from the Baptist World Alliance and the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople—widely regarded as the spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians—held exploratory talks recently that could lead to formal dialogue between Baptist and Orthodox Christians internationally. BWA General Secretary Neville Callam led the Baptist delegation, joined by Steven Harmon, adjunct professor of Christian theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C., and Paul Fiddes, professor of systematic theology at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. A decision on whether formal dialogue will take place is expected by March 2012.

ATLANTA (ABP) – Planners of the Nov. 17-19 New Baptist Covenant gatherings were disappointed with attendance but pleased with the diversity and quality of presentations, one of the organizers said Nov. 21.

“We had hoped for a larger attendance,” said David Key, director of the Baptist studies program of Candler School of Theology at Emory. “At the same time we feel like our content with the program was very strong.”

Day of Service participants Daniel Vestal and Colleen Burroughs help spruce up mission church.

Key said planners were disappointed that more people didn’t hear them in person, but thanks to Internet technology video of all the plenary sessions is available on demand at the New Baptist Covenant website. He said more than 1,000 people viewed the site over the weekend, and he encouraged others to do so as well. 

Crowds at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, host site for sessions broadcast by satellite to eight other venues across the United States, ran about 250. Key said local pastors promised to bring church members but didn’t show up.

About 200 people attended sessions at St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, an African-American congregation in the city’s northeastern sector. While numbers did not match organizer’s hopes, diversity did. Participants primarily included African-Americans and Anglos, but Hispanics and Native Americans also joined in.

Les Hollon, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, noted disappointment with the attendance for the events at his church, but he applauded the effort as "a bold experiment."

Organizers in Washington, D.C., commented on low turnout. “The people are not here but it is not our fault,” said Morris Shearin, pastor of Israel Baptist Church in the District of Columbia’s northeast sector. “We have done what we were asked to do.”

Volunteers spread mulch on a playground at Edgewood Church in Atlanta.

In Philadelphia the satellite feed was shown in the 3,000-seat sanctuary of Sharon Baptist Church. Attendance was sparse until the final sessions of the NBC event, which was combined with the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Eastern Keystone Baptist Association.

Steven Avinger, pastor of Philadelphia’s Greater Saint Matthew Baptist Church, said initiatives like the New Baptist Covenant II help lower racial barriers, but there is “still a lot of work to do.”

To that end, the meeting consisted of two days of worship services followed by community service at all nine locations on Saturday. Key said between 160 and 200 volunteers stuck around for hands-on mission work in Atlanta. “We were very pleased with that.”

Volunteers including Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Coordinator Daniel Vestal and moderator Colleen Burroughs, pitched in at Edgewood Church, an urban church start in east Atlanta. Projects included landscaping, painting and light carpentry to a building donated a year ago by the local Baptist association.

Pastor Nathan Dean, right, tells the story of Edgewood Church to CBF Executive Coordinator Daniel Vestal.

Pastor Nathan Dean said the building was “in pretty rough shape,” but the price was right for the congregation that had up till then been worshipping in a middle school. He said he was encouraged that a building that was built by white Baptists in the 1950s and then turned over to the association when members left the neighborhood due to white flight is now home to a congregation that is 80 percent black and 20 percent Caucasian.

Dean said the church intentionally reaches out both to the homeless, prostitutes and drug addicts and the “post-modern, post-Christian” affluent people moving back through gentrification. “A lot of people think you have to do one or the other, but you can’t do both,” Dean said. Even though they may lack a church background, he said, upwardly mobile young professionals have compassion for folks who are down and out.

Randy Shepley, coordinator for the Atlanta Day of Service and pastor of First Baptist Church in Tucker, Ga., described Edgewood Church as “an oasis of hope” for the community.

SAN ANTONIO—Too often, churches have trailed society at large in terms of embracing racial and ethnic diversity, a multiethnic panel told a regional New Baptist Covenant II gathering in San Antonio.

“I believe what we see on this stage is what our future must look like,” said Victor Rodriguez, pastor of South San Filadelfia Baptist Church in San Antonio, glancing at the other three panelists—another Hispanic, an African-American and an Anglo.

Rodriguez, immediate past president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, told a group at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio that Christians in various ethnic groups “must begin to think of church in different ways.”

Children who grow up attending multiethnic schools and laity who work alongside coworkers from varied cultures often understand racial and ethnic diversity better than the church does, said Jesse Rincones, pastor of Alliance Church, a multiethnic congregation in Lubbock.

“How does the church play catch-up?” he asked.

In part, churches can enter into true partnerships across racial and ethnic lines, he noted. But collaborative partnerships among churches need to be full partnerships of equals, he emphasized.

“In the New Testament, we don’t see junior partners or senior partners. We see partners,” Rincones said.

Love is the hardest thing God commanded, because it forces people to step outside their comfort zones and embrace people who are different, said Michael Brown, pastor of True Vision Church in San Antonio.

“Love does not mean we are blind to race and color or that we deny our cultural differences. Love is not about erasing those things. It is about coming together with our differences and learning from each other,” Brown said.

Unfortunately, what society has learned from Baptists has not always been positive. Too many Baptists have modeled for the world how Christian who disagree with each other fuss and fight, said Les Hollon, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio.

“But we have the opportunity to model what it means to have unity of heart in the midst of racial diversity,” he said. “It will mean we need to see the world as Christ sees the world.”

Churches also can model what it means to be forces for reconciliation and centers for recovery, Hollon added, as well as examples of integrity in a culture that craves them.

In order for churches to model restoration and reconciliation in a culture that fails to understand the power of redemption, Christians must move beyond predetermined notions regarding politics and ideology, Rincones said.

Christian learn how to move beyond barriers when they look ex-offenders, undocumented immigrants and other outcasts as individuals rather than categories, he added.

“We only dream of setting captives free when we know a captive or a captive’s child. We only desire to bind up the broken-hearted when we know someone who is broken-hearted,” he said.

Churches can expand opportunities for understanding by engaging in ministries that push them to cross barriers and experience different cultures, Hollon said.

“We can give people experiences of seeing that which they fear,” he said.

OKLAHOMA CITY—The world’s brokenness calls out for Christians who will speak courageously on behalf of justice and fairness, a trio of pastors told participants at the New Baptist Covenant II satellite sessions in Oklahoma City.

About 200 people attended St. John Missionary Baptist Church, an African-American congregation in the city’s northeastern sector. Although the Oklahoma City numbers did not match organizer’s hopes, diversity did. Participants primarily included African Americans and Anglos, but Hispanics and Native Americans also joined in.

In addition to viewing the New Baptist Covenant broadcast feeds from Atlanta, the Oklahoma City event also featured local sermons, breakout sessions and a mission project designed to highlight the dangers of payday lending.

America needs a generation of “meddlin’ preachers,” insisted John Reed, pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Oklahoma City. He preached on the ministry of the Old Testament prophet Amos, who condemned injustice and inequality in the nation of Israel.

Conditions back then mirror conditions in America today, Reed observed, noting very few Amoses have stepped forward to do anything about it.

“Very little meddlin’ preaching is taking place in America today,” he lamented. “Most preachers don’t have the courage to speak it.”

If enough preachers would pronounce God’s judgment on injustice, “the race problem would end, poverty would end, wars would end and we would shake Washington,” he said. “But things are getting progressively worse. Most of our pulpits aren’t really saying anything.”

That must change soon, Reed charged.

“I pray every day the Lord would give us some preachers who dare to preach the word of the Lord,” he said. Like ancient Israel, America today often is “externally correct but internally wrong.”

“We need preaching that purges and purifies, that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. We need preaching that will shake the foundations of government and organized religion.

“Things are more critical than you know, and it’s later than you think.”

America is wracked by a slumping economy, the highest unemployment since the Great Depression and a decade of war,” noted Charles Johnson, pastor of First Baptist Church in Desdemona, Texas, and Bread Fellowship in Fort Worth. On top of that, churches are dispirited, pastors demoralized and denominations divided, he added.

In the face of so much adversity, “let us recover a prophetic imagination,” Johnson urged.

“We need to climb up in that pulpit and raise hell,” he said. “We need a declarative ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ not a ‘What do you think?’”

Preachers aren’t the only ones who need that prophetic imagination, he added, calling also upon laypeople to speak up for justice and fairness.

The church also must reclaim its apostolic commission, Johnson said. “We must get outside the walls of the church (and be) catapulted into the world” to make a difference in the lives of hurting people.

“We’ve got a great mission, a wonderful Leader and the best message in the whole wide world,” he insisted. “We have no reason to be depressed.”

U.S. Christians must help their nation reorient its priorities, declared Lee Cooper, pastor of Prospect Missionary Baptist Church in Oklahoma City.

“America has to begin to face its ridiculous prejudices and face the things that keep us apart,” Cooper said. “We’ve got to see if our faith and religion really mean anything.”

He described how Jesus rearranged the priorities of Zacchaeus, the Jewish turncoat who collected taxes for the Romans and cheated his fellow Jews to make himself rich. After Jesus changed those priorities, Zacchaeus made full restitution to everyone he harmed.

“Zacchaeus paid attention to Jesus … because Jesus is a friend of sinners,” Cooper said. “Jesus comes into our human hearts to rearrange our misplaced priorities. Every one of us is under construction because God is rearranging things in our lives.”

OKLAHOMA CITY—Payday lending traps many of America’s working poor in a vortex of debt, participants at the New Baptist Covenant II satellite meeting in Oklahoma City learned.

Each New Baptist Covenant facility focused on a mission project, and Oklahoma City organizers chose an awareness campaign about the perils of payday lending.

“People are preying upon the poorest and weakest among us,” noted Bruce Prescott, co-organizer of the Oklahoma City satellite and executive director of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists.

Known by various names, payday lending is the practice of offering high-interest, short-term loans, usually in amounts from $50 to $500, Prescott explained.

In Oklahoma City, New Baptist Covenant participants sat in on an informational session about payday lending. Then, for their mission project, they visited payday lending offices near their churches, so they could see firsthand how small loans can add up to exorbitant debts.

Prescott said he hopes their experiences will help them educate the working poor about the dangers of payday loans and also pressure lawmakers to reign in the practice.

Payday lending has exploded in recent years, breakout sessions leaders explained.

Oklahoma law calls the practice “deferred deposit lending,” and it allows annual percentage rates to reach 391 percent, reported Kate Richey, an analyst for the Oklahoma Policy Institute in Tulsa.

In Oklahoma, the primary borrowers are nonwhite single women with low income and lower-than-average education, she said, noting: “Payday lenders won’t lend to people without jobs. So, the victims are the working poor. They’re preying on people with just enough so they can take it from them.”
These people don’t qualify for conventional loans from banks, and they often don’t have banks in their neighborhoods, anyway, Richey said. “If you don’t have a car and a bank in your neighborhood, where are you going to go?” she asked.

However, some banks actually own payday lending companies and make money off the exorbitant loans, she said.

Stephen Reeves, legal counsel for the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, showed a video clip of a retired military veteran who took out a $4,000 loan against his pickup truck so he could help his daughter get started in adulthood. The penalty for not paying off that loan was $1,200 per month, which did not reduce the principle on the loan.

“He could pay $1,200 per month forever and never pay off that loan,” Reeves reported. “That’s immoral.”

“The concept of usury is a biblical issue. When you charge people a high interest rate, you’re effectively stealing from them,” he said, noting Texas law allows an annual interest rate of 529 percent on a $300 loan.

Although payday lending laws vary from state to state, “the problem is the same,” Reeves said.

“It’s rotten to the core,” Richey said. “A lot of people are making money off of thousands of other people who are poor.”

Although lobbyists for the industry blocked the Christian Life Commission’s strongest proposals in the most recent legislative session, Reeves called payday lending “a winnable issue.”

“When people see what’s going on, they get it,” he said. “This cuts across the political spectrum, and it hits at the heart of race in this country. … We need to make it uncomfortable for politicians to defend it.”

He offered several suggestions for combating payday lending:

• Use data to document the harm done by exorbitant-interest loans.
• Gather bi-partisan support.
• Provide lawmakers with stories of real people from their own districts whose families have been harmed by the practice.
• Show lawmakers maps that illustrate the prevalence of the practice in their districts.
• Urge local towns and counties to enact resolutions and ordinances that curtail payday lending.
• Enlist the help of experts with research on the practices.

ATLANTA (ABP) – Former President Jimmy Carter told veteran journalist Bob Abernethy that he’s seen progress in areas that prompted him to convene a New Baptist Covenant gathering in 2008 and New Baptist Covenant II gatherings scattered across nine locations linked by satellite TV Nov. 17-19.

“We started talking about what became the New Baptist Covenant about four or five years ago,” Carter said from the anchor meeting at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Bob Abernethy and Jimmy Carter discuss issues facing New Baptist Covenant participants.

“We talked about two general and overwhelming subjects,” he said. “One was the lack of unity among Christians — and particularly among Baptists — because we had divided over our differences. So unity among Christians is a very important part of it.”

“The other was to provide cooperation among African-American and white children of God,” Carter said. “Since 1845 when the first Triennial Convention split because the Southern Baptists withdrew over the race issue, we haven’t had a forum in which large numbers of different races could assemble, and that was the second major issue.”

Carter said the historic 2008 meeting drew 15,000 people to Atlanta. About half were African-Americans already in town for a joint mid-winter board meeting of four historic black Baptist conventions. This year, he said seven of the nine meeting sites were in African-American churches, and black preachers and choirs led most of the plenary sessions.

“This means that we have now achieved, I think, both those things,” Carter said. “Unity among Baptists is increasing and we’ve broken down a number of barriers between different races.”

“We’ve made some progress in bringing Baptists together around a common goal,” Carter said. “I think there has also evolved, too, an emphasis on things we did not anticipate.”

For example, he said, two speeches in the morning session Nov. 18 addressed “a growing problem in our country of excessive imprisonment.

 “I think it illustrates that socially there are some things that have to be changed, and we believe the foundation for that change has to be the teachings of Jesus Christ,” he said.

“You never hear of a rich white man being sentenced to execution,” Carter said. “Almost all of those who are executed are poor people, people of color or those who are mentally ill. That issue of structural change has been inadequately addressed by society.”

“I hope that this movement about prisons will bear fruit in the future,” Carter said.

ATLANTA (ABP) – Baptists must view prison ministry as more than prayer meetings and Bible studies if they are to follow Jesus’ Luke 4 mandate to “proclaim liberty to the captives,” former Arkansas Appeals Court Justice and Baptist pastor Wendell Griffen told the New Baptist Covenant II.

“I do not have anything against prayer meetings and Bible studies,” Griffen, coordinator of ministries at Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., said in an address simulcast to viewing sites across the country participating in this week’s New Baptist Covenant II gatherings anchored in Atlanta.

New Baptist Covenant speaker Wendell Griffen says reforming America''s penal system is a moral issue.

While America claims to be “land of the free,” Griffen said, it imprisons more of its citizens per capita than any nation in the world, including Russia, China and Iran. Prison populations have grown from 300,000 in 1974 to more than 2.3 million. Most of the growth stems from drug convictions, which disproportionally target people of color.

Griffen said the United States incarcerates a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did during the height of Apartheid. More African-Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850, and more black men are disenfranchised from voting because they are labeled felons than in 1870 when the 15th Amendment was passed declaring the right to vote cannot be abridged “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

“This is not an academic issue,” Griffen said. To be true followers of Jesus, he said Baptists in the 21st century must confront forces that keep people confined.

“We must confront racism,” Griffen said. “The war on drugs is why the jails and prison populations exploded over the last 30 years,” he said. “The harsh truth is the war on drugs has been a war on black and brown people.”

Griffen said studies show that illegal drug use and sales occur in equal rates across all groups of income, class and color, yet most people in prison for drug crimes are non-white. “Confronting racism will require Baptists to discard the idea that justice is blind or color blind,” he said.

Griffen called on Baptists to also confront “the mass incarceration mindset that calls for building more prisons.”

“We can’t cure cancer and AIDS, let alone control the cause of cancer and AIDS, by building more cemeteries,” he said. “I’m amazed that people say that the way we are going to deal with crime is by building more jails and with longer prison sentences and hiring more prison guards.”

DeeDee Coleman

“When you build more jails, you are forced to fill them,” Griffen said. “Nobody builds a building for less than full occupancy. You will have to fill prisons and jails even if you must pervert justice to do so.”

Finally, Griffen said, Baptists should demand an end to the “second-class citizenship afforded to ex-offender status.”

“Number one, it means we must end the voter-discrimination stigma,” he said. “Why should people who paid their debt to society and have a job and pay their taxes be denied the right to vote?”

Felons are also barred for life from public housing. “That makes no sense to me,” he said. “Prison is public housing.” Ex-offenders are also barred from the educational system, even though most need assistance with education.

As part of restoration of status, “We must welcome ex-offenders into our churches,” Griffen said.

DeeDee Coleman, pastor of Russell Street Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit and founder of The Wings of Faith, a resource center for ex-offenders, said the church has “its own stigma” about incarceration and those who come into their midst upon release.

“As long as I don’t know what you’ve done, I can preach the gospel to you,” she said. “Once it comes out that you have been incarcerated, it changes.”

“We have no problem going to visit the sick, feeding the poor or clothing the naked, but we do have a problem visiting those behind prison walls.”

Coleman said if any institution should care about people in prison, it should be the church, because so many Bible characters from Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament to Paul and Silas, Peter and John and Jesus in the New were at some point incarcerated because of their beliefs.

“My charge to the church is to go behind prison walls, go behind the detention centers of this world and see the lonely, the outcast and the forsaken,” she said. “Go and look into the faces of those who need a word from the Lord.”

SAN ANTONIO—Ministers contribute to the decline of churches when they appeal to people’s lowest values of selfish consumerism rather than challenging them to follow Jesus, Rick McClatchy told a regional New Baptist Covenant II assembly.

“As churches, we focus on the A-B-Cs—attendance, buildings and cash. We create programs and service to attract and entertain the spiritual consumer and hope they will put some money into the offering plate to pay for all these services we are providing them,” McClatchy, Texas field coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship , told a group at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio.

Rosalynn Carter speaking at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., the anchor site for New Baptist Covenant II. The meeting is linked by satellite and Internet to dozens of viewing locations around the country, including sites in San Antonio and Oklahoma City.

McClatchy pronounced himself “a failure” for much of his ministry because he focused time and energy on trying to make consumers of religion happy.

“What I had to do was to face an ugly truth about my ministry. I wasn’t producing disciples who went out into the world to change it for the better. Instead, I was reinforcing people’s selfish concerns,” he said.

“I enticed and manipulated people into making so-called decisions for Jesus rather than truthfully challenging people to calculate the cost of following Jesus in a lifestyle of sacrificial service to God and others. …

"In my well-intentioned effort to attract a crowd, I had given them a secular Jesus that could reinforce their self-indulgence, materialism and indifference to the poor and marginalized," he added, paraphrasing a statement by author Mike Slaughter.

The turning point in ministry came, he related, when he realized Jesus’ original intent for the church was to create a body of people who would continue his work of compassion and transformation.

“Jesus had compassion upon people who were suffering—the poor, the hungry, the sick, the outcasts. But Jesus’ vision, while including compassionate ministries, also included transformational ministries,” McClatchy said.

“Jesus wanted to challenge the structures and powers that kept people in spiritual and physical bondage, be that political powers, military powers or religious powers. He was not content to simply tell the victims of injustice that things would be better in the afterlife. He wanted people to have life abundantly now.

“The true greatness of any local church is measured by how many of its members are out compassionately serving in the world to change it for the better—not by the A-B-Cs of attendance, buildings and cash.”

Sociologists report the group in the United States with the highest religious profile is older African-American women in the South. The reason, McClatchy asserted, is that when they were young, courageous church leaders in the Civil Rights movements challenged them to make sacrifices and take risks by peacefully protesting. In contrast, most white churches focused on trying to entice young people to attend by offering to entertain them.

“Think about this now. The church that asked their children to get locked up in jail kept them, and the church that asked their children to come to a lock-in lost them,” he said. “The truth is simple. Appeal to a generation’s highest aspirations—a nonsegregated society in this case—and you win them. Appeal to a generation’s lowest aspirations—having fun—and you lose them.”

The church experiences power when it asks people to go into the world and compassionately work to make society look more like God intended it to be, he insisted.

Missional churches capture that sense of being sent into the world to carry on the work of Jesus, he added.
Missional churches focus wholly on Jesus, engage the whole church in mission, practice a whole gospel that addresses the spiritual and physical transformation of the individual and society and reach out to the whole world in ministry, giving special attention to the suffering and hurting people, he explained.

“This type of church will not become a reality by a vote in a business meeting. This type of church will not become a reality by ordering a how-to-missional-church kit from your denomination,” McClatchy said.

“This type of church becomes a reality when you develop a missional lifestyle—a lifestyle like Jesus, where you go out where people are suffering and lost, people disconnected from God. You go to your neighbors, peers, children and grandchildren, and you help them, eat with them, sometimes stay in their homes, have conversations with them and tell them stories about God. Then invite them to follow Jesus, leaving all safety behind, and to change the world.”