Respond to emerging frontlines, Baptist leader challenges
ABILENE—New frontlines affecting Baptists are emerging around the world, Elijah Brown, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, asserted during his Pinson Lecture on Baptist distinctives at Hardin-Simmons University, April 23.
As Baptists enter the emerging frontlines to make disciples in the authority of Jesus—a reference to the earlier part of his lecture—Brown offered three ways they should proceed: with bold witness, prophetic courage and prioritizing suffering people.
Bold witness
Unreached people already number more than 3 billion, with 123,000 people born every day without access to a gospel witness.
“We are to live as missionary people,” Brown asserted, noting, “a BWA distinctive is that we believe every Baptist is a missionary.”
Brown encouraged each person to turn to a neighbor and say, “I am a missionary.”
Then, he told of a pastor in India who had pastored the church started by William Carey. The pastor burned out, resigned his position and moved across town. Having never had the option to sleep in on Sunday morning before, his daughter asked if they could try it just once.
He agreed but found himself pacing the room that Sunday morning, unsure of what to do with himself, when an elder woman knocked at his door.
Brown said she asked the pastor to pray for her, but he responded he was not presently a pastor.
“There is no other church,” she said, declaring, “As long as you live here, you will be my pastor.”
He invited her in and began a church in his living room.
The church now supports 22 missionaries across India and runs more than 2,500 in attendance.
“What if your church did that?” Brown asked.
Prophetic courage
Prophetic courage is not the easy route, Brown said. It’s easier to “sit in silence or parrot the prevailing power.”
“But as we abide in the authority of Jesus, we can affirm that the kingdom of God is not built with nationalism,” he continued.
In 1923, the Baptist world adopted a resolution asserting Baptists throughout their history have been champions of religious liberty, Brown pointed out.
The resolution also said a union of church and state is inconsistent with religious freedom, which is based on the “spiritual principle of free choice, while the state rests upon law with an ultimate appeal to physical force.”
But, Brown asserted, “the kingdom of God is not built by nationalism, including Christian nationalism.”
The gospel isn’t advanced by demonizing or threatening those with different political views, he said. Neither is the church saved by those who “wield political power in the name of protecting the church.”
The mission of God isn’t advanced by lust of power, fear, promulgating dishonesty, state protections or “the idolatry of nationalism.
“These are not fruit of the Spirit,” Brown said.
So why do so many people of faith “christen” and “champion violence?” he asked.
Brown also asked why so many believers “bless the bullet, exalt the missile, extol nuclear arms, sanctify the invasion and if need be, pick up the sword and gun to participate themselves?”
Often, he answered, it’s not about religion, but power, arrogance or rising “xenophobic nationalism wrapped in the name of religion.”
In lament, he requested for “you and I as people of faith to work to build public peace guided by the disruptive power of the fruits of the Spirit.”
For 400 years, Brown emphasized, Baptists have held the antidote to nationalism is religious freedom for everyone, maintained by a separation of church and state.
“As we abide in the authority of Jesus, let us also affirm the kingdom of God is not built with ethno-centrism and racial identity,” Brown said.
He provided numerous examples of members of the Baptist family around the globe who have faced persecution and dehumanization from racist and ethnocentric practices.
But, “we must continue to live unapologetically for restorative racial justice as reconciled humanity … as a mark of the overflowing generosity of God’s creation,” he said.
“The antidote for racism is flourishing freedom that embraces restorative justice in God’s multiethnic church,” he said.
Prioritizing suffering people
“Jesus stands with the suffering,” Brown said. “And we long to be with Jesus.”
Jesus, the suffering servant, rose as the “Wounded Healer,” and his wounds are “deep enough to heal the wounds of the world,” Brown said.
He noted the rapid deceleration of humanitarian aid around the world in the past 100 days, noting the United States has led the effort, but other major givers have followed.
Yet, humanitarian needs around the world have accelerated with increasing violence and displacements. While many BWA congregations have stepped into the gaps to meet needs in their communities, they lack sufficient resources.
Brown pointed to the first church in Acts 2:45, who sold their property and possessions to give to anyone in need.
It was not “church needs first, other needs second,” Brown noted, but “radical hospitality.”
“Whether in our neighborhood or in the nations,” gospel generosity “was to prioritize people who are suffering,” he said.
“In a world of changing demographics, increasing urbanization, vulnerable democracies and vulnerable people, we are to go and make disciples with bold witness, prophetic courage and prioritizing suffering people,” Brown asserted.
“But the question remains: Will we live as if all authority is in Jesus?”