How are things in the Tarheel state? It depends on who you ask. To basketball fanatics who follow the Blue Devils or the Tarheels, we won’t know until they have recovered enough to respond. We can imagine their outlook on things at the moment is rather bleak. The elimination of both of these vaunted powerhouse programs from the NCAA Men’s tournament has left them in shock and dismay. The fact that Virginia Commonwealth University survives (as of this writing) is testimony that life is full of surprises.
Ask moderate Baptists in the Old North State about the state of things and you will likewise get varied responses. Some, struggling to get over the muzzling of the Biblical Recorder and the continued ultraconservative veer of the state convention, are dismayed. Most, however, have turned to the future with hope and expectation as evidenced by the attendance and spirit of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina annual meetings held in Asheville last week.
Jim White
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Friday and Saturday of last week I had the opportunity to attend this gathering of 1,100 and shared with many the concerns for them expressed by Virginia Baptists, some of whom paid for annual subscriptions to the Herald to be sent to their North Carolina colleagues so they can receive Baptist news they can trust to be objective. Those with whom I spoke were genuinely touched and encouraged by this action.
No North Carolina group is more encouraged, however, than the Women’s Missionary Union. Executive director Ruby Fulbright expressed delight that the work of WMUNC will be publicized in the pages of the Religious Herald since the North Carolina paper is now unwilling to give them positive press. Laura McDaniel, executive director/treasurer of Virginia’s WMU, showing true Kingdom consciousness, is almost as excited as Fulbright.
Duke and UNC are out of the tournament. VCU is in the final four and the Baptist state paper in North Carolina is reluctant to print favorable stories related to its own WMU. What a strange world we live in.
The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina withdrew support from the WMU there when the women refused to give the BSCNC executive the right to have the final say in whom they could employ. Freedom matters to them.
In our ever-changing circumstances, new realities have become crystal clear. We find our partners on the basis of affinity rather than geography. Virginia Baptists have already embraced this reality in action taken in last November’s annual meeting. We voted then to offer BGAV membership to fellow Christians who embraced the principles of religious freedom and missions regardless of where they happened to live.
Partnerships with North Carolina’s WMU and CBF seem natural because of our mutual commitments and concerns. Where we can work together on mission with neither seeking to control the other, we should; for Christ’s great commission commands it. Where we can support and encourage one another, we should; for Christ’s great compassion requires it. Still, one party cannot a partnership make. We shall see how we and they perceive the Lord’s leading and discover what surprises are yet in store in this unpredictable world of ours.
Meanwhile, in April, at their invitation, I shall happily join the North Carolina WMU at Ridgecrest, N.C., to participate in their Missions Extravaganza and to help celebrate their 125th anniversary. And to our readers (on all sides of the borders) I’ll report what I see and hear.
Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of preaching at the Antioch Baptist Church of Sandston, Va., which this year celebrates its 235th anniversary. In preparing for the message, I reviewed Joshua 22. The narrative picks up the action after the Israelites have settled the Promised Land and each tribe has been given a portion. Nine tribes received land on the west side of the Jordan River with the descendants of Reuben and Gad getting territory on the east side of the river. Manasseh settled territory on both sides.
As the action unfolds, the eastside tribes erect a large altar duplicating the one, true altar at Shiloh in the west. The nine tribes, furious because they believe the altar to be blasphemous and an indication of apostasy, prepare for war against their unfaithful cousins. Before arrows fly and blood is shed, however, someone thinks to ask them why they have done such a thing. They reply, “If we have built our own altar to turn away from the Lord and to offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, or to sacrifice fellowship offerings on it, may the Lord himself call us to account. No! We did it for fear that some day your descendants might say to ours, ‘What do you have to do with the Lord the God of Israel? The Lord has made the Jordan a boundary between us and you—you Reubenites and Gadites! You have no share in the Lord’ So your descendants might cause ours to stop fearing the Lord.”
The passage spoke to me in a new way. Perhaps it was because I had so recently visited with our North Carolina brethren, that the artificiality of a border stood out in clear relief. Even then, roughly 3,300 years ago, their kinship was not based on geography, but on affinity.
In John Chandler’s book, Courageous Church Leadership: Conversations with Effective Practitioners, Steve Chang observes that visionary leaders are not guides. Guides lead people to places they themselves have seen and visited. Visionary leaders take their people to places none of them has seen. Chang observes, “I have no idea what’s ahead! I haven’t been there; this is new territory; this is uncharted territory for me. … When I turn around and face my people, I don’t show nervousness. I show a face of calm. But when I turn around and face the direction we are heading, it can be despairing or terrifying” (p. 123).
Through this unpredictable, shocking, exhilarating, terrifying, exciting, despairing world of Baptist life we walk by faith and not by sight.
As we continue our march into uncharted territory we trust the Lord to be our guide beyond the boundaries. One day the Baptist General Association of Virginia will ask itself if the name is a throwback to an earlier, geographical time. With gratitude for all that the “Virginia” part of our name has meant geographically, ideologically and theologically, we will ask “What’s wrong with just being the Baptist General Association?”