By Alex Gallimore
“College is where you learn that you have a particular past and that it doesn’t have to dictate your future.” These words, spoken by Bill Leonard during his baccalaureate address to graduates of Wake Forest University in the spring of 2010, ring truer today than ever.
I remember first coming to the Divinity School at Wake with an outrageous amount of religious baggage. Raised Southern Baptist (after the takeover) and disillusioned by two years in various Atlanta mega and emerging church movements, I needed a religious future better than the one of my past.
My parents were not your typical SBC church members. They had become discouraged by the “organized gospel” of Baptist politics and chose not to pass the historic importance and hopefulness of that identity on to me.
At 18, I remember thinking Jesus was great but church, at best, was fake. After four years studying comparative religion at university I found myself a divinity student and on a journey to give a call to ministry one last shot.
I still cannot believe what I discovered. I learned that there were Baptists in this world committed to being a real and fresh and forever changing witness of the gospel to a world that desperately needs it. I learned that there were Baptists who were so committed to personal soul freedom they could work with those from traditions very different than their own in order to bring about a better good for all. I learned that although a covenant community is important, I could be Baptist, and disagree with other Baptists.
This was a revolutionary awakening that turned my past upside down. I didn’t have to follow every creed The Vatican (Nashville) told me I had to follow. Simply put, I learned that my particular Baptist past did not have to dictate my Baptist future.
After a week in Tampa, Fla., for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, this is my hope for our very young movement. The Fellowship is 20 years old and in a season of life in which a great deal of self-discovery is much overdue.
For the better part of 20 years, the Fellowship has been defined by what it is not. This is an important history and it requires stones of remembrance to ensure the next generations do not forget the work and sacrifice of those who have gone before.
Still, it is time the Fellowship learns that the wounds of its particular past do not have to dictate what can be a very bright future.
I am 25 years old. Although I am not a second-generation Fellowship Baptist like many of my colleagues, there is a perspective that unites us all. We don’t care about what happened before we were born. We’re grateful for the battles that were fought on our behalf, but we’re ready for a new conversation. We’re ready for a new position. We’re ready for a new future.
This past week at the assembly I overheard someone declare, “I’m not mad at your ex-wife.” I would have substituted the word “spouse,” but the statement captures well the sentiment of my generation. The next generation is ready for a new way of being Baptist that is, well, Baptist.
Perhaps the most Baptist thing we can do is to let go of the past. Perhaps we need to stop calling ourselves Baptists and simply be Baptists. It is time we focus on being a witness in our communities, partnering with those outside our tradition for the benefit of all. It is time we extend the same religious freedom our ancestors fought for 20 years ago to everyone inside our own fellowship.
It is time that we enter into a true covenant with one another, a covenant that celebrates autonomy and embraces diversity of every church and individual even when they arrive at very different conclusions.
Now that we are home from the General Assembly and back at work in our ministries, my prayer is simple. Twenty years from now when I sit with my kids at the 40th anniversary of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and they ask me to tell them the old, old stories, I can look back and say: “Twenty years ago we discovered we had a past, and that it did not have to dictate our future. Look how far we have come!”