(Editor's note: This story is a republished version of one of four content items, originally posted on ABPnews.com on Sept. 16, that were lost due to a hacker attack on our website later that evening.)
GREENSBORO, N.C. (ABP) – A move by the North Carolina Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to revisit its foundational statement has re-stoked a nationwide debate among scholars about what it means to be a Baptist.
Larry Hovis, left, and Ken Massey lead a Sept. 16 discussion of a proposed new foundational statement for North Carolina CBF.
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Larry Hovis, coordinator of North Carolina CBF, said that as part of developing a new mission statement in 2007, someone suggested revisiting a decade-old document describing the group's identity, mission, principles and values.
"We think it's appropriate for an organization, especially one that's growing and changing as much as ours, to kind of just go back and revisit those," Hovis said Sept. 16 in one of seven listening sessions around the state for feedback to a document developed over 15 months by a task force appointed in 2008.
The statement was presented to the state CBF Coordinating Council and then discussed in a breakout session at the group's annual meeting in March. CBF leaders call it a "conversation starter" about what it means to be a North Carolina CBF Baptist.
The conversation turned more spirited when scholars weighed in on the drafters' decision to replace references to Baptist principles like the priesthood of believers and religious freedom with language that identifies the movement with the larger church. For instance, the document references the Apostles' Creed, an early statement of Christian beliefs used for liturgical and teaching purposes in a number of Christian denominations.
Aaron Weaver, a doctoral student at Baylor University, wrote in a Sept. 8 blog post that the revised language abandons "cherished, historic Baptist principles" like soul freedom and the right of an individual to read and interpret the Bible for himself or herself.
Tony Cartledge, who teaches Old Testament at North Carolina's Campbell University Divinity School and blogs for Baptists Today, said the task force favored one of "two competing ideologies" in Baptist academia.
The predominant view, Cartledge said, focuses on ideas such as biblical authority, soul competency, church autonomy and religious liberty as classic hallmarks of the Baptist identity, as articulated in Walter Shurden's book The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms.
A minority view, sometimes dubbed "Bapto-Catholic," sees Baptists as less distinct from and more enmeshed with the larger church. They oppose what they view as hyper-individualism and promote learning in communities guided by larger church teachings handed down in the historic creeds.
Cartledge said the task force "has clearly come down on the 'Bapto-Catholic' side of the fence, proposing revisions that would add creeds, remove individual interpretation, and downplay church autonomy — things many moderate Baptists hold very dear."
Glenn Jonas, a professor of religion and philosophy at Campbell University, questioned the document's use of the Apostles' Creed. "While I don't have any difficulty with the Apostles' Creed personally, I find it interesting that a group of Baptists who consider themselves to be non-creedal would include a creed in their foundational document," he wrote.
Bruce Gourley, executive director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, said the task force was asking the North Carolina CBF "to forsake the Baptist heritage of freedom of conscience and the priesthood of all believers, while downplaying religious liberty and separation of church and state, in order to embrace and formally align themselves with ancient creedalism and the magisterium ecclesiology of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions."
Ken Massey, pastor of First Baptist Church in Greensboro and a member of the task force, said at the Sept. 16 session, hosted by his church, that he was surprised by the backlash.
"I don't think we ever gave … thought to creation of a confessional statement. It just never was our intention to do another Baptist confession of faith," Massey said. "And yet we wanted to find some way, instead of articulating what we are not, to articulate some commonalities about us."
Massey said the intent was not to build a "barbed-wire fence" aimed at keeping outsiders out and insiders in, but rather "a campfire around which people gather together."
"I think that's probably what led us to the Apostles' Creed," he explained.
"We were not trying to create a test for fellowship," Massey said. "Our attempt was not to resolve an ongoing debate taking place in some academic circles about what the true Baptist distinctives really are. We were all about trying to find some way to be confessional without creating a confession, as it were, but also to really identify that we are a Christian body."
Hovis said the first part of the proposed statement "was an attempt to basically say that we are Christians."
"As long as I've been a pastor, I have tried to teach Baptist principles," Hovis said. "I started with [the basic assertions that] we are Christians and we are followers of Jesus," he continued. He described the revised language as "an attempt to connect us with historical Christianity."
Massey said the statement also set out to correct an over-emphasis on individualism sometimes found among Baptists.
"Every Baptist that I've ever been pastor to has not needed instruction on how to be an individual, how to feel like they can make their own decisions," Massey said. "Most Baptists I have known have had their Ph.D.s in individualism. They are experts at it. It's the air they breathe. They're very comfortable with it. They're not going to let anybody else tell them what they have got to believe.
"What I have had trouble with in Baptist life is trying to convince people they are a community. Not just a place where people gather and associate, from which they decide together they are going to do some kind of ministry, but they actually are a community where life is shared."
Massey said most people in his church are less concerned with how to be a better Baptist than with how to be a better Christian. Younger church members, in particular, he said, do not identify with 1990s-era pronouncements often made among moderate and progressive Baptists that emphasize values that they believed were being eroded at the time in the Southern Baptist Convention.
"My young adults have told me very clearly they don't care if we are not like a Southern Baptist Convention," Massey said. "In fact they have a negative perception of me articulating how we are different from Southern Baptists. They want to know what we're for and what we're going to do."
Hovis said the task force would undoubtedly revise the statement based on feedback at the listening sessions. He said there is no timeline for completing the process, which from the start was described as "important but not urgent."
"I think if nothing else happens, the fact that we have come together and talked is a good thing, a learning thing," Hovis said.
The proposed statement ends with an assertion of affinity for the values of the national CBF, which also has a foundational statement that explicitly affirms the traditional principles of soul freedom, Bible freedom, church freedom and religious freedom.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.