ARLINGTON, Texas (ABP) — Pentecost, and the Holy Spirit it celebrates, are largely overlooked in Baptist churches, pastor Dwight McKissic said April 27 at his Baptist Conference on the Holy Spirit.
That lack of awareness is Baptists' loss, according to McKissic and many of the 200 others who gathered at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas — eight months after McKissic, a black leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, triggered a tempest in the convention by acknowledging he has practiced a “private prayer language” since his days as an SBC seminary student.
While Christians celebrate the blessings of God the father at Thanksgiving and rejoice in the advent of God the son at Christmas, most Baptists don't celebrate or study the “ignored member of the Trinitarian enterprise,” McKissic said.
“The church nullifies and cancels the power of the incarnation when it is not unified,” he said in the welcoming address at the three-day event. “How can we ever find unity again? I suggest to you that we must accept the principle of Pentecost [as a model] for reuniting God's family by his power.”
Pentecost, the biblical celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit, brought together a remarkable diversity of Jews and proselytes from all over the Roman Empire, he said, comparing the Holy Spirit to a unifying “wind” that blows through Christians. And while the particular events of the Pentecost won't be repeated, the principle is the same.
McKissic told listeners, who hailed from Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Alabama, that people question the authenticity of the faith when Christians divide over color and “over the question that somebody might speak in tongues in their prayer closet.”
“That's why we invited everybody,” he said. “This conference is not about indoctrination. It's about education.”
The first day of the conference featured a pastor's roundtable discussion of the role of the Holy Spirit in Baptist churches. The meeting was a follow-up session to a December pastors' meeting McKissic also hosted.
Pastors and other Baptist leaders at that earlier discussion voted to request Southern Baptist Convention officials to reconsider policies restricting speaking in tongues, including “private prayer languages.”
McKissic, a trustee at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has feuded with fellow trustees over the SBC seminary's policies on glossolalia. The controversy began in August after McKissic mentioned in a Southwestern chapel service his practice of a private prayer language.
McKissic also said in the sermon that he disagreed with the SBC International Mission Board's 2005 decision to exclude missionary candidates who espouse the practice. Later, seminary trustees threatened to ask the convention to remove McKissic from the board.
The rift eventually became known throughout the Southern Baptist blogosphere, with many younger SBC bloggers criticizing Southwestern trustees and administrators for their treatment of McKissic. Some of the more prominent bloggers, including Alan Cross, Art Rogers, Wade Burleson and Benjamin Cole, attended the April conference.
Cole, the prolific pastor-blogger from Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, went one step past McKissic's admonition of Baptists to study the Holy Spirit. During his presentation, he chastened pastors for holding Fourth of July picnics and singing patriotic songs in church while most of their church members “can't even name the date of Pentecost.”
Baptist hymnals have “six or seven” songs about the Holy Spirit but “many more” in the “God and country” section, he said. It's part of a national, patriotic identity that has robbed Baptists of their identity in Christ, he added.
“There is nothing worshipful about ‘America the Beautiful,'” he said. “It is an idolatrous song when sung in the midst of the people of God…. Our identity is in Christ. I don't pledge allegiance to the flag when I gather with the people of God on the Lord's day.”
Cole, who was later loudly accosted by a man in the audience who took exception to what he characterized as “arrogant” and “unpatriotic” sentiments, said he is not ashamed of being an American citizen, “but that citizenship is so transient that it almost becomes meaningless when I gather with the people of God.”
The Pentecostal paradigm, Cole said, is that God tore down barriers like race and nationality in order for Christians to become known by the name God intended — Christ. He, McKissic and event speakers emphasized that despite differing opinions among Baptists on the role of the Holy Spirit, especially when it comes to speaking in a private prayer language, unity should be a common goal.
Peggy Cleveland, a layperson from Pelham, Ala., who attended the conference, said she wants unity as well. Cleveland, who attends a Baptist church but chooses to classify herself simply as a Christian, said she attended the event partly as a skeptic — if McKissic and the others felt the need to hold a conference on the Holy Spirit, that implied there must be something “wrong” with it, she said.
After hearing from McKissic, however, she said she was optimistic about the rest of the conference.
“The Holy Spirit reveals to the individual person … but how will other people know what it reveals to me unless I share it?” she asked. “That's why the unity is important.”
McKissic too is optimistic.
“I have a dream that the Baptist family will come together — not as black, Hispanic, Asian and white [nor] as tongue-speakers and not-tongue-speakers,” he said. “I have a dream that we will come together as Christians.”
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