(ABP) — It is hard to describe the euphoria felt by most of us who attended the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta this past week. I would like to analyze that euphoria as reflecting layers of healing and maybe try to name at least a few of those layers.
The most obvious layer of healing was found in the joyful reunion of black and white Baptists, sprinkled richly with Asian, Hispanic, and other Baptist brothers and sisters as well.
We really did worship together, sing together, laugh together, clap together, marvel together, study together, and talk together. We really did find unity in Christ, after 160 years of institutional division, itself occurring against the broader backdrop of centuries of slavery, segregation, and racism. Black and white Baptists met together on terms of equality and unity. This is miracle enough for one meeting.
Another layer of healing had to do with gender. Women preached, women taught, women sang, women danced, women read Scripture, women prayed. Certainly the majority of plenary speakers were men, and the various Baptist bodies represented at this meeting reflect different views on the issue of gender. But the bottom line was that at this meeting the question of women's leadership in Baptist life was not a question at all. Some might consider it heresy. I consider it healing.
There was healing in the institutional relationships between the various Baptist bodies. It remains relatively new for the major black Baptist groups to meet together, let alone for the various white Baptist groups to meet together, let alone for all these groups to meet together. That's healing, or at least the beginning of healing.
A more subtle kind of healing was visible as various speakers, especially the white southern Baptists, reflected on their own conflicts with, and breaks from, the Southern Baptist Convention. A narrative voice prevailed here, rather than a didactic one, and this trend was most profoundly and unexpectedly exemplified in the impromptu reflections of Bill Clinton on his own history as a Baptist. As the former president told the story of his long sojourn as a Southern Baptist, and attempted to pinpoint the crux of the difference between the prevailing SBC vision and that of those who do not share it, he did so with sympathy and without rancor.
I wondered what our black Baptist brethren were thinking while Clinton was speaking and while other white speakers like John Grisham were reflecting on the conflicts within the white southern Baptist world. In a sense, the problems dividing the white southern Baptists are not their problems, not their history. And yet somehow just being in the presence of Christian people who have had such grievous wrongs of their own to forgive makes it easier to abandon anger and embrace love and humility ourselves. If black Baptists can forgive and move on after slavery, segregation, and cruel racism, surely white southern Baptists can do the same after our own grievances?
Another layer of healing has to do with claiming our identity as Baptists once again with a healthy measure of pride. Grisham spoke for many of us in reflecting on the embarrassment he has sometimes felt when pressed about his Baptist identity and commitment. Our “brand” has been damaged. But this meeting, which was simultaneously a private religious gathering and a public declaration of a renewed Baptist identity before a watching world, made me proud to be a Baptist again.
I want to suggest a final possible kind of healing, especially for white Baptists who identify as moderate or post-SBC. This is a healing in relation to our own traditional piety.
I have argued earlier in this column that there are signs of a kind of reaction-formation among some of us: Whatever the “SBC types” do, we will do the reverse. This is certainly not universal but I have witnessed it in many different settings. At its worst what emerges is a kind of stultifying cynicism about all passionate expressions of traditional Christian faith. Ultimately this is a path to a jaded secularism — and empty churches.
It would be hard to remain a cynic if one truly entered into the spirit of the event just concluded in Atlanta. Here again white Baptists have so much to learn from Baptists of color, and perhaps we began learning it at the New Baptist Covenant. This combination is hard to beat: a vivid focus on Jesus Christ the incarnate Savior and Lord, theologically rich biblical preaching, gloriously passionate and skillful worship performance and participation, and a serious commitment to love and justice in both personal and public morality.
If that's what it means to be Baptist, count me in. It's certainly what it meant to be Baptist at the New Baptist Covenant meeting.
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— David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. His latest book is The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center. www.davidpgushee.com