DALLAS (ABP) — Habitat for Humanity needs Baptists to help preserve its Christian character, founder Millard Fuller pleaded.
Fuller and his wife, Linda, launched Habitat in 1976 to provide “a simple, decent, good place in which to live” for every person on earth. Since then, Habitat has built almost 160,000 homes for nearly 1 million people all over the globe, Fuller reported.
“I have a deep concern that Habitat for Humanity remain firmly a Christian ministry,” said Fuller, the organization's president. “From the beginning, I have seen Habitat as a new frontier in Christian missions — a creative and new way to proclaim the gospel.
“The missionary enterprise has been going on for many, many years, and there have been traditional ways to do missionary work — hospitals, schools, agriculture, preaching, revivals — and all of that is authentic. There's noting wrong with that.
“But I see Habitat for Humanity as a new and creative work to do what we are commanded to do in Matthew 28, which is to proclaim the gospel, and proclamation occurs in many ways — verbal and incarnational.”
Incarnational proclamation involves living out the gospel, much like Jesus did when he came to earth to demonstrate God's love for people, Fuller explained. “The prophets had proclaimed God's word, but God chose to send his Son, Jesus, as the message of his love.”
Ironically, success may be the biggest impediment to Fuller's vision, he conceded. Habitat has attracted millions of volunteers who want to help end poverty by providing affordable housing.
“Some of them are not Christians,” he noted. “We have an open-door policy” to accept all volunteers who want to build homes in order to end poverty. Consequently, people of all kinds of faiths and no faith have stepped up to participate.
This trend offers a couple of benefits. First, more homes get built. And second, since Habitat crews begin each day with a devotional and prayer and Christians work on the projects, the non-Christian workers theoretically receive a spiritual witness when they work on a project.
But if evangelical Christians don't do their part, if they get crowded out, then Habitat could lose its Christian flavor and the spark of its witness, Fuller fretted.
“My greatest concern for Habitat for Humanity is going secular,” he said. “It's not foreordained that this ministry remain a strong Christian ministry. All that it will take for Habitat to go secular is for Christians to stay away from it.”
Consequently, Fuller has been focusing his attention on challenging Baptists and other evangelical Christians to get involved in Habitat.
“We urgently need [Baptists], not just to saw boards and pound nails, but to have a presence on site that introduces people to Jesus,” he stressed. “But you can't do that without presence … without Christians on site.”
Fuller gets most frustrated with his “evangelical brethren” who tell him they're uncomfortable on a Habitat work site with non-Christians.
“How can you say you're an evangelical if you don't want to work around folks who aren't Christians?” he asked. “That's precisely where an evangelical Christian ought to be — on a site sponsored by an overtly Christian organization with no restriction on what you share with people. Why shouldn't you be there?”
Because of the scope of Habitat's mission — “to end poverty housing on earth” — the organization cannot afford to turn away volunteers, Fuller said.
“We have an open door to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, atheists, agnostics, whoever wants to join us, but we are Christian,” he said. “In that sense, we are no different from a church. The church says, 'Whosoever will may come.'
“A church should rejoice if an atheist wants to come … but the pastor doesn't alter the sermon. If anything it is stronger.”
Presbyterians and Methodists have provided the strongest support to Habitat, but Fuller is singling out Baptists. “I want to issue the strongest possible appeal to Baptists to come out and join us, to keep Habitat for Humanity faithful to its founding principles,” he said.
Those principles are distinctively Baptist, Fuller insisted, pointing out Habitat's Baptist lineage.
The Fullers founded Habitat in 1976 out of Koinonia Farm, a Christian community near Americus, Ga. Two Baptist couples — Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England — sought to model Christian justice and racial reconciliation on the farm.
The Fullers visited Dallas recently to accept the Maston Award for applied Christian ethics from the T. B. Maston Foundation. Prior to his death, Maston taught Christian ethics to generations of ministers at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and guided Baptists toward racial reconciliation. Maston was a contemporary with Clarence Jordan in the civil-rights movement.
The Fullers are members of Maranatha Baptist Church in nearby Plains, Ga. And Habitat's most famous volunteers, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, also are members of the church.
“From the very beginning, the leadership of Habitat for Humanity has been Baptist,” Fuller said. “But that deep Baptist connection is not known by a lot of Baptists.”
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