ATLANTA (ABP) — The Southern Baptist Convention will not join a new ecumenical group designed to bring Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant and evangelical Christians together, according to news reports.
A spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board said the SBC would not affiliate with the fledgling Christian Churches Together in the USA.
“For the most part, we don't do ecumenism because you usually have to give up some doctrinal beliefs or ignore or emphasize others to work with folks that really aren't on the same path, share the same doctrines, the same beliefs — particularly about salvation,” said Martin King, North American Mission Board spokesman, quoted by Religion News Service.
Christian Churches Together, — set to launch formally next fall, is designed to be a broader body than the older National Council of Churches, which many evangelicals considered too liberal. The Catholic Church and most conservative Protestant bodies — such as the SBC — do not participate in NCC.
Groups of leaders from mainline Protestant, evangelical, Pentecostal, Catholic and Orthodox backgrounds began meeting three years ago to form a group that would serve as a roundtable to encourage better understanding between a broadly diverse range of Christian groups in the United States. CCT grew out of that. The initial meetings included observers from SBC agencies.
CCT's stated purposes include “speaking to society with a common voice whenever possible.”
Other evangelical bodies, including the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, have agreed to become part of CCT. In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed to join the group. The SBC and some Catholic groups have teamed together on a number of conservative social issues recently.
In an interview with Christianity Today magazine shortly after that vote, conservative Catholic leader Richard John Neuhaus said the bishops voted to join CCT because they understood it to be a much more modest enterprise than the NCC.
“You'd have to judge on a case-by-case basis as to whether a form of cooperation confuses or compromises the integrity of any particular church or organization, but on the face of it, I think it's very hard to argue in principle against what CCT aims to do at this point,” said Neuhaus, editor of the conservative magazine First Things.
In reacting to Southern Baptist leaders' decision not to join, CCT's leader expressed disappointment, but not surprise. “It is pretty clear that this just wasn't a reasonable expectation of where they are right now,” said Wes Granberg-Michaelson, chairman of the group's steering committee. Granberg-Michaelson is also the general secretary of the Reformed Church in America.
“We never had a high anticipation that the Southern Baptists would be a part,” he continued. “We'd wanted to have as strong a participation as we could from across the board in terms of representing different constituencies.”