By Robert Dilday
The Baptist World Alliance may be the best opportunity Baptists have to embrace a “transcongregational” mindset which balances their historic adherence to congregational autonomy while avoiding the isolation of local church independence.
That’s the assessment of outgoing BWA president John Upton, who will complete a five-year term July 26 as the top elected official of the global fellowship representing about 43 million baptized believers.
“My fear is that we Baptists are so prone to thinking of being in an isolated place we lose sight of what that [connection] means and how to leverage it,” said Upton, who is executive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. “We understand congregational. We don’t understand transcongregational. The BWA is the place to learn that.”
Upton reflected on his past five years as president during an interview days before his term ends at the close of the Baptist World Congress meeting in Durban, South Africa. He will be succeeded by South African pastor Paul Msiza.
There’s a hunger for wider congregational relationships among Baptists, Upton said, that is sometimes stymied by the faith tradition’s strong theological commitment to autonomous local congregations. Though he also advocates an autonomous understanding of the nature of the church, “because we are so congregationally based, we don’t have a comprehension of what it means to have an identity as a collective, much less leverage it.”
“That’s why so many young people go on [international] mission trips,” he said. “When I fly this time of year the planes are packed with people going on mission trips. They experience something in an international context that they can take home with them. And it’s obviously found in an international context, because otherwise they wouldn’t be on the trip. You can see Jerusalem a lot better when you’ve been to the uttermost part of the earth. You see your neighbors differently. You have new sets of eyes.”
Upton said a sense of connectedness is likely to increase during his successor’s tenure. As a South African, Msiza is shaped by that country’s concept of Ubuntu, often defined as a belief in a “universal bond of sharing which connects humanity.”
“You can’t have a leader like Paul step in from a culture of Ubuntu and not have a stronger sense of unity,” Upton said. “There’s a sense of ‘I am because you are.’ It’s reconciling, hopeful, collaborative at its core. Five years of that kind of leadership will have an impact. It already has impacted our understanding of autonomy. I’m only free to the extent that you’re free.”
Emerging leaders
An emerging set of Baptist leaders around the globe will lend support to that connectedness, said Upton.
“I’ve traveled to their countries and seen these people in their leadership roles, and I’m amazed at the caliber of leadership on every continent,” he said. “There’s a generation of very innovative and sacrificial young leaders who are surfacing.”
Those leaders share a sense of a church “not isolated from the world but strongly connected to the world,” said Upton. They seek “unity of the church not for its own end but unity of the church for the world’s transformation.”
There’s no top-down mindset among those new leaders, he said.
“They thrive in a collaborative and distributed environment. … Their whole idea is a walk together, a sense of journeying together. Each brings their own distinctiveness, their own gifts and talents and they’re all valued. It’s shared learning but more importantly shared mission.”
His own country may be a slow learning in that respect, Upton said.
“The United States has got to get over its suspicion. We’re so polarized politically, religiously and everyone is trying to figure out everyone else. Our young ones coming along have seen enough of that. There’s a world to be changed, they say. … As they become part of groups like the Baptist World Alliance they are able to be free of those kinds of encumbrances.”
Global shifts
Upton says the world is different in 2015 than it was when he was elected in 2010. That’s impacting the shape of the BWA, he added.
“A lot of emerging countries are in a different place in 2015 than in 2010. A lot of established countries are in a different place. The church is not as strong there as it was. The center of Christianity is shifting. The center of population is definitely shifting. The movement of the southern hemisphere into the northern hemisphere is having a huge impact. The world is experiencing a huge migration and that includes a migration of religions, so much so that Islam is a major factor even in the U.S.
“We’ll have to learn to exist in a much more diverse society than we did even in 2010.”
But the BWA is successfully navigating that shift, he said, with Neville Callam, a Jamaican, as general secretary and Msiza, a South African, as president.
“Have we ever had a time when we’ve had an African and a person of African descent heading this organization?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s a new day. The organization is much more international than it’s ever been. The North Americans and Europeans are having to find themselves as one of the family, not as the leader of the family.”
The internationalizing of leadership leaves Upton optimistic about the BWA’s — and Baptists’ — future.
His optimism is founded in a “great deal of excitement about having a South African who came out of apartheid, comes out of the margins, who also knows what reconciliation means, who has stood in the gap between faith and society.”
“I have no concerns about the future of Baptists around the world,” Upton said.