When Baptist News Global Executive Director Mark Wingfield asked me five years ago if he could publish my piece comparing King George in Hamilton to Calvinism’s God, I had no idea the opportunities his invitation would bring me.
One of my favorite opportunities has been attending the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly for the past three years. It’s been fun to hang out with fellow BNG writers and readers in person. But our fellowship together has been more than simple opportunities to have fun. The time we’ve spent together has been subversive.
In her opening prayer for the breakfast BNG cohosted with the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, Mallory Challis said: “Fellowship is subversive. It calls us to love and love calls us to action, and action makes the way for justice.”
Baptists making way for justice
Rick Pidcock
I still haven’t gotten used to hearing Baptist pastors or seminary professors telling me they like my articles. Every time I hear it, my instinct feels like there’s about to be a catch.
Of course, it’s nice to be affirmed. But growing up in the world of independent fundamentalist Baptists who thought the “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention was made up of compromisers and “disobedient brethren” who weren’t willing to practice biblical separation, it’s surprising to hear anything positive from people identifying as Baptists given the things I write.
Until I started writing for BNG, I didn’t know any Baptists allowing women in church leadership, affirming LGBTQ people, advocating for restorative justice or simply valuing their neighbors by treating them with complete dignity.
But here we were at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, surrounded by Baptists who were loving their neighbor as self and who were being motivated by their faith and theology.
Being free to be ourselves
One of the subversive conversations I had this year was with a woman about how changing our theological scripts about gender changed our personalities. When I thought God looked like Hamilton’s King George, I believed God’s posture toward me was one of authority and submission. As King George sings, “You’re my favorite subject / My sweet, submissive subject.”
In that world, all humanity lived on one side of a gender binary with distinct roles to which we had to sweetly submit.
As we conversed about how these scripts affected us, we noticed how changing our scripts led to becoming free to be ourselves.
“What if God wanted us to be ourselves?”
When I had to be a “biblical man,” I felt pressure to be an extrovert due to our gender scripts about male headship. Then after I left that theology, I was free to be myself and realized I was more introverted. When she had to be a “biblical woman,” she felt pressure to make herself small and quiet due to our gender scripts about female submission. Then after she left that theology, she was free to be herself and realized she was more extroverted.
What if God wanted us to be ourselves? What if freedom wasn’t boxing men and women into roles they aren’t equipped for but helping them grow in self-awareness to live more holistically in the world?
Dehumanizing self and neighbor
One concern many evangelicals mention when someone references the self is that focusing on self may lead to an individualist hierarchy that prioritizes self above all.
In our culture, that’s a fair concern. If we leave church hierarchies but still relate to one another personally in systems of hierarchy, then we’ll have to prioritize neighbor over self or self over neighbor. If we prioritize neighbor over self, we’ll likely wear ourselves out by constantly putting ourselves last and helping others at the expense of our own health. But if we prioritize self over neighbor, then we end up dismissing and dehumanizing people.
To relate to self and neighbor in a hierarchy is to dehumanize whichever one we choose to put down.
This is why we need to leave relationship metaphors of hierarchy altogether. It’s why we need what Challis called “subversive fellowship.”
Justice and the ‘I’
One of the clearest examples of subversive fellowship I can think of is the fellowship of the slaves singing spirituals. During the Civil War, white Christians in the North strode into battle singing songs about armies casting down rebellions for Christ, while white Christians in the South strode into battle singing songs about Dixie enduring forever as they lift up the Cross.
But as white Christians on either side of the Civil War strode publicly into battle with song, Black Christians had to sing in private, quietly under wash bins, so they wouldn’t be heard. And perhaps the most subversive sign of their fellowship came through their use of the word “I.”
In white evangelicalism, “I” and “we” communicate two different ideas. “I” communicates the perspective of the self, while “we” is communal.
But for the slaves, using the word “I” was not a promotion of individualism over community. Rather, slaves singing the pronoun “I” meant they were affirming their human dignity.
In her book In Their Own Words: Slave Life and the Power of Spirituals, Eileen Guenther wrote: “‘I’ appears frequently in the spirituals but does not solely refer to the singer. Rather, it declares that the slave is, in fact, a person in a society that denied that recognition, designating the slave as nothing more than property. The ‘I’ is a ‘communitarian word, the expression of collective consciousness.’”
“For justice to be good news, it has to be oriented toward the restoration of wholeness for self and neighbor.”
In other words, the slaves had such an integrated understanding of relationship that there was no difference between “I” and “we.” To embrace the self would require one to embrace one’s neighbor. There is no wholeness of self without wholeness of neighbor. And there is no wholeness of neighbor without wholeness of self.
This is why justice cannot be retributive. For justice to be good news, it has to be oriented toward the restoration of wholeness for self and neighbor.
That’s essentially the subversive fellowship I find every time I attend the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly. Whether we’re exploring issues of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, age or any other markers by which we distinguish ourselves from one another, the dehumanizing hierarchies of my independent fundamentalist Baptist background are nowhere to be seen. And instead, we’re simply here together, valuing our neighbors in valuing ourselves, and loving our selves in loving our neighbors.
In his book Meditations of the Heart, Howard Thurman talked about subversive fellowship this way: “God is making room in my heart for compassion: The awareness that where my life begins is where your life begins; the awareness the sensitiveness to your needs cannot be separated from the sensitiveness to my needs; the awareness that the joys of my heart are never mine alone — nor are my sorrows.”
Rick Pidcock is host of the BNG podcast “Highest Power: Church + State.” He is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.