ARLINGTON, Texas (ABP)—Pentecost and coming of the Holy Spirit are largely overlooked in Baptist churches, Pastor Dwight McKissic said at his Baptist Conference on the Holy Spirit.
That lack of awareness is Baptists' loss, said McKissic and many of the 200 others who gathered at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington. The event was scheduled eight months after McKissic triggered a tempest in the Southern Baptist Convention by acknowledging he has practiced a “private prayer language” since his days as a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
While Christians celebrate the blessings of God the Father at Thanksgiving and rejoice in the advent of God the Son at Christmas, most Baptists don't celebrate or study the “ignored member of the Trinitarian enterprise,” he said.
“The church nullifies and cancels the power of the incarnation when it is not unified,” said McKissic, who led his church to pull out of the Baptist General Convention of Texas six years ago and join the breakaway Southern Baptists of Texas Convention.
“How can we ever find unity again? I suggest to you that we must accept the principle of Pentecost (as a model) for reuniting God's family by his power.”
Pentecost, the biblical celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit, brought together a remarkable diversity of Jews and proselytes from all over the Roman Empire, he said, comparing the Holy Spirit to a unifying “wind” that blows through Christians. And while the particular events of the Pentecost won't be repeated, the principle is the same.
The first day of the conference featured a pastor's roundtable discussion of the role of the Holy Spirit in Baptist churches. The meeting was a follow-up session to a December pastors' meeting McKissic also hosted.
Pastors and other Baptist leaders at that earlier discussion voted unanimously to request Southern Baptist Convention officials to reconsider policies restricting speaking in tongues, including “private prayer languages.”
McKissic, a trustee at Southwestern Seminary, has feuded with fellow trustees over the seminary's policies on glossolalia. The controversy began in August after McKissic mentioned in a Southwestern chapel service his practice of a private prayer language.
In that sermon, McKissic said he disagreed with the SBC International Mission Board's 2005 decision to exclude missionary candidates who espouse the practice. Later, seminary trustees threatened to ask the convention to remove McKissic from the board.
The rift eventually became known throughout the Southern Baptist blogosphere, with many younger SBC bloggers criticizing Southwestern trustees and administrators for their treatment of McKissic. Some of the more prominent bloggers, including Alan Cross, Art Rogers, Wade Burleson and Benjamin Cole, attended the April conference.
Cole, the prolific pastor-blogger from Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, went one step past McKissic's admonition of Baptists to study the Holy Spirit. During his presentation, he chastened pastors for holding Fourth of July picnics and singing patriotic songs in church while most of their church members “can't even name the date of Pentecost.”
Baptist hymnals have “six or seven” songs about the Holy Spirit but “many more” in the “God and country” section, he said. It's part of a national, patriotic identity that has robbed Baptists of their identity in Christ, he added.
“There is nothing worshipful about ‘America the Beautiful,'” he said. “It is an idolatrous song when sung in the midst of the people of God. … Our identity is in Christ. I don't pledge allegiance to the flag when I gather with the people of God on the Lord's day.”
Cole, who was later loudly accosted by a man in the audience who took exception to what he characterized as “arrogant” and “unpatriotic” sentiments, said he is not ashamed of being an American citizen, “but that citizenship is so transient that it almost becomes meaningless when I gather with the people of God.”
The Pentecostal paradigm, Cole said, is that God tore down barriers like race and nationality in order for Christians to become known by the name God intended—Christ.