WACO, Texas — Nobody can predict with certainty what the next 400 years hold for Baptists — or for any religious denomination, church historian Martin Marty told a gathering at Baylor University.
But Marty, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, offered general observations as he spoke on “The Future of a Denomination: Baptists in the Next 400 Years.”
Marty characterized denominations — as distinct from a single state church — as a “four century-old Anglo-American invention” and noted Baptists were “present at the creation.”
Church historian Martin Marty
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While some observers ask if denominations in their present form are dead or dying, Marty asserted that “structurally, functionally, something would likely fill its role.”
What’s true for denominations in general undoubtedly would prove true for the Baptist movement, he suggested, but he cautioned against making confident predictions.
Marty offered a series of “where and whither questions” followed by “what and how” application:
• Identity. Regarding the essence of the distinctive Baptist tradition, Marty confessed, “I have not found the essence of baptisthood.”
However, he suggested, a clue to the historically central feature of the Baptist movement lies in its name.
“Believers’ baptism by immersion was the most visible mark of being a Baptist,” he said, pointing to its “branding” nature. But the commitment to following religious convictions and living those convictions out with integrity preceded the mode and method of baptism. Separatists and others “backed into” their understanding of believers’ baptism, he asserted.
“It was so exceptional, unsettled and branding that it became central to the story and provided the name,” he said.
• Community and autonomy. Baptists long ago “took the risk” in terms of emphasizing individual decision-making in matters of religion, Marty noted. However, he added, historic Baptist convictions about soul liberty and soul competency have been balanced by “the integral tie to community in voluntary association.”
The challenge for the future lies in the “pick and choose” nature of individualized spirituality that does not find direction from a religious community, he asserted.
• Church polity. Observers of church life recognize that regardless of a denomination’s official polity — hierarchical, episcopal, presbyterian, congregational or whatever — “the local wins out,” Marty observed, and “Baptists should be theologically most ready to profit from the trend.”
At the same time, individual Christians, churches and denominations have unprecedented capacity to be involved with other Christians globally through communication technology, he added. Through the Internet, “distance has disappeared,” he noted.
• Church and state. In some circles “long-held Baptist views on separation of church and state have appeared to be compromised or obscured — or even abandoned,” Marty said.
“The moral crisis, the security crisis, the pluralism crisis — all have led some to conclude we are so far gone that even Baptists have been willing to call on the state to help us do our work,” he said.
How Baptists — “and Baptist-like traditions” — respond to church-state issues in the future has fateful consequences for their witness in society, he observed.
• Peoplehood. Baptists, like other Christians, tend to congregate and allow their lives to be shaped to a large degree along lines of social class and race, Marty noted.
“Some largely white Baptist groups do better than others at reaching beyond historical bounds, but all confess that they have a long way to go,” he said.
The role of women in the church — particularly in ministry — remains a crucial issue with which Baptists likely will grapple in the future, he noted.
• Witness and pluralism. Few Baptists waver in devotion to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, Marty said, but they struggle with how that faith relates to other world religions.
“We can’t settle for a casual universalism that says we’re all in different boats headed toward the same shore,” he observed.
At the same time, some Baptists want to avoid holding to the kind of exclusiveness that would cause non-Christians to write them off as narrow bigots more focused on “denouncing each other than hearing each other,” he said.
• Conflict. “Baptists as creative dissenters were born in conflict and produce conflict,” he said. But Baptists also possess the capacity to provide “a rich and warm home,” he added. “And there are plenty of biblical texts to find direction for that.”
An African-American, Hispanic and British Baptist each offered responses to Marty’s presentation.
David Goatley, executive secretary-treasurer of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention and president of the North American Baptist Fellowship, offered cautious words about a tendency toward disunion in Baptist life, but also described the calling toward communion.
“The centering role of denominations is no longer needed in the same way it once was,” Goatley noted.
Churches can access information by Internet that denominational publishing houses once provided, and they may connect with missions opportunities globally without the intermediary of a denominational mission board, he said.
Rather than make a utilitarian argument for denominational entities — “We can do more together than we can do working alone” — Goatley suggested looking to the need for communion and fellowship.
“There is a calling for communion, a call to be family,” he said. “Denominations create the table around which we gather.”
Nora Lozano, associate professor of theological studies at Baptist University of the Americas, described the way her early understanding of Baptist identity was shaped in reaction to Catholics, and later charismatics and Pentecostals.
“We defined ourselves in a negative way,” she said. “What they did, we didn’t do.”
Later, she gained an understanding of Baptist identity formed by what church historian Walter Shurden has called “four fragile freedoms” — Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom and religious freedom.
Lozano voiced hope that Baptists will find the freedom to become more inclusive — particularly of racial minorities and women — and more trusting of fellow Christians who may differ on emphases or worship styles.
Nigel Wright, principal of Spurgeon’s College in London, challenged Baptists to look not just at the future that can be calculated based on trends, but also at “the imaginable future” as projected by the biblical prophets and by the heavenly vision in Revelation 7.
That vision of a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language gathered to worship the exalted Christ means “everything about Baptist life is provisional,” Wright said.
“Baptists are not the last word, but just a step on the journey — a journey we share with God and with people of many communions,” he said. “There is no one way of being the church.”
Wright called for a “corrective ecumenism” that recognizes the true church does not yet exist, but the many Christian communions have insights they can offer to other members of the Christian family.
While Baptists can learn from Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Christians something about the historical continuity of faith, other parts of the Christian family can learn important principles about freedom from the Baptist movement, he noted.
“We need to care about other parts of the church,” Wright said, “because our future is bound up in their future.”