NORMAN, Okla. (ABP) — If they hope to represent Christ in the world, Baptists must find a "better way" of relating than the racism that has marred their witness for most of the past two centuries, participants in a multicultural gathering of Baptists heard.
A documentary and a panel discussion on racism highlighted the first sessions of the Midwest regional meeting of the New Baptist Covenant in Oklahoma.
The New Baptist Covenant is a movement launched former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Mercer University President Bill Underwood to help Baptists transcend racism and combat poverty. It kicked off with a multi-racial, multi-ethnic gathering of about 15,000 Baptists in Atlanta in early 2008. Since then, regional rallies have been held in Kansas City; Winston-Salem, N.C.; Birmingham, Ala., and Aug. 6-7 in Norman, Okla.
The regional meetings have focused on helping Baptists learn how to "do things about the marginalized and the poor," explained Jimmy Allen, a longtime Baptist leader and key organizer of the original New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta.
"God is continuing what he started among us," Allen told the Oklahoma crowd, which included African-Americans, Anglos, Hispanic-Americans and Native Americans from across the Midwest and Southwest. "You're in the forefront of the Baptist movement as you find new ways of working together."
A centerpiece of that effort in Norman was a documentary and panel discussion about Baptists' response to racism.
"Racism is the bone stuck in Baptists' throat," insisted Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics and producer of Beneath the Skin: Baptists and Racism, the documentary that opened the meeting.
"The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones, but … because we found a better way," Parham said. "The age of racism will not end among Baptists because we ran out of racists, but because we found a better way."
The documentary takes its name from a line offered by Emmanuel McCall, a Baptist pastor and longtime interracial leader in Atlanta. He quoted a mortician who observed about race: "… beneath the skin, it's all the same."
After viewing the documentary, New Baptist Covenant participants heard a multi-racial panel discussion regarding the implications of racism.
"We're not a post-racial America; we're still very much in the struggle," noted Javier Elizondo, executive vice president and provost of Baptist University of the Americas in San Antonio, Texas.
Elizondo said people must approach racism in humility, acknowledging their own limitations.
"We speak from our own background," he said. "I'm a Mexican. I can only speak to this topic as a Mexican. We can only speak from our own perspective," he said, calling on people of goodwill to realize how they filter their own perspectives of race.
Fitz Hill, president of the predominantly African-American Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock, Ark., agreed.
"Our experiences shape our impressions," Hill said. He called for truth as an antidote to the false impressions that fuel racism.
Hill illustrated by citing criticism he received when he was one of the few black head coaches of NCAA Division I college football teams. A booster told him his poor record indicated he had "too many black assistant coaches." He countered that his record was better than his two white predecessors and asked if the booster ever complained that those coaches had "too many white assistant coaches."
In addition to truth, experience is a great teacher when it comes to overcoming racism, said Tim Eaton, president of Hillsdale Freewill Baptist College in Moore, Okla.
Freewill Baptists' tradition has been opposed to racism, Eaton noted, explaining they opposed slavery as early as colonial America and refused membership to slave owners. Freewill Baptist colleges also were among the first U.S. schools to admit people of all races.
"I'm proud of our history, but history means very little to those who are around you," Eaton said, noting Hillsdale requires students to participate in multi-ethnic community-service projects so they are forced to interact with people who are "very different" from themselves.
Racial difference still is dominant in America, testified Laura Cadena, director of communications for Mercy Street, a multi-racial ministry in Dallas.
"My age group says racism does not exist," Cadena said, noting she grew up in Texas "protected" from the barbs of racism by her Hispanic parents and grandparents.
But she encountered racism when she moved to the Southeast for a couple of years, she said, reporting, "Anti-immigration has become anti-Hispanic."
Personal encounters provide the antidote to racial stereotyping, claimed Kim Henry, wife of Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry.
Her encounter happened during a mission trip to Ghana in Africa, where malnutrition and malaria claim the lives of 50 percent of children before they reach their fifth birthday.
Henry recalled hearing about 75 young children singing, "Our riches are in heaven" and then her group receiving nearly all the food in that impoverished village as a welcoming gift.
"We went to minister to them, and they ministered to us," she said. "This was unlike any experience I'd ever seen — to trust God so much that you would give everything away."
The experience taught her the U.S. lifestyle of abundance is inferior to the simple yet profound faith of her new African friends.
"I wish my parents were alive to see Baptists come together to discuss racism," said Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a recent leading advocate for racial equality in the Southern Baptist Convention.
McKissic said racism can be so entrenched that even well-meaning words do not erase it, noting the SBC apologized for the "sin of racism" in 1995. But years later, when he visited the headquarters of the SBC Executive Committee and asked to meet with the highest-ranking African-American staff member, he was told that person was the head janitor. "It's impossible to ask a question in the SBC without having to go to a white person to get the answer," McKissic said.
J.C. Watts, a former four-term U.S. congressman from Oklahoma, said in a separate address that the answer for racism is unconditional love.
"Man's love is often conditional," said Watts, who first gained fame as quarterback for the Oklahoma Sooners football team. "Man's love is often exclusive, but God's love is unconditional. God's love is inclusive. God loves us all — red, brown, black and white.
"The thing that should drive us … is unconditional love for the individual," he added. "When people talk about the New Baptist Covenant, I hope they would say: 'They have a compelling love for the individual. They're always talking about Jesus.'"
Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.