The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina got a lot of attention recently by passing the following resolution: “Among the churches not in friendly cooperation with the convention are churches which knowingly act to affirm, approve, endorse, promote, support or bless homosexual behavior.”
In response to this action, several churches have decided to leave the convention rather than wait to be expelled. One departure stated that the congregation “will not allow our conscience to be coerced by [the convention's] exclusionary conditions of membership.”
Now there's the rub: How do we determine the condition of membership? When do we decide that a particular church is no longer a place where we can worship or that a particular association is one to which we can no longer belong?
As Americans and as Baptists, these questions have particular resonance, condemned as we are by history and cultural formation to the celebration of personal freedom. At its most vulgar expression, this becomes “church shopping” for the congregation that fills my current need. But a real theological conviction is expressed in the tension here: The church is both a voluntary human organization and the mystical body of Christ.
Granted, I am in a marriage that doesn't allow me the freedom to leave our church. Since my husband is a United Methodist pastor, his congregation is our congregation. Right now our children play among the headstones of a rural churchyard rather than in a “family life center.” By the way, this does have at least one advantage. Learning the names and hearing about the lives of those who have gone before us makes “the communion of saints” very real.
The resolution adopted by North Carolina Baptists raises, for me at least, two particular concerns: 1) To what extent are we to examine the lives (sexual, economic and so forth) of prospective members? How, or in what ways, are we accountable to one another? And 2) Does allowing, even affirming, the presence of gay people necessarily mean the church condones homosexual behavior?
At stake in this debate, though, more than the issue of homosexuality, is how we practice being church. If it is true that baptism signals our re-creation into the body of Christ, then it also means we are bound together with a particular people that we did not necessarily choose.
It is no accident that baptismal liturgies connect the waters of baptism to the salvific waters of the Red Sea. Just as God creates and saves Israel through the parting of the waters, so also God creates and saves a people through the waters of baptism. In baptism, God calls us to share a life together, a life marked by faith, hope and love. To receive the unity that God gives the church means that our disagreements, while serious, do not divide the body.
But does this mean we simply “live and let live,” or that we have no way to discern how to live faithfully?
Theologian Samuel Wells uses the term “overaccepting” to describe how we can receive the other person even if we disagree with him or her. A term taken from dramatic improvisation, overaccepting is learning to place a particular offer within a larger framework that helps to keep the story going. Overaccepting frees one from either simply accepting (live and let live) or blocking (cutting off) the other.
For example, a child points his finger at you and says, “Bang! You're dead.” You can accept by falling down dead. You can block by saying, “I'm not playing anymore.” Or you can overaccept, for example, by dying and coming back as a ghost.
A well-known example from Scripture: When the crowds bring the woman caught in adultery to Jesus requesting that she be stoned, he says, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” He neither accepts their offer to stone her nor blocks their offer by saying, “Don't do that.” Rather, he overaccepts their offer by placing it in the more truthful context of our shared sinfulness and God's forgiveness: “Go and sin no more” (John 8:1-11).
To overaccept is to ask, “How can our response to this issue or dilemma encourage a renewal of the practice and faith of the church?”
Admittedly, this is a question that does not always allow for easy solutions. Overaccepting requires us to see the other as a gift. But how can we see someone as a gift who (we think) is compromising the gospel?
Here we come to one of the most interesting ways, I think, that God works in the world. If not for heresies in the church, the church would have been unable to develop a richer account of what it means to be God's faithful people. Without Arius, for example, who denied the divinity of Christ, we would not have a deeper understanding of what it means to call Christ the Son of God. And this story repeats itself. Without Schleiermacher, the “father of modern liberal theology,” we would not have had the great 20th century theologian Karl Barth.
Like all churches, however, we need to pray that God will transform us so that we might “overaccept” one another, not as a way to deny our disagreements or indicate that they do not matter, but rather as a way to discern more deeply how the Spirit is present among us. In so doing, Christ is made more visible to the world (John 17:21).
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— Beth Newman is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]