ATLANTA (ABP) — The name “Baptist” is not widely respected in America “because for so long so many Baptists have worked so hard to exclude so many,” best-selling author and Baptist layman John Grisham said Jan. 31.
Grisham told a New Baptist Covenant audience in Atlanta that the Mississippi Baptist church in which he grew up used the Bible to justify segregation and the subjugation of women.
“Sadly, in many ways and in many places, that church still exists today,” Grisham said in a rare public appearance he said.
Many other Baptist churches have moved toward openness and inclusion, including his current congregation, University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va. “If there is a hint of discrimination,” he said, “my wife would go somewhere else and take me with her.”
Churches that made biblical arguments for exclusion often based those positions on literal interpretations of selected scripture passages, Grisham said. “Even as a child, I didn't understand this.”
Although women were often “the backbone of the church,” they were not permitted to hold certain positions of spiritual leadership. However, not all members of his hometown church agreed with such literal interpretations, he added.
“My mother may have played lip service to this submission stuff,” he said, “but she didn't really believe it.”
In fact, he said, even those who found biblical justification for racial segregation and male dominance had limits to their insistence on literal interpretation.
When the apostle Paul told Timothy to have a little wine…,” Grisham said to laughter and applause. “Well, some things were not so literal. There was wiggle room after all.”
Grisham — author of An Innocent Man, The Firm, A Time to Kill and The Testament, his first Christian-themed novel — gave three suggestions to Baptists who seek to get off the defensive and restore their good name.
First, he said, Baptists should truly respect diversity. “God made all of us, loves us equally and expects us to love each other equally without respect to gender, race, sexual orientation or other religions,” he said.
Second, he said, the church must stay out of politics.
“As a church, our mission is to serve God through teaching, preaching and serving others,” he said. “When the church gets involved in politics, it alienates many of the very people we are called to serve, and those who push politics will pay a price.”
Third, Grisham urged fellow Baptists to spend as much time out on the streets in ministry as in the church.
“Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell,” he said. “Shouldn't that tell us something?”
Christians are needed by the sick, the homeless, neglected seniors, scarred war veterans, impoverished children, refugees, immigrants and prisoners, Grisham said.
“We cannot pick and choose,” he said. “We need to get on with the business of serving others.”
Before Grisham's address, Atlanta-area pastor Julie Pennington-Russell preached on “The Bible Speaks about Respecting Diversity.”
“We never see Jesus until we see him in every face,” said Pennington-Russell, who moved to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., from Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, last year.
Noting the broad racial, economic, geographic, cultural and theological differences present within the audience, Pennington-Russell said, “We are practicing the Baptist tradition of respecting each other's differences.”
“Respectfulness” is a good gift, she affirmed, but then asked, “Is this really the gift we came so far to give this week?”
Respect alone “has no power to change something that is broken between you and me,” she said. “Only love can do that.”
Respectfulness is not a bad gift, “but it runs out of steam at the 50 yard line,” she said.
“But love, like Forrest Gump, runs all the way down the field, through the end zone and into the parking lot.”
We have the ability to be respectful of others while still holding them at arm's length, Pennington-Russell said, but “love doesn't let us get away with that.”
“Jesus is the face of love,” she said, the one “who showed us what the power of real love could do through us in this world.”
Jesus came reaching out to us, “and in light of such a love, maybe it's time for you and me to do some reaching, too,” she said, challenging participants to think of someone they have difficulty loving.
“Let love take you by the hand and lead you like a child to a new way of seeing that brother or sister, and look for Jesus in the face of that person,” she said.
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— John Piece and Tony Cartledge write for Baptists Today. Greg Warner of Associated Baptist Press contributed to this story.