BWA General Secretary Emeritus Denton Lotz (R) receives the ward from John Graz, secretary general of the International Religious Liberty Association. (BWA photo)
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WASHINGTON (ABP) — Retired Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Denton Lotz has been honored by the Seventh-day Adventist Church and affiliated religious-liberty organizations for his contributions to furthering global religious freedom.
He received the International Award for Religious Liberty June 18 at a dinner in Washington. The dinner and award are co-sponsored by the Adventists in conjunction with their religious-freedom publication, Liberty magazine, and the International Religious Liberty Association. Lotz is currently president of the association, which was founded by Adventists in 1893 but is non-sectarian and open to all supporters of church-state separation and religious freedom.
Lotz, who was named BWA’s general secretary emeritus upon his retirement in 2007, was awarded for making “religious freedom a major focus of his ministry as church leader and church statesman,” according to a BWA press release.
In his response, Lotz said the award was recognition of the role that Baptists have played in the defense of religious liberty since the founding of the Baptist movement 400 years ago, in 1609. Baptists, he said, were often persecuted because of their anti-establishment stance and their defense of the liberty of conscience.
“Baptists were a persecuted group,” he told the roughly 300 guests gathered in the ballroom of the Capital Hilton hotel. “We believe that where religious freedom is denied, all other freedoms are denied.”
Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) delivers the keynote address at the 7th Annual Religious Liberty Dinner in Washington. (Megan Brauner/Adventist News Network)
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Keynote speaker for the dinner was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), an ordained United Methodist minister who, prior to being elected to Congress, served as the first African-American mayor of Kansas City, Mo. “Everyone has the right to
freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, yet persecutions and atrocities are still taking place,” he said, according to the Adventist News Network.
Cleaver underscored the fact that, more than 60 years after the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, hundreds of millions of people around the world continue to be mistreated because of their faith.
“The choice to privately or publicly practice a religious belief or the choice to abstain from a religious belief or the choice to change one’s own religious beliefs is unmistakably fundamental to human rights,” he said.
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