The right to dissent-even about what makes a school religious-should be a key distinctive of Baptist higher education, suggested church historian and seminary dean Bill Leonard.
“Baptists began as a community of dissent,” Leonard said during his presentation on how Baptist education functions within a context of conflict. Early Baptist dissent was grounded in freedom of conscience and a commitment to uncoerced faith, he stressed.
“I would suggest that one Baptist way-no doubt there are many-for responding to the changing nature of campus life would be a reassertion of those early Baptist ideals of dissent, conscience and believers' church,” he said.
“That is, Baptists should be at the forefront of the quest for ‘voice' on college and university campus-not as a tepid, grudging response to nebulous political correctness, but because voice is endemic to the nature of Baptist identity, perhaps even its most profound distinctive.”
Meanwhile, Albert Reyes, president of the Baptist University of the Americas in San Antonio, Texas, said Christian higher education remains a justifiable mission for Baptists if it is genuinely accessible to the largely non-Anglo next generation of students.
“In the same way that missionaries must contextualize their approaches to incarnate the gospel message, educational institutions that contextualize their institutions will have greater opportunities to provide Christian higher education to the emerging generation of Baptists,” Reyes said. “This effort will require nothing less than the organizational and cultural transformation of the institution itself.”
Associated Baptist Press