By Bill Leonard
“Diversity” is surely one of the first words that spring to mind when delegates from American Baptist Churches in the USA meet in biennial convocation. This year’s gathering in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was a classic illustration of the ethnic, racial, regional and theological diversity in a group that traces its roots to 1814 and the founding of the General Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States for Foreign Missions.
After divisions over slavery led to schism with the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, the remaining societies ultimately founded the Northern Baptist Convention in 1907. Later known as the American Baptist Convention, the name was changed to American Baptist Churches, USA, in 1972, the same year delegates adopted a program for distinct racial, ethnic and gender representation on all denominational boards. That organizational intentionality helped make ABC/USA the most multi-culturally representative Baptist group in the United States.
This year’s biennial was preceded by a two-day theology conference proposed by Roy Medley, ABC/USA’s general secretary, and planned by a group of scholars that reflected considerable racial, gender and academic diversity. Yale’s Emilie Townes, Guillermo Ramirez-Munoz of the Evangelical Seminary of Puerto Rico (the host institution) and I provided keynote addresses.
We were joined by more than 50 colleagues from church and academy, some of whom presented additional papers on the theme, “Memory, Identity and Hope: Intersections in American Baptist Ecclesiology.” Discussion was enhanced by many younger African-American, Latino/a, Asian and Caucasian academics and church leaders, insightful analysts who offer hope for the future.
Amid these multicultural voices, however, the 2011 biennial addressed a denominational “Statement of Concern” delineating “a flood of new challenges that, for the local church, call into question the effectiveness of a traditional approach to ecclesiology, evangelism and mission.”
Those challenges include:
— Declining attendance and income for church budgets.
— Changing societal norms and needs.
— The struggle to be relevant to younger generations.
— Waning denominational participation and loyalty.
— The inability to recognize and respond to new opportunities for ministry or to identify indicators that signal the appropriate ending of existing ministries.
— Concern regarding the stewardship of church facilities, including their environmental impact.
This honest assessment of 21st century religion readily applies to most American faith communities — realities evident in a loss of Protestant privilege, the waning of religious identity, and the continuing impact of pluralism on American culture.
Baptists, like other denominations across the theological spectrum, are experiencing numerical declines, budget cutbacks and church closings in epidemic proportions, thus highlighting historian Norman Maring’s haunting question: “Do the original reasons which prompted Baptists to become a distinct denomination still justify their separate existence? Can they contribute something as Baptists which might easily be lost if they no longer existed?”
For starters, certain Baptist groups should act immediately to develop new organizational relationships, linking multiple denominations more closely. The ABC/USA is well suited to pursue an intensified Baptist connectionalism given its varied constituency and the intentionality of its diverse multicultural leadership.
Twenty-first century “concerns” suggest, perhaps demand, that multiple Baptist groups extend their collaborative ministries while pursuing more formal institutional connections.
Denominational realities compel consideration of a more integrative associationalism between such Baptist communions as the ABC/USA, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Lott Carey Missionary Convention and the Alliance of Baptists. Some cooperation already exists, highlighted this November by collective regional gatherings sponsored by the New Baptist Covenant. But without more substantive denominational affiliations, that may be too little too late.
Two Baptist denominations seem historically qualified to lead the way. In 1968, James Washington wrote: “With the single exception of the integrated Free Mission Society, no organic ties existed between major black and white Baptist national organizations during Reconstruction or thereafter — until the predominately white American Baptist Churches and the black Progressive National Baptist Convention became ‘associated organizations’ in 1970.”
American Baptist Churches and the Progressive National Convention churches can lead out in extending greater fellowship, cooperative missions, interracial connections and new organizational alignments.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham writes realistically of the “egalitarian and self-serving” actions of the American Baptist Home Missions Society toward freed slaves in the post-Civil War South. She concludes that in spite of mixed motives, “so convinced were the northern Baptists of the need for black women’s higher education that they termed exclusionist policies toward women ‘short sighted and suicidal.’”
Perhaps the failure to extend a greater connectionalism among diverse racial and regional Baptist organizations would be equally “short sighted and suicidal” in our day. Obviously, such efforts face legitimate challenges, but without such ecclesial intentionality, the remaining “turf” claimed by each group may not long endure. The time is now.
Before we throw in the ecclesiastical towel, let us reflect on the 1611 confession of that little band of Baptist heretics re-forming the church in an Amsterdam bake-house: “That the church of CHRIST is a company of faithful people separated from the world by the word & Spirit of God being knit unto the LORD, & one unto another, by Baptism, upon their own confession of faith.”
Four hundred years later, might we decide TOGETHER if that is STILL who we are and who we wish to BE?