AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) — Recently, white Texas Baptist pastor Larry Bethune became the president of a mainly African-American Baptist group — and it didn't make news, because it was nothing new.
Perhaps what is news to many Baptists is that the American Baptist Churches of the South has, since its beginning, included both white and black Baptists in its leadership and gone quietly about its business. Bethune is only the latest of several white pastors of Southern Baptist heritage who have served the majority African-American group.
“When I go to regional meetings, I'm the chip in the cookie. And it's been remarkably good for me to be part of a predominantly African-American fellowship,” Bethune, who is pastor of University Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, said. “It's interesting to experience that, because — being a white male who's accustomed to being the majority in most settings — there are ways in which experiencing being a minority has … raised my consciousness to the ways we in the majority exclude people in the minority without even being conscious of it.”
ABCOTS, as the group's leaders abbreviate its name, is one of 32 regional bodies affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. It includes ABC congregations located in the former states of the Confederacy as well as Oklahoma, West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. While the ABC is historically a white, Northern denomination, it now has an increasingly sizable minority of African-American congregations. Many of those are located in the South.
Meanwhile, a handful of historically Anglo congregations have been affiliated with the region since its founding more than 30 years ago. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of historically white churches that have left the Southern Baptist Convention have affiliated with ABC and ABCOTS.
“African-Americans have come to the American Baptist Churches, first of all to learn their system, to learn their agenda. And as we become more populous, as we become large, we now have an opportunity to help set the agenda. The same thing is true with Euro-Americans” who have joined ABCOTS, said Ivan George. George is the group's minister for missions development. “You first come and learn of the culture and adapt yourself to the culture, and then within that culture, you can find your own self.”
Bethune said that, despite the fact that University Baptist joined ABC and ABCOTS in 1993, he felt “welcomed into the fellowship” immediately and that his congregation received “nothing but support” from regional officials. Bethune has participated in ABCOTS leadership positions for the group for several years, serving as an officer and as chair of the region's ministers' council.
That's more welcomed than his church felt while involved in white Baptist life, Bethune said. In the 1990s, the Austin Baptist Association and, later, the Baptist General Convention of Texas expelled the congregation for its welcoming and affirming stance toward gays.
Homosexuality has been a divisive issue in several ABC regions in recent years, leading to regional splits on the West Coast and threatening to tear other regions — and the entire denomination — apart. Many of the historically white churches that belong to ABCOTS are gay-friendly, while African-American churches tend to be very culturally conservative.
University Baptist was expelled from the Austin association once before, in the 1940s, for accepting African-Americans into membership decades before other Southern Baptist churches even thought about doing so.
But, Bethune and George both said, the conflict has not become a problem for the region.
It's because ABCOTS congregations and leaders are very dedicated to the historic Baptist respect for the autonomy of local congregations under the lordship of Christ, according to George.
“There's something that holds us all together — Jesus Christ is lord, number one, and we all have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” he said. “That's not a cookie-cutter relationship, so every person and every local congregation is open to how the Holy Spirit leads it, so therefore the Holy Spirit can't be put in a cookie-cutter shape.”
“What we find is that the essence of both the strength and the weakness [of the ABCOTS model] is our interdependence and our dependence,” George said. “It's what we call soul liberty. It would be much easier for us if we had one set of standards and one set of practices and everyone had to adhere to that — it would have been so much easier. But the Holy Spirit leads us in a different way.”
Bethune said he wants to see other white progressive Baptists in the South enjoy the kind of experiences he has encountered working across racial lines in ABCOTS.
“There have been some relational overtures between the [Cooperative Baptist Fellowship] churches and the ABC churches,” he said. “My concern is that that not happen at the national level from the top down, because I don't think that will work. It needs to happen at the local level, where CBF churches and ABC churches reach out and work with each other. And that means white CBF churches in the South and African-American ABC churches in the South working together. Not just pulpit exchanges, which are once-a-year symbolic nods, but joint mission projects.”
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