Editor’s Column

Denver Biennial
If you are going to the 2005 Denver Biennial, be sure to sign up for the RWF Dinner on Sunday, July 3rd at 5:00 PM. We are pleased to announce that William R. Herzog, Professor of New Testament at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, will be our speaker. Bill always provides fresh insights into the Bible message for today’s church. Dr. Herzog has also taught at American Baptist Seminary of the West and Central Baptist Seminary. We have asked Bill to speak on “What Is Good News for Baptists in the Current Situation.”

RWF on the World Wide Web
I am also pleased to note that after a couple of years of problems that WWW.RogerWilliamsFellowship.org is alive and well. Timothy Bonney has revampted the website, brought it up to date, and moved it to a new provider. Check it out!! While you are at it, also join our on line discussion group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rogerwilliams. The website will lead you through the process. 

We are pleased to have Christopher Evans article on Walter Rauschenbusch as a reminder that social justice is an essential elment of ebangelical Christianity. Rauschenbusch fought the Social Darwinism of the Evnagelicals of his time and we need to continue that tradition. I find that much of the emphasis on Levitical Law of the current Evangelical movement is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is not the gospel preached by the Apostle Paul. We need to resist the “Legalism” invading our denomination lest we fall thoroughly into heresy which masquerades as orthodoxy. The Gospel of Jesus Christ builds his Kingdom; the Law kills the Spirit, divides the Body, and distracts us from bringing new souls to Christ.

The Rogers Williams Fellowship board has endorsed the process outlined at the “Rochester Summit” and ask you, and your churches, to endorse this affirmation of our congregational polity.

THE ROCHESTER SUMMIT AFFIRMATION
 February 18-19, 2005
 
 We are a diverse group of 158 American Baptist men and  women, ages from our 20's to our 80's, gathering from 14 states, 49 Associations and 11 Regions or State Conventions.  We represent clergy and laity; local, regional, and national leaders; and  members of the General Board and Program Boards.

 We reaffirm that the Old and New Testaments are the sufficient  ground of our faith and practice and, under the experience of the  Holy Spirit, we need no creed or confession.

 We rededicate ourselves to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and call  our entire denomination to the common task of sharing the whole  gospel with the whole world.  We call upon all American Baptist  Churches to be welcoming communities of faith where every child of  God is included.  Individually we espouse soul freedom, endeavoring  to live by the moral and ethical principles taught by Christ and  revealed in scripture, realizing that God is the ultimate and sole  judge of our thoughts and actions.  As worshipping communities, we celebrate being worthy trustees of all of God's creation.  We uphold  freedom of religious expression, expect no conformity to any creed  or binding confession, and strive for justice within all  human relationships.

 We affirm the denominational leadership that God has imparted to us who support our Baptist principles of soul freedom and local church  autonomy and commit ourselves to be the "Bridge-Builders" that our  General Secretary has called us to be.

 My personal comments on this issue:. I believe that the petition of the Indiana Kentucky Region and related actions by other regions are a direct attack on our congregational polity. We are not a connectional church under the direction of a human higher authority. We have from the very beginning been a “bottom up” movement.  Probably the best example of a moral consensus that we have reached at the denominational level was on the abstaining from alcohol as a beverage. This position resulted from a grass roots process that resulted in a denominational consensus. But we also recognized that ultimately the enforcement of this policy was a matter of individual conscience.  When we have disagreed, we have always given the right of individuals to change churches, churches to either split or change associational alliances, or even to change geography.

In my old age, I’ve inherited the mantle of family historian from my mother. One of the family lines was involved in a Congregational (Puritan) church that as a congregation moved four times. The first time in the 17th Century from Dorchester England to Dorchester Massachusetts to escape the religious persecution of the Crown. The second time was from Dorchester Massachusetts to Windsor Connecticut because the congregation disapproved of the witch hunts of Cotton Mather. Incidentally, a relative of one of the leaders of the congregation was accused of being a witch. The third time was from Windsor to Dorchester, South Carolina and then in 1765 to Midway Georgia. In Georgia, this congregation sent Dr. Lyman Hall to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a representative of the congregation when Georgia refused to send delegates. Lyman Hall was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. This congregation recognized that the freedom to follow their conscience was more important than their personal safety.

My great, great, great grandfather, Truhart Tucker, was ordained to the ministry by the Rev. Jesse Mercer at the Bethseda Baptist Church in Green Point, Georgia about 1810. As a result of this I have been reading the early minutes of this church’s covenant meetings. I was amazed at how much time was spent at these meeting on the moral failures of the slaves who were members of the Bethany Church. The conclusion that I came to was that concentrating on moral failures is a way of avoiding the really hard questions of faith. The Rev. Jesse Mercer did some great work. He raised money for the new Baptist seminary in Washington D.C. He was instrumental in forming the Georgia Baptist Convention, he led a number of his congregation into ministry, but a great deal of his energy went into dealing with the problems that came from slavery.

As Christians, we must be careful about looking at “the splinter in another’s eye, while ignoring the log in our own eye.”

Yes, homosexuality is a major issue in the life of the church and the life of the denomination but so is divorce, child abuse and hunger, heterosexual as well as homosexual promiscuity, the increasing human and financial cost of health  care, violence in the name of religion, the impact of two career families upon voluntary organizaion, and the increasing lost of whole generations to the church through disillusionment with our leadership. 

I f the Welcoming and Affirming movement is of God it will survive no matter what power is brought against it; if it is not of God it will wither away. Let God be the judge and let us build a Kingdom based on the Love of Jesus.

“For God so loved the world that he sent his son, and whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

William Hugh Tucker
Editor, Baptist Freedom