Roger Williams Fellowship

What Does it Mean to Be Baptist?: Choosing our Convictions, Forming Our Life Together

In 1996 I was a guest professor at the “Moscow Theological Seminary of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists”. I asked about the institution’s name. It seems that prior to the post-Soviet inundation of Russia by Mormons, Moonies, “independent” Christians and just about every other kind of American religious group that proselytizes, if you were Christian and you weren’t Orthodox and you weren’t Catholic, then you were “Baptist”, an elastic term including all sorts of charismatic and non-charismatic descendents of the Protestant Reformation, who had evolved in relative isolation from both the West and mainstream Russian culture for generations.

Here in the United States there are 43 different groups of “Baptists” identified in the online version of the “Association of Religious Data Archives”. They are Calvinist and Arminian, liberal, progressive, conservative and fundamentalist. They collectively are the greatest mission-sending people in the world and they eschew missions as sinful presumption, usurping God’s authority. They ordain women and welcome gays and lesbians into fellowship; they restrict ordained leadership to men and feel that the “homosexual agenda” is one of the greatest threats to the integrity and perseverance of American culture. They were founding pillars of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (originally “Protestants and Others United...”) and they have been among the leaders in the contemporary movement to “take back America for God” and to recognize and honor the Christian roots of this nation. They exercised prophetic leadership in the Civil Rights movement a generation ago and they are, in the persistence of “Northern” and Southern Baptists, the last major American denominational tradition to preserve the pre-Civil War divisions of the 1840’s and 50’s.

One of the universally-agreed upon “Baptist principles” is congregational autonomy, but the centrally-controlled agencies, and the six wholly-owned seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention belie this principle, and the Cooperative Program set up to fund them has historically been one of the most extensive and efficient religious bureaucracies in the world. (Ironically, the Cooperative Program has languished as Southern Baptist conservatives have consolidated their control over the Convention in the last twenty-five years.)

Another classic “Baptist principle” is biblical authority. I learned growing up in Kentucky that Baptists have taken with utter seriousness the Reformation motto “sola scriptura”. The Bible is our sole rule of faith and practice; we eschew manmade creeds and catechisms. Or do we? It wasn’t until I rolled out this truism before my colleague in the Church History chair at Central Seminary, Dr. Robert Fulop, that I learned about the venerable stream of New World Baptist “confessions” beginning with the Philadelphia Confession of 1707 and continuing through the three recensions of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message in 1925, 1963 and 2000. This latter document was said to simply “express what is commonly held by Southern Baptists” as taught in scripture. But if such a document is used to define boundaries of fellowship and enforce doctrinal conformity among a defined group of believers, then it is, practically speaking, a creed, no matter what it is called. This fact, in and of itself, is not necessarily either good or bad; my point is simply – once again – the often unappreciated diversity of positions and characteristics among the “Baptists”.

Martin E. Marty, in a widely-cited 1983 article in Christianity Today, wrote of the “baptistification of America”. In our culture of rugged individuals, entrepreneurs and men and women of unique and personal guiding principles (at least in our own imagination), Methodists tell their bishop what he (or she) can do with the assigned pastor, and Episcopalians fire their bishops, go under the care of bishops from Uganda and sue the national church to retain control of their properties. That is to say, they act like Baptists. And in the exploding suburbs and exurbs that define late 20th and early 21st century America, the mega and not-so-megachurches sprouting in strip malls and meadows are pointedly nondenominational. They are “Community Churches” and “Family Life Centers” and offer “New Hope” or a “Word of Life”. But in my experience on both coasts and in the Midwest, they are almost universally “baptistic”, with their congregational autonomy, practice of believer’s baptism, emerging networks of “voluntary” association with like-minded believers, and their uncritical assumptions that the “What We Believe” statements on their websites are simple transcriptions of the plain teachings of scripture. And in this emerging Christian landscape, every pastor is a bishop and every local church with its daughters is a denomination unto itself, though the word is unvoiced.

In the fall of 2006, I was invited to teach a course on world religions as a guest professor at Whittier College. As a way of understanding the group of students I would guide through this process, I distributed an anonymous survey in which I asked the students to specify their religious identity, if any, and their knowledge of and level of commitment to it. Not surprisingly, surveying a group of students self-selected for interest in a religion course at this liberal arts college with Quaker roots, I found that 22 of the 25 students self-identified as some sort of Christian. Also, with a large number of Latino students, it was not surprising that 11 of those 22 self-identified as Catholic. But not a single one of the other eleven used any of the mainline labels such as Baptist, Methodist or Lutheran. Not a one! Three students did call themselves “Evangelical”, including one “Evangelical Catholic”!

Now admittedly this is anecdotal evidence based on an exceedingly small sample, but it is consistent with my experiences working with students over more than twenty years of teaching. Truly the days of denominational “brand loyalty” are over. And just maybe those loyalties were never as deep or extensive as we have imagined. But in addition to our fundamental loyalty to Christ and his Church, wherever it is alive and faithful, we have some history, some convictions and some relationships to honor. And together that history, those convictions and those relationships weave a precious pattern through the tapestry that is the Body of Christ.

As American Baptists, ours is the history of evangelists such as Jitsuo Morikawa, theorists of the social gospel such as Walter Rauschenbusch and prophetic practitioners such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (And invoking those very names reminds us that such emphases and practices are not mutually exclusive but intimately related.) Ours is the history of liberal/progressive pastors such as George Hill filling pulpits in great urban centers and conservative/progressive pastors (if I may coin a phrase) such as Bill Keucher leading great churches in the broad American heartland. Ours is the history of great women of faith such as Helen Barrett Montgomery and Ella Mitchell and Mary Armacost Hulst standing up and standing out for generations. Ours is the history of Adoniram and Ann Judson and John Mason Peck and Dr. Marian Boehr going to far places to make Jesus present and Lennie Ballesteros and James Chuck and Tom Gabio making Jesus present to the ones in our midst whom society might deem “other”.

Another writer would invoke other names, but for me, this litany of names generates a particular trajectory into the plethora of invocations of “Baptist Principles”, a particular prioritizing of convictions to honor. We will cherish soul competency; no cabal of pastors, no denominational bureaucrat, no theological special interest group will tell us what we may believe or whom we may include or with whom we may associate. But our understanding of soul competency will not be a religious analogue to an extreme individualism. My invocation of history – the unique strand of history that is American Baptist – reminds us that we formed ourselves through voluntary association for ministry and mission. Our identity as Baptist Christians has been forged through relationships and through shared practices. And the principle of soul competency, our history of association and the particular names I have invoked all combine to generate a big tent version of life together as Christian believers.

We may be no more or less “Baptist” than Southern Baptists, Cooperative Baptists, National Baptists or “independent and fundamental” Baptists, but our life together is life under the big tent where Jesus is Lord and we stay together in spite of our differences – indeed, sometimes because of our differences, for we learn through respectful interaction with the other who challenges our perceptions and customs. Living with difference is not a facile endorsement of post-modern skepticism. We acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the unique authority of Scripture. But like many Americans we also acknowledge a healthy distrust of authoritarian persons and structures – secular or religious – and the motivations that drive them. Something about “principalities and powers...”

Still, our society may become ever so secular, ever so distrustful of institutions, ever so immersed in self-realization, and we humans will never transcend certain needs and drives that are, I believe, at the core of the imago dei within us. We have a fundamental drive to identify with something or somebody larger than ourselves. Why not the living Christ, present and active in and through us who are privileged to be called his disciples and formed by him? We have a fundamental yearning for membership in the beloved community. Why not the Church of Jesus Christ, freely giving itself away in neighbor love?

If I dare say so, it is a propitious hour to be the sort of Baptist Christian I have tried to describe and to live the sort of life together I have tried to invoke. And it is a choice that we make so to define ourselves and so to live. Labels are not so important. After all, Roger Williams himself was a “Baptist” for only a few months. But these choices we make and the relationships we create and sustain and the holy vulnerability we exemplify in our fearful society are of inestimable value. We are “marching to Zion” together, and it is a holy pilgrimage.

Dr. David L. Wheeler
June, 2008

David L. Wheeler is Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Portland, Oregon and Secretary-Treasurer of the Roger Williams Fellowship.