by Bruce T. Gourley
Published July 2013
(Baptist Studies Bulletin Archives Index)
Name the year in which the following events took place: The first Ford F-Series pickup rolled off the assembly line. Kentucky beat Baylor for the NCAA Men’s Basketball championship. The World Health Organization was founded. The Presley family moved to Memphis. The Supreme Court ruled that religious instruction in public schools violates the U.S. Constitution. Babe Ruth died.
Give up? All of the above events took place in 1948, the year to which Southern Baptists of 2013 have returned. More specifically, baptisms in the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination long in decline, have regressed to 1948 levels. At the same time, Liberty University in Virginia, a Southern Baptist school, is moving in the opposite direction: last year the fundamentalist school reached the 80,000-student mark in their online program. At the rate Liberty is growing, it should be larger than the SBC in a couple of decades.
What do the tales of the SBC and Liberty University, theological twins traveling divergent statistical paths, tell us about success in Baptist life of the twenty-first century?
Should baptisms, the twentieth century standard of Baptist progress, be removed from the pinnacle of the Baptist success equation? (Church historian Bill Leonard, speaking last month to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, recently framed the act of baptism as historically secondary to the experience of grace as the prerequisite for Baptist Christian community.) Should the numbers of students enrolled in Baptist educational institutions replace baptisms in formulating success in the world of Baptists?
“Success” as a word appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, shortly before Baptists emerged in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. Originally meaning “what comes next,” the word eventually evolved to signify the accomplishment of one’s goals.
Historically, Baptists for most of their first two centuries were a tiny, minority sect struggling to survive against persecution directed at them from establishment churches and theocratic governments. In such a context, their goals were simple, albeit at times puzzling to outside observers.
First and foremost, the sect sought to merely survive. Opposed by most other Christians, who often considered Baptists heretical, the handful of early Baptist congregations struggled to keep their faith communities intact at a time when being a Baptist often led to fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of property. Recruiting new converts was difficult. Why, after all, would anyone want to sign up for a life of persecution? That Baptists survived their early years was a success in and of itself.
Secondly, Baptists from the beginning set out to enact a dangerous concept that had been theorized by a handful of philosophers but had never truly been put into practice: freedom of conscience. The concept was anathema to Catholic and Protestant leaders, whose religious institutions depended upon forced conformity of their adherents. Monarchs, ever striving to control their subjects, also hated the idea. When Baptist co-founder Thomas Helwys demanded that King James I (he of King James Bible fame) grant liberty of conscience to his subjects, the king threw Helwys in prison, where he died within a few years.
Yet for Baptists, publicly advocating freedom of conscience was worth the price of persecution precisely because of their conviction that “God alone is Lord of the conscience,” a phrase repeatedly used in Baptist confessions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and hearkening to scripture. “For why should my freedom be judged by another’s conscience,” the Apostle Paul asked in 1 Corinthians 10:29. Furthermore, to the astonishment of many, Baptists fought for freedom of conscience not just for themselves, but for everyone, even those with whom they disagreed.
From belief in freedom of conscience arose certain heretical convictions that outside observers came to most closely associate with the sect known as Baptists: believer’s baptism, voluntary faith, local church autonomy, religious liberty for all, and church state separation. In the life of Baptist individuals, believer’s baptism testified to the experience of grace and the start of a new life devoted to the transformation of self, others and society through Christ-given freedom.
We, of course, know the rest of the story. Baptists did survive, and their once heretical convictions have, in the modern era, become widely accepted truths among many contemporary Protestant Christians. (A frequent exception being religious liberty for all and church state separation, beliefs that Baptists made certain were established in the new American nation, but that many contemporary American conservative evangelicals–a majoritarian group seeking privilege and favoritism with government–now denounce.)
Thus for early Baptists, success was achieved–eventually. And their accomplishments were on behalf of all persons, not merely themselves.
Yet during the past two hundred years, one might argue that Baptists have often overshadowed their own historical contributions by focusing on lesser, inwardly-directed measurements of success.
Rather than championing God-bestowed dignity and equality among humanity, majoritarian Baptists are too often intent upon domination of others. Instead of investing in doing Christ’s work among needful humanity, many Baptist congregations largely spend their resources internally. Rather than measuring their work in lives transformed by Christ-given freedom (Galatians 5:1), baptism counts are the holy grail of success. Instead of fostering the growth and expansion of the God-given human mind, too many Baptists imprison the mind with dogma.
What should success look like in Baptist life today? While the times and circumstances have obviously changed, early Baptist identity may provide a deeper well from which to address the question. Early Baptists succeeded in transforming individuals and society, a nation and the world, religion and government. A more modest, if no less important, goal in the twenty-first century might be the transformation of a church’s neighborhood. Many congregations have the resources to work throughout their neighborhoods in providing healthy food, alleviating basic medical illnesses, fostering growing and inquisitive minds, mentoring children, promoting healthy family life, breaking down racial and ethnic barriers, teaching financial skills, and modeling holistic faith. Whether or not transformative neighborhood ministry and witness increases church membership (and baptisms) is secondary; the Baptist heritage is outward-focused, not inward-directed.
What if Baptist identity in our modern era could be lived outside of the church building, as in centuries past?
What if, fifty years from now, Baptists come to be known as a people who are about the business of transforming lives, rather than counting baptisms?