Why pray for the Southern Baptist Convention?
A reminder to my fellow Disciples of Christ and others
Tuesday & Wednesday, June 11 & 12, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) will have their annual meeting in Indianapolis; they met in New Orleans last June, and took actions some of which are awaiting ratification this summer in a second and decisive vote.
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I ran a post a few months back explaining why I would encourage people to be in prayer for the United Methodist Church in their General Conference, even if they aren’t Methodists themselves.
I explained myself then largely in terms of the Disciples of Christ, my own religious tradition, and will do so again here, but you could do a quick translation of most of this into the terms of many groups as to why they might want to be prayerfully mindful of what’s going on this week in Indianapolis.
As I said about Methodists, it’s just as true in many ways about Southern Baptists: they are often right across the street, our neighbors quite often. Now there’s a bit of a barrier in our histories in many settings that we often do not have the same relationship through community Thanksgiving services or cooperative Vacation Bible Schools, since the SBC tends to be much more “independent” that way; they definitely don’t tend to be active in state level or local ecumenical programs like a council of churches or ministerial associations they way we have with Methodists. But they are there, and present, and in some communities we do work on some shared ministries, and sit on the same platforms at times as fellow Christians.
Our members and their members talk to each other. Prayer is a good means to be more mindful of what’s going on with the SBC. I say this to ministers in particular, and church leaders of all sorts: members of our churches & SBC congregations live across the street from each other, eat in the same restaurants, bowl in the same leagues, and are often related to each other. They talk, and we should be mindful of how their issues percolate into our churches.
Some of our leaders grew up Baptist. In the Midwest, the SBC has been planting churches aggressively for the last forty years, and that means quite naturally as families move or couples wed we end up with a few elders and deacons and officers who have had experiences in Baptist churches, both American Baptist (the former Northern Baptist Convention, a split which, yes, occurred before the Civil War over slavery, a history which you can easily look up). And in conversations about how ministers move between churches (very similar), on what role the region or state society plays in our property management (for Disciples, none; for SBC, even less), and as to how our fiscal obligations work out between the local and wider church (Baptists definitely understand missionary giving). So clergy can find themselves re-translating Baptist polity sometimes for even long-standing Disciples leaders, especially as from a distance it can look remarkably similar.
The SBC plays a major role, historically, in many of the communities where we serve. I’m sitting and speaking out of the Midwest, but I work through Phillips Seminary and their CMLT program which serves a large number of commissioned ministers in regions across the continent, and I know in many towns where Disciples congregations are present the SBC church is the dominant player in the community. They may or may not be the biggest, but in large swaths of the US often the SBC church plays the biggest role, at least in the minds of otherwise secular community leaders.
The SBC has become a major news item, and is likely to be one this week in all sorts of media, even for people who aren’t interested in church news. Last summer I heard from many Disciples clergy who found themselves fielding questions about both how the SBC annual meeting worked in relation to their local churches, as Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church was ushered “out” of the SBC by action of the messengers at the meeting in New Orleans, and also how this kind of action (let alone the reasons for it) relates to our General Assemblies.
Baptist theology and Disciples theology are . . . well, this is awkward. They are very different, but for a variety of reasons end up LOOKING as if they are the same. Our history and traditions result in our reading of scripture calling us to baptize “for the remission of sin” and by immersion. Outwardly, Baptists in general and the SBC in particular baptizes by immersion, so just going by appearances — which we all tend to do — we work and therefore think the same way. In fact, we do not. Baptist theology calls on their process of inviting people into faith and membership to search for an experience of conversion, a work of the Holy Spirit having already happened within the penitent believer, before they are welcome to be baptized as a mark of membership . . . and you generally in the SBC (less so today than in the relatively recent past) have to be re-baptized into a new church, because it is a mark of your obedience to the church more than the baptism itself is a sign of your relationship with God. We could discuss this at length because Baptists are NOT all the same, not by a long shot, but that’s a big part of what’s going on beneath the public face of this annual meeting around women in ministry: the question in the SBC as to whether or not there will be any variation between the faith and practice of SBC congregations. The ascendant party in SBC is pushing for a more rigorous uniformity. Meanwhile, let’s just say uniformity has never been our spiritual gift among Disciples.
In fact, we Disciples and our cousins in the independent Christian Churches & Churches of Christ went through a multi-stage split between 1926 and 1968, which had a number of stated reasons behind it, some of which related to missions, but became over time a division marked by some very similar issues to where the SBC is at. I would say at NO point in that slow-motion crack-up across forty years did any independent leader say “we are separating ourselves from you over women in ministry” but that has become a primary distinctive between our two branches of what Barton Stone and the Campbells set in motion. Independent Christian Churches may have women elders, but in fact it is rarer than hen’s teeth to find them; as the NACC, their old annual meeting of sorts, went through their last few gatherings, a huge debate in independent un-denominational Christian Churches and among their clergy was whether or not there should be women on the platform doing keynotes. (True story.) In effect, it has become very similar to where the SBC was, and I’m curious given their extremely flat polity (flatter than ours in the Disciples, to be sure) if the SBC going to an outright women pastor ban will nudge the independents in that direction. And as many clergy in the Disciples have learned, many of our congregations didn’t allow women as deacons, let alone elders, within living memory, and we still have a few yet to invite a female as senior pastor. So there are . . . resonances.
You may call this “burying the lede,” but I think many Disciples congregations are still sorting out how they feel about women in ministry. I’d even go a step farther, and say we have congregations where there are key leaders, often older ones but not always, where they are not interested in barring LGBT+ persons from leadership, but still have issues with women in top leadership. Yes, I can see you nodding your head. Thank you, you get it. This is NOT a fully resolved issue for us even in the Disciples. I think that’s true for other even oldline mainline Protestant groups, let alone other religious bodies. I have good friends in non-Christian religious traditions, and I hear about how they grapple with American sexism in ways both overt and covert (maybe even unconscious, but still). So how the SBC talks about women in ministry, and of course what they do about that role, will have more than just a “ripple effect” on many other faith communities. This is why we should be prayerful, and thoughtful, and in conversation with each other over what the SBC is talking about doing, and how they do it, and WHY: because theology and polity are matters which we all deal with whether we know it or not. We may not want to care about central offices or missionary contributions or norms of ministerial practice, but the way we relate to each other around them say a great deal about who we believe God is, and how God is at work in the world, so it’s important, I believe. It’s not just “what THEY are doing.” It matters, and so I encourage you to be aware, and mindful, and engaged in active intercession around what’s happening in Indianapolis this week, if only for what will happen closer to us in the weeks ahead.
Because the point was, and is, and always will be, prayer.
For schedule & context - https://sbcannualmeeting.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-SBC-Daily-Bulletin-Tuesday-Final.pdf