I want to introduce you to the least exclusive club in the world. A club so open that anybody can get in, whether they qualify or not, although the club says it has high standards for membership.
It is a club so broad in its social standings that it has included the lowest of the low and the highest of the high; everybody from the absolutely destitute to the Rockefeller family has been a member of this group. Every cultural outlook is represented, from those whose idea of art is something painted on black velvet, all the way to concert pianist Van Cliburn. All of them belong to this group.
It is a club so wide in its political and social outlook that it includes extreme conservatives and extreme liberals and, if there is such a thing, people in the extreme middle. Every political turn is represented: Democrats Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Albert Gore, and Marion Barry belong but so do Republicans Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, and Mark Hatfield. This is indeed a wide-open club.
More than that, it is very large, with members in more than 165 countries, yet nobody is quite sure who is at the head of it or who is in charge of it or if anybody is in charge of it. This is a very peculiar club!
I am speaking of the Baptist club. Or rather the Baptist family. We Baptists are a people of contradictions. We seem to conform to no particular standards of belief, behavior, or conduct, and yet the rest of the world sees us as dogmatic, strict, stern, and unbending. We say that we prize our independence, and yet some of us will give our freedom to whatever the current pop idolatry is. We claim no creed but the Bible, but every study shows that we do not know the Bible. We argue that we want to sing the old, old songs, but then go absolutely crazy for the latest synthesizer beat. We contend that every believer is a priest, every person is his own interpreter, but then we ask our pastors to know everything and be everywhere and step on everybody’s toes. We are a people of contradictions, we Baptists.
The first Sunday in February each year is designated as Baptist Identity Sunday through the Baptist World Alliance. This Sunday is an opportunity to focus on what we hold dear as a Baptist people. I haven’t done this very often at Takoma, because I never want to leave the impression that we are too concerned about sectarian things; after all, there weren’t any denominations in the New Testament church, and I am quite sure that the brokenness of modem Christianity is not what the Lord Jesus had in mind when He founded His church. And yet we are a part of this family. It is good on occasion to learn about our family. And particularly good in this church, because so many of us have backgrounds in other traditions. I know for a fact that some of you have come from places which are very, very different; some have come from the far left, like Unitarians, and some have come from the far right, like Pentecostals or Catholics (who, by the way, would be very surprised to hear themselves put in the same slot!). Let me just get a flavor of this: how many of you have at one time or another belonged to a church that was not a Baptist church?
My aim today is really very simple: to celebrate our kinship with Baptist brothers and sisters to build on the values that are truly important. I am by no means suggesting that Baptists have a comer on the truth; but I am suggesting that our Baptist interpretation of the gospel is distinctive, it is important, and it is life-giving … if we understand it.
I want you to hear, then, a passage of Scripture that tells us about Christ’s church and what it ought to be like. And I want to illustrate from Baptist history and practice two principles that are of great value for us.
Ephesians 4:1-6, 11-16
I
First, please notice that we are a people who prize our independence. We are a people whose most basic value is that every person has the right to have a personal relationship with the living God. Every person is a person of infinite value; every believer is his own priest before God. One of the things we ought to fight for and insist on is the freedom and the dignity of every individual soul. This is called, in Baptist theology, "soul competence".
Soul competence. That means that every person is competent to stand before God, without the intervention of anything else. Neither priest nor church, nor ritual nor doctrine, nor anything else can substitute for each person’s individual experience with the living God.
Let me illustrate. Occasionally a parent will say to me, "I’d like to have my child baptized, I think it’s about time." My answer always is, "What does the child want? What is the child feeling?" The key is personal experience with God. As a parent you cannot impose that on your child. Your child must determine that on his own. As a pastor I can’t just baptize people because they are of a certain age. Baptism is a sign of a person is in fellowship with Christ for himself. Each person is a soul competent before God.
This idea of soul competence has many implications. It makes us a people who cherish freedom and work for freedom. Did you know that many of our American traditions about freedom were fostered and nourished by Baptists in the early days of the republic? Did you know that it was Baptist Roger Williams who founded the first state in the world where people could worship or not worship entirely free of coercion? The colony of Rhode Island was a Baptist invention.
Did you know that it was Baptist preachers, who had been repeatedly arrested in Virginia for the grave offense of preaching without a license, who lobbied first Thomas Jefferson and then James Madison to make sure there would be complete religious liberty in the new United States? That’s the Baptist doctrine of soul competence coming out.
And you do know, especially as we start Black History Month, that it was Baptist Martin Luther King and others like him who raised their heads high and sang out, "Before I’ll be a slave again, I’ll go to my very grave?" They and many before them were willing to be arrested, and to violate man’s law, because as strong, soul competent persons, their ultimate loyalty was to God’s law. There again, the Baptist doctrine of soul competence.
But, you know, this also makes for a lot of problems. It means we easily become a very fractious and contentious people. It means we get to be very argumentative. Think about it: if you start off telling people that they are somebody, and that they can have a relationship with God for themselves; if you tell people that everyone is of equal worth and value, they are going to believe that, and they are just going to think that their opinion matters! As someone has quipped, if you get three Baptists together in a room discussing some issue, you will get at least four different opinions!
And so the world has a negative image of Baptists. The world sees Baptists as argumentative, fragmented, divided, difficult. The world thinks we just love to fight. And there is truth in it; one of the reasons there are so many Baptist churches is that we multiply by dividing. Anybody who feels like taking a crew out and starting a Baptist church is welcome to do so. If you are familiar with our immediate neighborhood, you know that there are storefront groups calling themselves Baptist churches within spitting distance of our front door. They have every right to do this; but sometimes it happens just because somebody wants to be contentious.
But the Bible calls on us not only to value our freedom, but also to value our unity; not only to trumpet our private opinions, but also to listen carefully to one another. "I beg you …all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." To me this means that as good Baptists each of us is charged by the Spirit to speak his heart and voice his mind and then to take responsibility for our unity. Say what you have to say, say it lovingly, but don’t be running off all hot and hurt. Trust yourself and trust your brothers and sisters with the truth as you see it.
I’ve talked of late with some folks who haven’t been here for a while. I’ve found out that they don’t like something that we’ve done or more likely they don’t care for what somebody has said. And my answer to these folks is that we need for you to come and speak up about what you feel, but also to take responsibility for the unity of the body. Just sitting on the sidelines grumbling is irresponsible. "Make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace". As a Baptist church and people, we will honor that, hear that, and cherish that. And we will be stronger for it. Speak your mind, and in doing so, "make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."
II
There is a second aspect of the Baptist way, as suggested by this Scripture. There is another important value in our Baptist family; that is our commitment to be a people on mission. As long as Baptist people focus on doing something for the Kingdom and on using one another’s gifts for ministry, we stay together. But when we lose sight of what we are to be doing for the world, we begin to come apart at the seams. When we stay focused on missions, evangelism, and ministry, we do well. When we turn away from serving others, we turn in on ourselves and become destructive. Baptists do best when we work at serving the world and not ourselves.
Paul says it: "The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ". The gifts given to the church are gifts intended for others, gifts intended for outreach to serve the needs of a broken world. That’s what has kept us together.
Two hundred years ago in England a young shoemaker named William Carey found himself burdened for the lost people of India, where the name of Christ was scarcely known at all. Carey was a shoemaker, but he was also a Baptist preacher, and he tried to persuade his colleagues to send missionaries to India. For his efforts he was rewarded with the command, "Sit down, young man. When God wants to save the heathen, he will do it without your help or mine."
But that did not stop Carey. In the midst of a Baptist fellowship that was centered on arguing and contending over minor points of doctrine, Carey gathered enough support, went to India, translated the Bible into Hindi, and began the whole modern missionary movement. Unity in our Baptist movement came about because the task of missions became more important than arguing abstract ideas.
A few years later, in the United States, a man named Luther Rice, who also had a burden for missions, found Baptists in America totally disorganized and in a chaotic condition, mainly because they had no central focus on missions. Luther Rice set about to organize this loose band of believers, and in the process started a Baptist newspaper, organized Baptists’ first denominational structure, and founded what is today George Washington University here in the District. The only thing that held these people together was a commitment to missions, and it took a visionary like Luther Rice to bring them together.
Today we Baptists are in some ways the wonder and the envy of the Christian world. Some denominations raise money for their missions work by taxing their congregations; they say to each local church, ’’You are expected to give us so many dollars." And then those local churches then try to figure out how they can get out of paying what feels like a tax. Other denominations raise money for their missions work by setting goals and quotas for their congregations, and then chastising those who don’t make the goal.
But now what do we Baptists do? We simply challenge one another, "How well can you do?" "How much can your church give?" When I was growing up, churches actually competed with one another to see how much money they could give away, and it was possible, at least in a few places, that a church might give away half of its income for missions work!
We’ve lost a lot of that, and because we’ve lost it, we’ve lost a lot of our genius.
And what do we have instead? If we’re not focused on missions, we have, in certain parts of our family, a mood of contention, an atmosphere of suspicion, and a climate of distrust. Some of you have kept up over the last fifteen or so years with developments in the Southern Baptist Convention. Some of you have said you wish we would just leave the Southern Baptists. Others have said you’ll leave us if we leave the Southern Baptists. As for me, I’ve just wanted to stay focused on missions. I’ve just wanted to see us support missionaries and stay focused on declaring the gospel in the farthest places of earth. And right now I’m bending my efforts toward getting us to focus on evangelism and ministry in our own neighborhood. When we stay focused on missions, then arguing about everything from whether women should be ordained to how you read the Bible takes a back seat. Missions holds us together.
"His gifts were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry." We here at Takoma have cut back on our gifts to missions this year. We felt we had to in order to pay some other bills. But I will tell you that if we do not find a way to turn that around soon, it will come back to haunt us. We are spending more and more money on ourselves, and less and less for others. That has to stop.
But I do feel encouraged about some things. I feel encouraged when a number of us are demonstrating new interest in the ministries of the D. C. Baptist Convention. I feel encouraged when our marriage enrichment group of young adults expresses interest in helping at Johenning Baptist Center. I feel encouraged when our Missions Committee wants to help furnish Bethany House for use by missionaries. I feel encouraged and excited to know that very likely within the next couple of weeks we will have worked out an agreement between our church and the Baptist Home for Children so that we can use one of our houses for family ministry.
I feel encouraged when a dozen or so of our people agree to organize as visitation volunteers and do evangelism in our community. I feel encouraged when we are able to organize new ministries such as SHARE and ROY, and get outside of ourselves. We won’t have time to argue if we are serving others. Missions, ministry, and evangelism are the real glues that hold together this Baptist family.
And so this morning I want to encourage you to be proud of being a Baptist. I want to urge you to learn our history, to cherish our values, and to stand tall as persons who are soul competent, able to stand before God on your own. But most of all, I want to encourage you to trust and treasure this fellowship, to trust and treasure your Baptist brothers and sisters by getting involved in ministry and missions. We are connected, like it or not, with some folks we may not agree with. But connected, like it or not, we are. And God has given us the world to love. So "speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body ... promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love."
