I Was the Token Male in the Women's World

"Brother Webb, working with all those women must have affected your mind.  Something obviously did."
Those words ended a harsh, lengthy letter I received when I was editorial department director for the national Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), an independent auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention.   Well, at least, the writer called me brother!
This was in the 1970s during what proved to be the unsuccessful effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U. S. Constitution.  Some Southern Baptists -- men as well as women -- were making a parallel effort to heighten awareness of the need for equal standing for all Christians in the churches.
That letter writer was a retired military chaplain who took exception to an article titled “A Woman’s Place,” which I wrote for Royal Service, at that time, the flagship publication for WMU.    
I wrote that a woman’s place need not be restricted to the home.  Moreover, a woman’s place in the church need not be restricted to subservient roles.  I cited the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:5-6, who imposed no restriction on women praying or preaching in church, so long as they observed the accepted dress code of the day and kept their heads covered.  
The chaplain preferred chapter 14, verse 34, in the same biblical book in which Paul told women to be silent in church.   That verse is open to varied interpretations, but it is difficult simply to ignore the earlier chapter 11.
My article was adapted from Bible studies I led during WMU weeks at Glorieta and Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Centers.  I highlighted godly women in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament in ministry, business, and the home.   
Word about these spoken presentations excited the editor of a Baptist state paper.  He contacted my supervisors at the national WMU offices in Birmingham, Alabama, to verify that a WMU employee had actually said those troubling words.  I stood by what I had said from the pulpit and in print, and the executive leadership stood with me.  
I had an ongoing job assignment to write for the various WMU magazines.  Contempo, the magazine for Baptist Young Women (BYW), was edited by a young woman, recently graduated from Baylor University.  She was eager to address the issue of the place of women in home and church.
A bachelor named Bill Gothard was filling public auditoriums across the South with a week-long lecture series, elucidating his vision of the God-ordained chain of command in the home:  Children are answerable to their mother.  The wife-mother answers to her husband, and the husband answers to God for the whole lot.  
Large numbers of Southern Baptist women and men attended Gothard’s lectures, absorbing these instructions.  This was almost twenty-five years before the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention passed an amendment to the document known as The Baptist Faith and Message Statement, declaring: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."
Another amendment to that document, in 2000, stated, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”  That statement, which is not binding on local congregations or families in those congregations, goes on to say this:

"The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation."

When the Contempo editor asked me to do an article on family relationships.  I wrote that Pansy and I both were mature Christian adults when we married, and the question of who should be the human head of the house was never asked nor answered.  We both had heads, and we both intended to use them.

This caused a tempest in the WMU teacup.  One distressed BYW member, in the Gothard mode, wrote that, after reading my article, unless or until her BYW director gave her specific permission, she could no longer read Contempo.

In my years as “the Token Male at WMU,” there were attempts at dialogue among SBC agencies and WMU regarding the place of the Christian woman.  In a mostly male gathering in Nashville, someone asked about gender sensitivity in language.  What about addressing Sunday morning worshipers collectively as “brethren”?  Many of the men in the meeting insisted “brethren” and “brothers” were gender-inclusive: women shouldn’t feel left out when those terms are used.   
A woman, probably Carolyn Weatherford (now Crumpler), our CEO at WMU, turned that around: “How would you men feel in a congregation if a speaker greeted everyone as ‘sisters’?”  Most of the men thought that was different. “Sisters” just isn’t inclusive like “brethren.”  So a quarter century before the 1998 amendment to the faith statement, Southern Baptist women already were expected to submit graciously to male-oriented language.
Several times since the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC began in 1979, the men at the helm have tried to convert WMU from an auxiliary to an agency, which would place WMU under SBC control.  Each time, WMU has graciously submitted word that they have no intention of submitting graciously to SBC’s male servant leadership.
The SBC was organized in 1845, primarily for sending missionaries to foreign countries and to areas in this country deemed under-evangelized.  But, ironically, when women began the effort to form a national organization to enhance mission work, they met resistance from pastors.   Catherine Allen, who was one of my colleagues on the national staff, in her centennial book, A Century to Celebrate: History of Woman’s Missionary Union, documented the ambivalence of pastors in the 1880s, the decade leading up to WMU’s founding in 1888.
When women began having missions-themed sessions parallel to SBC meetings, men attended in large number, but they refused to recognize women as “messengers,” the preferred SBC term for delegates.
At the women’s gathering in Baltimore in 1884, when a woman spoke ardently on behalf of missions, some of the men shouted against her, accusing her of “preaching.”  When they asked whether she was “ordained,” she said, “No.  I was foreordained,” and went on with her message.  
In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1886, several men failed to get the Convention to invite the women to attend as visitors.  That year and again in 1887 in Louisville, the women retaliated, excluding men from their meeting.
When WMU was officially launched in 1888 in Richmond, some men continued their opposition.  Even so, Pastor F. M. Ellis made this statement:    "There is in our churches a great power, which has not yet been utilized but has remained dormant, the power and influence of woman.  The lines of destiny seem to point to her as the great power by which the gospel is to be sent to the ends of the earth.”
In the 1880s, because men refused to associate with the women, the women formed their own organization to support missionaries the men had appointed.  Now, the men want to bring that women’s organization into the SBC.
Baptist historian H. Leon McBeth wrote that men “have had an almost irrational fear of women even standing in the pulpit, whether they were preaching or not. .  .   .  It is almost as if we fear that if you approach too closely, you will somehow contaminate or desecrate the holy places and holy things of our faith.
One concrete example from McBeth:  After WMU officially formed, they prepared a written report to the Convention each year.  But the first forty years, they had to submit the report (graciously?) to a man who would read it to the gathering.  In 1929, when the national WMU president gave her own report for the first time, McBeth said, “several men walked out rather than witness such desecration.”
To avoid further contamination of the holy precincts, for several years for the Convention adjourned from the church sanctuary and reassembled in Sunday school facilities to hear the WMU report.
When I joined the national staff in 1974 (approximately the eighty-fifth year of WMU’s founding), I was not the only man on the payroll.  One of the artists for our publications was a young African-American man, working alongside “all those women” in the art department (I wonder whether that affected his mind).  The other male employees were either janitors or in the shipping department, packaging publications for shipment to churches across the country.
Decades earlier, when WMU was in charge of missions education for boys, J. Ivyloy Bishop led the Royal Ambassador organization for the SBC.  He was the first man in a position of professional leadership at WMU.  Though I never met Mr. Bishop, I suspect he faced the same question: “How can you stand it, working with all those women?”
I did not feel less a man by “submitting graciously” to the women in my line of supervision.  My division director Bobbie Sorrill, our CEO Carolyn Weatherford, and I were all mature Christian adults who could relate to each other as Christian professionals.  Today, we are Facebook Friends.
Women’s issues from the 1970s are still with us, in the nation and in the SBC.  Many church groups move forward, acknowledging that God calls women as pastors and bishops and blessing them in these positions.  Meanwhile, the SBC has stepped boldly into the nineteenth century when a woman’s place was in the home.  In church, she can work with children and pray for the missionaries.

More recently, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, launched a “women only” homemaking curriculum, consisting of classes in nutrition, meal preparation, and textile design.  There’s nothing wrong with courses in home economics at a Baptist school, but it seems odd in a theological seminary’s curriculum.  Though it may seem strange to exclude men, I guess if the instructors are women, men should not be expected graciously to submit, either in church or in a seminary classroom.  A news release from the seminary quoted Titus 2:5, indicating this curriculum is intended to make the students  “good homemakers, and submissive to their husbands.” President Paige Patterson was quoted as saying the curriculum is “for the sake of the church and the ministry and for the sake of our society. If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”

While the SBC looks backward and constricts the role of women, new seminaries and divinity schools which relate to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) are recruiting and nurturing women.  These women are free to pursue theological studies leading toward pastoral service.  CBF is a small but more progressive group which broke away from the SBC after fundamentalists gained rigid control of the entire SBC structure.

When I was on the national WMU staff, we were aware of a very limited number of women pastors in SBC churches.  As the saying goes, you could probably count them on one hand.  Over  the past decades, the number of women in CBF-related pastorates has increased, though not in the SBC.  

Though growth has not been not phenomenal, more churches are recognizing the legitimacy of the sense of pastoral calling in the lives of women.  Still, the war continues, as demonstrated in the Georgia Baptist Convention’s action against First Baptist, Decatur, because a woman, Julie Pennington-Russell, is their pastor.  Not only will the state convention refuse to seat Decatur folks as messengers, they no longer accept contributions from the church.  

The path will not be easy as more churches stay open to the possibility that God is calling women as their pastors, but my prayer is that they will not limit their options by eliminating women from consideration.

When WMU hired me, this was a reverse spin on putting a woman in a “man’s job.”  But they didn’t just draw my name out of a bonnet.  Along with congregational work, I had wide experience as a journalism professor and writer for Baptist publications, including WMU.  So some of the editors knew me as one of their writers, and they thought I would be able to “work with all those women.”

And, yes, I freely confess: Working with all those women did affect my mind, causing me to see our sovereign God work in the lives of both women and men who graciously submit to His leadership. 

Looking Back to Other Independence Days

Today, Independence Day 2013, I re-read something I wrote for Independence Day 2002.  That, in turn, looked back to what I wrote on Independence Day 1971:

I recently rediscovered notes I had scribbled in church on a bulletin dated "Independence Day, 1971."

"Going to church on Independence Day proved to be a strange experience. In the service which included patriotic songs and the pledge of allegiance to the nation's flag, I had mixed emotions. My boyhood training of national pride and idealism welled up. But those emotions kept getting tangled with darker feelings. I kept thinking of those whose freedom is abridged in our land -- the blacks who as a people have not known liberty and justice -- and of those in high places who seem to be trying to suppress such basic freedoms as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We all too readily sing 'My Country, 'tis of Thee' and say the Pledge as if these express realities rather than ideals toward which to strive. In a comfortable, all-white, middle class congregation, we can convince ourselves that these things are so and that God is guiding and blessing America on a predestined course as holy nation---one nation under God."

As I look back, I am struck by how little things have changed. If all are equal in this land of the free, some are still more equal than others. Today many African-American children attend schools that are separate and unequal. In the past nine months [since 9/11] Arab and Muslim Americans have received governmental and non-governmental scrutiny at odds with Constitutional guarantees and the lessons of American history.

Another troubling aspect of that 1971 church service is still with us. In many churches on the Sunday closest to Independence Day, it is difficult to tell what, exactly, is being worshipped. Patriotic songs replace Christian hymns, and the Pledge of Allegiance is recited almost as if it is a creed or confession of faith.

As a Baptist, I am fiercely loyal to both my nation and my church. I am equally dedicated to keeping a respectful distance between them. When my Baptist ancestors in some English colonies refused to pay taxes to support state religion, they were jailed and, in some cases, killed. The principles for which they struggled -- free exercise and disestablishment -- are now codified in the First Amendment of the Constitution, and have long been a hallmark of Baptist groups.

James Miller, pastor of First Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island -- which is also America's first Baptist church, founded by religious liberty advocate Roger Williams after his flight from the Massachusetts Bay Colony -- recently described his church's distinctive July Fourth celebration to EthicsDaily.com. Pastor Miller said, "Rather than tapping into those old land of liberty-type of songs that are often sung in some churches, I prefer to highlight those old hymns such as 'Be Thou My Vision' and 'God of Grace and God of Glory' that remind us we are citizens of two worlds but that it is God we worship." Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs [now the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty] in Washington, D. C., a watchdog group for church-state separation, told EthicsDaily.com that whatever a church does in celebrating Independence Day, "... we must be sure that we don't overshadow the cross."

For the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Judge Alfred T. Goodwin last week ruled the words "under God" in the Pledge to be unconstitutional, then almost immediately put his ruling on hold. A firestorm of opposition to the original ruling broke out on talk shows and in the halls of Congress, pointing to our inability to separate church and state in our thinking and emotions. Both houses of Congress voted in support of God in the Pledge, and House members gathered on the Capitol steps to say the Pledge and sing "God Bless America." Many Americans defended the phrase "under God" as a precious symbol. But God is much more than a symbol.

Though both tap deep streams of commitment and emotion, faith and patriotism are not identical. Just as being a loyal American has nothing to do with devotion or lack of devotion to God, being a loyal, welcome member of a church, synagogue, or mosque should have nothing to do with one's politics or patriotic fervor. As we celebrate the birth of the United States of America, we must work harder to disentangle religion and nationalism. For now, just as in 1971, the emotions associated with God and country get tangled in the hearts of all.

I See a Nation

I see a nation in my mind

Where everyone can freedom find,

Where thoughts may freely be opined,

Where folks I meet are color-blind, 

And no one has to be defined

By stereotypes that are unkind.

And children won’t be left behind

Because their family’s not refined.

Down such a path our lives could wind

Until our spirits are aligned

To share a union newly mined.

I see that nation in my mind.

 Lawrence Webb

 July 4, 2004

"Sweet Land of Liberty, Of Thee I Sing"

I learned a parody of “My Country, Tis of Thee” from my fellow grade schoolers during World War Two.  It started this way:

“My country’s up a tree,
My home is Germany.
My name is Fritz.”

A teenager in our little rural school suggested a name for a patriotic club the high school kids were organizing: “Anti-Slant-Eye,” a slap at Japan, another nation the United States was battling.  Their teacher-advisor led them to find another name.

By definition, there’s always an enemy nation in a war.  So the best way to show loyalty to your own country is to put another country down.  Or so it seems.
The sad irony is that, after a decade or two, the country we learned to hate in one war becomes an ally in the next.
George Orwell, Robert Southey, and Mark Twain come to mind as writers who have addressed the futility of war:

Orwell's novel, 1984,  pictures how Big Brother manipulates loyalties among the people in Oceania.  At the proverbial drop of a hat, Winston Smith and his fellow citizens turn against Eurasia and support Eastasia.  Later, they turn against Eastasia and support Eurasia.


In Southey’s 1798 poem, “The Battle of Blenheim,” Wilhelmine and Peterkin listen as their grandfather Kaspar extols the great victory in that battle.  France and Bavaria lost to the allied forces of England, Austria, and the United Provinces in 1704. After the children find skulls in their garden, they ask for an explanation:

  "It was the English," Kaspar cried,

     "Who put the French to rout;

  But what they fought each other for,

     I could not well make out;

  But everybody said," quoth he,

     "That 'twas a famous victory.”

Learning of the war in which “many thousand bodies here/Lay rotting in the sun," Wilhelmine calls it “a very wicked thing.” But Kaspar corrects her.  Then the poem ends with this exchange between the lad and his grandfather:

"But what good came of it at last?"

     Quoth little Peterkin.

  "Why that I cannot tell," said he,

     "But 'twas a famous victory."

Twain’s “The War Prayer” pictures an anonymous war:  

"The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering .  .  ."

On Sunday morning, in a full church, the preacher offered a prayer ---

"that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --"

A stranger went to the pulpit, motioned the minister to step aside, and prayed the underside of what had just been prayed:

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”

Happy Fourth of July.

Old Eustace and a Baptist Meeting

Eustace came to mind as Pansy and I attended the 2013 General Assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) in Greensboro, North Carolina.

A few years ago, our church notified us that Eustace was our “family minister,” under a plan in which deacons and other designated lay members are supposed to keep track of crises or special events in the lives of assigned families.

Eustace (which, of course, was not his real name) came up to me at church soon after we received the notice and said, in effect, “You being a minister, you won’t have any problems.  So I won’t bother you and your wife.”  Eustace was a man of his word.  Thereafter, when he saw us across the sanctuary, he would wave at us and give a big grin.  I could picture him taking out his notebook and putting a check by our names: “I’ve done my duty by the Webbs.”

The idea that ministers and their wives have no spiritual needs flashed through my mind at the CBF meeting as continual inspiration flowed like an IV, filling the veins of my spirit and healing wounds of my heart.  

Music touches the depths of my spirit.  So I hungrily absorbed the sounds of a mellow saxophone with “Jesus Loves Me,” a song adults need to hear along with children.  A full orchestra’s “It Is Well with My Soul” reminded me to check my spiritual vital signs to see if all really is well.  A kilted bagpiper’s traditional “Amazing Grace” made me once more claim the “grace that is greater than all my sin.”  The piper played first as he marched steadily down the center aisle of the huge auditorium and then as he accompanied a massed youthful choir.  The instrumental pieces were so familiar that I “sang in the Spirit” as they were played.

I joined in hearty congregational singing of the sort I scarcely remember hearing since long-ago seminary chapel when robust voices were raised to the glory of the One to whom we were seeking to dedicate our lives in church careers.

Newly commissioned chaplains, church starters, and counselors stood on the stage, some giving testimony in larger than life video amplification.  Their fresh commitment to serve “the least of the least” of Christ’s brethren and sisters caused me to ask myself, “How am I fulfilling the dedication I made to the Lord sixtysome years ago?  How am I letting God use me?  What more could I do?  How can my wife and I best use some of our financial resources to strengthen their work and the broader ministry of CBF?”

After the commissioning, the new CBF ministers moved to locations around the auditorium, and we were invited to form small clusters around each minister.  The inner circle right around each new worker put their hands on his or her shoulders.  Those of us on the outer rings put our hands on the shoulders of those in front of us.  By extension, then, all of us in a cluster were physically and spiritually connected as a prayer of dedication was offered.

Wendell Griffen, a tall salt-and-pepper-haired African-American bi-vocational pastor from Little Rock, began his Thursday night capstone message with a line from Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s movie, The Blues Brothers.  In the movie which I have not seen but now want to see, one of these unsavory, foul-mouthed characters declares, "I'm on a mission from God."  Griffen offered a disclaimer for the language and behavior of the Brothers, but he used that declaration as his launchpad for challenging us CBFers to be on a mission from God.

Bill Leonard, church history professor at Wake Forest Divinity School, challenged us Baptists to put a clearer, affirming focus on baptism, the rite which gave us our name.  It’s been a while since I baptized anyone, but Leonard’s breakout session made me realize I had made little effort to help children or adults understand the testimonial significance of what they were undertaking or to remind viewers in the congregation of their own symbolic burial to sin and resurrection to a new kind of life.

Another foundational concern for Baptists throughout our four-century history came into focus in the session led by Brent Walker and his fellow staffers of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.  Our look at current thorny issues of church-state separation made me wonder what more I can do in our church and in other contexts to protect this vital principle which led to the very formation of our denomination.  Our Baptist forbears promulgated this among our nation’s founding fathers and influenced the inclusion of this principle in the first sixteen words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Brett Younger appropriately had us laughing -- often self-consciously -- in a workshop on use of humor in the pulpit.  The professor of homiletics (“preaching,” in everyday language)  from Mercer’s McAfee School of Theology, made me start to reassess my whole approach to preaching, not just the question of how or whether to try to make the congregation laugh.  Younger’s bottom line: make sermons interesting, not necessarily make them funny.  I thought of a note a guest preacher found on the pulpit: “What are you trying to do to these people?”

A tiny Texan named Suzii Paynter stood seven feet tall in her closing challenge as the new coordinator of the national CBF.   She laid out her vision and challenge which I hope and pray will mark a truly new day for CBF.  We're still young as an organization and have a good foundation, but if she gets to the various state CBFs and other local meetings, she can go a long way toward energizing our statistically small body.  Her challenge includes new church starts, outreach to diverse populations, and inclusion of more women as ministers.

We had several other uplifting experiences on the CBF trip that were not part of the programmed events:

En route to Greensboro, we stopped over in nearby High Point, North Carolina, to visit one of my former journalism students and his family. Nathan did the layout and design for my two Christmas books.   He and his wife Christy have three handsome, healthy boys: ages 10, 8, and 5.  They also have a dear little girl, age 4, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which Nathan and I both have likened to a childhood version of Lou Gehrig’s Disease  (ALS).  Our heartache at seeing her continual deterioration is mitigated by seeing the loving care her parents and brothers give.  Nathan and Christy are determined to help her have a good life for whatever time that life may last.

We were delighted to see the maturity and Christian commitment of a Greensboro couple whose lives had intersected with ours when they were much younger.  Gayle and Richard were grade schoolers in my first church after seminary.  A few years later, just after we married, Pansy taught Gayle in ninth grade English.  Gayle is now a retired teacher herself, and Richard is a semi-retired business-related professional.  We enjoyed fellowship with them in the evening worship hours and over dinner in a little Greek restaurant they frequent.  

A strong initial appeal for going to the CBF meeting was the prospect of fellowship with representatives from the seminary at my college alma mater, Hardin-Simmons University (HSU).  My appreciation for how HSU professors and staff helped me grow up is so strong that I wrote a book, Hardin-Simmons, Hail to Thee.  That title, by the way, is the first five words of our HSU anthem.   I was able to spend time at the seminary booth in the exhibit hall, and Pansy and I were guests of the seminary at the Baptist Joint Committee luncheon.  All this led to reflections on opportunities Hardin-Simmons provided for overcoming some of my youthful flaws during four eventful years on campus.
I also enjoyed many mini-reunions in hallway conversations with fellow ministers, some of whom I hadn’t seen in decades.  I’m trying to keep those contacts alive through the blessing of the Internet and e-mail. 

The CBF assembly closed with a Communion service.  This was no passive event.  We had to get up from our chairs and go to servers who were stationed throughout the auditorium.  The very act of getting up and moving caused me to think even more seriously than usual about my sin and Jesus's sacrificial death to forgive and remove those sins which is depicted in this rite.

So, old Eustace was more than a little off base.  And I didn’t try to explain to him that we ministers have spiritual weaknesses and that we face temptations day by day and often fall to them, much the same as he and other lay people do.  

The entire CBF trip -- en route and in the hallway, in addition to the structured sessions --   provided occasion for introspection and retrospection, for spiritual renewal.

Years ago, I heard about an old cowboy who spent weeks or months out on the range, virtually alone with his cattle.  About his only sustained contact with other live humans was at the annual camp meeting where he absorbed all he could of the gospel messages.  Then, he fed on that inspiration for months to come as he went back to his cows.  I pray that I can feed for months to come on the inspiration of those brief days in Greensboro.

If you're a Baptist . . . or if you're not

If you're a Baptist, you might be interested in knowing more about your Baptist background.  

If you're not a Baptist, you should be interested in how Baptists were pioneers in the struggle for religious freedom and church-state separation.

You may not know what brought Baptists into existence in the first place.  We are just over four hundred years old, beginning 1608 or 1609.  Two men in England and Holland are considered the first Baptists: John Smyth (or Smith) and Thomas Helwys.   They resisted the required Church of England because it was required.  People were punished -- fined, jailed, or worse -- if they refused to be Anglicans.  To be born British was to be born Anglican.  The name Baptist was a criticism of their insistence on baptism by choice.

Smyth and Helwys with some forty dissenters fled England for Holland and found problems of religious freedom there as well and later returned to England. Their two main concerns were (1) baptism and church membership for people old enough to decide for themselves and (2) church-state separation.  The two issues were intertwined. People did not have a choice because the king’s religion was the religion of the nation.  Helwys died in prison as a dissenter under King James I.  

A kindred spirit was Roger Williams, who took courageous stands, first in England and later in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He started the first Baptist church on this continent in Providence, Rhode Island, after he fled Massachusetts under threat of his life.  

Neither Williams nor Smyth remained Baptist for long.  They were “Seekers,” always seeking new free expression of faith. But they laid a foundation for religious freedom.

Here are some excerpts from Williams’s “A Plea for Religious Liberty,” showing his determination for freedom of religion and freedom from religion.  I am including the statements which seem most pertinent (http://www.constitution.org/bcp/religlib.htm).  His “Sixthly” is especially significant:

First, that the blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace. .  .  .

Fifthly, all civil states with their officers of justice in their respective constitutions and administrations are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual or Christian state and worship.

Sixthly, it is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God's Spirit, the Word of God. .  .  .

Eighthly, God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls. .  .  .

Tenthly, an enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.

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I recently bought two books which gave me more depth perspective regarding Williams and also the impact Baptists had in getting the First Amendment passed:

Nicholas P. Miller, The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State,  Oxford University Press, 2012.

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul, Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, Viking Press, 2012.

Barry gives great details of Williams’s struggle against established religion, first in England and then in the American colonies.

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Sad to say, the dominant Baptist group in the U. S., the Southern Baptist Convention, my framework for roughly the first fifty years of my life, has done a one-hundred-eighty degree turn.  SBC leaders were the main instigators in establishing the group now known as American United for Separation of Church and State. But now they frequently abuse the whole separation concept.

I no longer consider myself Southern Baptist.  I identify with the newer Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF).  It’s too small to call a splinter group.  It’s more like a sliver group.

Tucking in the shirttail

Easter is a season, not simply one day, in liturgical churches.  So let me, a Low-Church Baptist, tell you about one of my most memorable experiences in an Easter Sunday service.

Pansy and I were in London's Westminster Abbey, sitting in the section known as Poets Corner.  On the row just ahead of us was a middle-aged couple in their Sunday Best.  With the couple were three young fellows of older high school or younger college age, all in neat casual wear.

As we stood and sat several times during the Anglican service, one of these youths caught my eye:  His shirttail was out of his slacks, extending below his windbreaker jacket.

In the Anglican tradition, people go forward if they wish to receive Communion, and ushers that morning signaled each row of worshipers when it was their turn.  When people on the row ahead of us stood, this young man began quickly tucking in his shirttail.

I wondered why.

Did he dress in a hurry in leaving the hotel and simply not bother about tidying up until he got to church?

Did he enjoy the tails-out look but fear the man and woman he was with would disapprove if they noticed?

Was this a conditioned reflex in response to years of etiquette training?

Or was he conscious of a holy dimension as he was about to kneel for a moment to receive bread and wine?

This ritual, by whatever name -- Communion, Eucharist, Lord's Supper, Sacrament, Memorial Supper, The Table -- is the most solemn activity among Christian churches around the world.  It points to the death of Jesus, His self-giving which connects us to God through faith.

In John's Gospel, chapter 6, Jesus calls Himself the bread of life which came down out of heaven and says those who eat His body and drink His blood have eternal life.  That may sound "too Catholic" for us Low-Church Protestants.  But there it is, in Red Letters in some Bibles, as the very words of Jesus.

If we are offended by such language, we aren't the first.  The Gospel writer says, "After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him."  Not even His intimate group of disciples understood what Jesus meant.

Roman Catholics say the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus.  Lutherans say Jesus is present in some mysterious way but not with the literalness of Catholics. And we Low-Church Baptists loudly insist, "It's just symbolic."  One of my fellow Baptists said, "We squeeze every once of spiritual significance from the observance."

But what did Jesus mean by saying in John 6:53, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you"?

What about this?  We are to identify so fully with His life, death, and resurrection that we absorb the reality of His person into us.

If the young man in Westminster Abbey had absorbed such thoughts of Jesus into himself, no wonder he tucked in his shirttail as he readied himself to receive the bread and wine and in some sense encounter the crucified and risen Christ.