For Wilshire Baptist Church
My first job out of college was at the Waco Tribune-Herald as a general assignment and late-night police reporter. No surprises there; that’s where newspaper newbies started out. But, my work days were 4 p.m. to midnight, and my weekends were Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I was out of sync with the world, so when I was offered a regular daytime beat, I jumped at the opportunity.
So, social service agencies and religion became my thing. The former put me in the middle of agency budget tightening during the Reagan years, and the latter put me in the deepening water of changes in many denominational cultures and especially the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the denomination I was born and raised in. My first church as an infant was the First Southern Baptist Church of Great Falls, Montana.
Both of those beats put me at the forefront of newsworthy events, which I enjoyed because my job was to write about newsworthy events, but I wasn’t really plugged into the ramifications of the changes I was writing about. I knew the local MHMR (mental health-mental retardation, as it was called back then) agency was being constrained by tighter budgets and that was hurting how many people they could serve and how they could serve them, but that didn’t really impact my life in any concrete way. And I knew the SBC was tightening its message and mission and becoming more fundamental. That didn’t really impact me either. In my mind I still was a free-thinking Southern Baptist.
Forty years later, I look back and I’m less interested in reading the news about this and certainly not writing about it, but now I’m very interested in the ramifications. I can see that mental health has become a huge issue in our world, and our lack of will as a society to fund services to help those in need is destroying our society. Whether talking about gun violence, addiction, education, homelessness, hunger, parenting or even justice, there is a mental health element that is not being addressed and that is hurting us all, including me. As for religion and especially denominational polity, efforts to categorize, police and cast out individuals and entire congregations that want to do things a different way are rampant in many denominations.
I’ve just read an email blast – “An Invitation to Baptist Churches” – from Paul Baxley, executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF). It’s an invitation for local congregations to come as they are and join forces with other churches to do the work of Christ. It’s an open-ended and open-hearted invitation that seems to me to be exactly what Jesus himself was modeling and telling us to do: Come as you are, be who God made you to be, and come work together to be a light and help in a hurting world.
While the invitation makes no mention of the SBC, I read it knowing that this past week the SBC dismissed two congregations that dared to label women as “pastors.” Basically, a so-called Baptist organization was telling churches they can’t associate with them because they dared to be “baptist” in the truest sense of the word, which is to do church as they wish in their own community. So, it seems to me the SBC is out of sync with what it means to be Baptist.
At the same time, I don’t know why so many churches and people outside the SBC are inflamed about what is happening inside the SBC. They have every right to do as they wish. My advice would be to go about your business and mission as your local congregation chooses and find other churches or denominations to partner with if you want to be part of larger, collaborative mission efforts.
Having read Baxley’s invitation, I think the CBF would be a good place to be. And what might you work on with other congregations through that fellowship? A list might include some of what I listed earlier: gun violence, addiction, education, homelessness, hunger, parenting, justice, mental health. There’s plenty of work to be done; good church work. It’s work that just might put us in sync with what Jesus was teaching all along: love one another.