Why Moderate Baptists Are Still Baptists
A week after Southern Baptists agreed to the significance of the exclusivity of the Gospel as they affirmed their identity, moderate Baptists boasted of the "freedom" that make them Baptists.
"We are free to think for ourselves, free to read the Scriptures to determine what they say - free," said Bill Underwood, president of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., according to the Associated Baptist Press.
The Mainstream Baptist Network gathered over the weekend at a convocation around the theme "Voices of Hope: Why I'm Still a Baptist." Among the responses, one conference speaker addressed the theme with four answers – Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom and religious freedom – or what Joe Lewis, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Petersburg, Va., called Baptist hallmarks.
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Underwood, who is also part of a recently launched Baptist effort with former president Jimmy Carter on creating a new Baptist voice, was critical of conservative as well as moderate Baptists who do not commend the "unchecked privilege of interpretation" of the Bible.
"Who will do the checking?" Underwood posed, adding that "it is wrong to insist the community can declare orthodoxy." No one has a monopoly on truth, he said, according to ABP.
On a similar note, Bruce Prescott, executive director of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists, said, "God desires everyone to love Him, but if love is a free response of faith, then to reject Him must also be a possibility. So, if God leaves us to be free in matters of faith and religion, then what right do men have to force them upon others?”
According to its website, the Mainstream Baptist Network identifies its members as "not narrow-minded, dogmatic, legalistic or anti-intellectual."
Moderate Baptist leaders, representing some 20,000 Baptists in North America, are scheduled to hold a convocation in January of 2008 with Carter and former president Bill Clinton for a New Baptist Covenant, which will aim at "improving" the Baptist image. Participating Baptists, including Underwood, say that Baptists are currently seen as being narrow-minded and in disharmony.
"What communitarian Baptists ignore is the need to acknowledge a place for that lonely, prophetic voice – the voice of dissent," said Underwood at the recent conference, saying that the community is sometimes wrong as was the case when the Roman Catholic Church declared that the sun rotates around the Earth.
While mainstream Baptists credit their identity to freedom, Southern Baptists recently reaffirmed its identity with the inerrancy of Scripture.
The Southern Baptist Convention had withdrawn its membership from the Baptist World Alliance, which houses much of the moderate Baptists, in 2004 due to what Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson had noted was a "continual leftward drift in the BWA."
At the Baptist Identity II Conference at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., David S. Dockery, president of the Southern Baptist university, stressed the significance of the conservative resurgence, arguing that without it, the Southern Baptist Convention would have "lost the Gospel" - an issue that many other denominations are facing.
The new trend for Southern Baptists in the postmodern era - when there are rising conflicts over worship style, speaking in tongues, and control - is going back to Baptist basics such as the Bible and theology.
Meanwhile, Suzii Paynter, executive director of the Baptist-affiliated Christian Life Commission in Austin, Texas, says "church is not a franchise," explaining that each church is free to cluster with churches and denominations as it sees fit.
