baptist reinvention
Reader ADHD Librarian gave me a heads-up to this article about the campaign by some US Baptists to distance themselves from the more conservative image of the Southern Baptist Convention. Backed by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the group aims to hold a convention next January:
Nashville-based Baptist Center for Ethics executive director Robert Parham, an organizer of the effort, said the goal of the group was to showcase the often-eclipsed views of “Golden Rule Baptists,” Baptists who are neither conservative nor liberal but espouse the biblical teaching of “treating others as we would like to be treated.”
“Baptists are more than Southern Baptists, who are more Southern than Baptist, more exclusive than inclusive, more negative than positive, yet Southern Baptists too often define what it means to be Baptist” said Parham, a longtime critic of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“Regrettably, the word Baptist has become synonymous with an anti-everything posture. Anti-women, anti-public education, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-Disney. The perception that the Southern Baptist Convention represents all Baptists is one reason we met in Atlanta to plan a celebratory gathering that will reshape public opinion about Baptists.”
This sort of reinvention might simply be a further splintering of the universal identity of the church. However, given the strong political voice that some US religious figures have, the positioning and identification of religious labels can be important. In my own tradition, there has been a move by some churches to abandon the title “church of christ in favour of the ubiquitous “community church” tag, prompted at least in part by concerns about associations with the cultish International Church of Christ.
I like the moderate baptist approach better - create new levels of meaning within the existing term so that you can retain your identity and heritage while distancing yourself from the image that you don’t wish to embrace.