Several thousand moderate Baptists have taken over the Washington Convention Center this week but with a far different message than their more conservative cousins, the Southern Baptists.
These are the Baptists — about 700,000 of them — who left the Southern Baptist Convention in 1991 to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, based in Atlanta. Then a federation of 391 churches with a $4.5 million budget, it’s now 1,900 churches with a $16.4 million budget.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who joined them in 2000, has been a force behind the movement. Two collections were slated during the convention for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Offering for Religious Liberty and Human Rights.
Informally known as “Fellowship Baptists,” the conferees’ annual two-day meeting, which ends today, overlaps with a gathering of more than 2,000 American Baptists, based in Valley Forge, Pa. Southern Baptists and American (formerly Northern) Baptists split in 1845 over slavery. The Fellowship and American Baptists will have a shared worship service tonight at the convention center.
One continually recurring theme at the event yesterday was how this new breed of Baptists should define themselves.
“People find it surprising that we’re quite comfortable talking with Roman Catholic Christians or people from mainline Protestant denominations,” said the Rev. Philip Wise, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Lubbock, Texas. “I think there’s something else coming that will be post-evangelical that perhaps we’ll be comfortable identifying ourselves with.”
Fisher Humphries, a professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, said Fellowship Baptists “have relatively equivalent theological affinities with the moderate-to-left wing of evangelicalism and with the moderate-to-right wing of liberalism.”
Fellowship Baptists have accused Southern Baptists of succumbing to a takeover by fundamentalists during the 1980s.
“The history of Fellowship Baptists have made us more aware of the tendency of evangelicalism to collapse into fundamentalism than of the tendency of liberalism to collapse into secularism,” he said.
Memories of the 1991 split still appear to be raw. Book tables in the exhibit area included titles such as retired missionary John Merritt’s “The Hostile Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and a Missionary’s Fight for Freedom in Christ” and ousted Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Russell Dilday’s “Columns: Glimpses of a Seminary Under Assault.”
Also present were displays for about 13 moderate Baptist seminaries that have sprung up since the denominational split.
A display table for Americans United for Separation of Church and State elicited “very positive” reactions from the Fellowship Baptists, said Americans United organizer Rena Levin.
“These are the Baptists who remember Roger Williams and John Leland,” she said, referring to Baptists from the 17th and 18th centuries who stood for the independence of church and civil functions in the American colonies.
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