Over the last few months, there has been a great deal of talk among Baptists about the need to overcome differences and unite as Baptists again.
Honestly, I don’t understand how that is supposed to work. There are Baptists like Mike Huckabee, who is using Baptist churches to campaign for President, says that people with HIV ought to be put into detention centers, women ought to act submissively to their husbands, and the Constitution ought to be made subordinate to Christian theocratic authority.
Then there’s the John Grisham variety of Baptist, who pointed last week, as he attended a gathering of 15,000 Baptists who were trying to figure out ways to actually help people, “Evangelical politics has become a big business, and the results are disastrous… When the church gets involved in politics, it alienates many people it is supposed to serve.”
Why are these two kinds of Baptists trying to find common ground? It seems that they’re working with contrary goals. Why not just make the Baptist split hard and fast so that people will know what kind of church they’re really dealing with?
There could be an All-Baptists Convention, with a vote about which group of Baptists gets to call themselves Baptists, and then the others get to choose a new name for themselves, like the Crucifixios, or the Bethlehemists, or whatever suits their fancy.
I live across the street from a Baptist minister and he came to invite to hear his daughter demonstrate her sSpanish-speaking abilities. I told that great what a wonder witnessing tool! Then he said’ those dang illegals looking at his young Baptist apprentist with disgust. We live in a middle-class suburb of Detroit,mostly all White. About six months later a Hispanic family moves next door to him, and his daughter got pregnant with two little bambinos. While attending Tennesee Temple University. Woe is us if we don’t keep our big mouths shut! Don-Livonia