Celebrating Easter and Cooperative Baptists
This week I need to take this space to do two things. First I need to thank some very hard working people and secondly I need to thank some other hard working people. The former relates to last week and the latter to next week. Read on, this might make sense.
First thanks to all of you who were involved in the reflection, commemoration, and celebration of the life of Christ last week. It was a glorious Holy Week. Thanks to you who helped to coordinate (with lots of details!) the Seder meal on Thursday. Gay Mayse and her many helpers deserve our gratitude for a thoughtfully prepared Passover meal. The service on Good Friday was beyond a doubt one of the more moving commemorations of Good Friday that I have ever attended. Mark Lawson created a powerful program. It’s one thing to have someone of his talent in the congregation, it’s quite another to have someone like him who is willing to overwork that talent for the benefit of the congregation. The choir was glorious and the music nothing less than stunning. And Easter morning was a magnificent celebration! As I said on Sunday no human expression will ever get close to expressing all there is to the mystery of the resurrection, but none of the 647 people present would say we didn’t do our best!
Second, I want to thank Nell Lockhart. Next week (April 28-29) we will be hosting the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Missouri. Nell has done (and will do) a great deal of work to prepare for this weekend. She and her many helpers deserve our gratitude.
While no one is going to ask why our Good Friday and Easter celebrations are important, you might wonder why it’s important that we are involved with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I’m glad you asked. While there’s more to say on this than I have space, let me give you 3 reasons:
1) We can do more together than we can apart. Today “institutions” aren’t as popular as they used to be – but today they are just as important, if not more so. We need good universities to train our laity. We need good seminaries to train our clergy. No one church can create a college, but working together churches can start/support institutions and can create mission-sending organizations. The CBF partners with some great schools and has created a mission organization that is making an impact around the world. And it is an organization that embraces our priorities of Christ-centered compassion. I encourage you to come next weekend, and find out a bit of what we are helping to support in the CBF.
2) Churches need other churches. Just as you weren’t created to live in isolation, neither is any church. We learn from each other. Ministry ideas, theological ideas, ecclesiastical ideas come from our brothers and sisters in other faith families. We need fresh ideas, and new perspectives. We need to know how other churches are dealing with the same social issues we are. And we need to help other churches in their mission. Our food pantry is a great example of this principle – no one church could do as well as what we all do together.
3) The CBF has a special mission that KBC helped to form. Our “fellowship” of churches is centered on seeking to be the presence of Christ. In this effort we emphasize the Spirit over the letter, the person over the law, and compassion over convention. The CBF holds onto our Baptist ways of soul autonomy and congregational freedom. We seek a better balance between the individual’s conscious and the commitment to the community. We do this in a context where many Baptist churches have lost their roots. In an effort to hold onto what they believe to be fundamental to their faith (subjugation of women, for example), they’ve thrown out what is truly fundamental to being Baptist: the Spirit’s help in interpreting Scripture in light of present day historical/scientific understanding. Sure you can find texts that will allow you to put women down, just as you can quote texts to support slavery. But we know now that God calls all to leadership – depending on God’s gifting, not God’s granting of body-parts. Early Baptists rejected the silly superstitions of other groups for an enlightened understanding of Christ’s work in our world. They did this believing in the individual’s capacity to experience God’s help in the interpretation of the Bible. The CBF is a group of churches seeking to live out the call of Christ with commitment to him, not a commitment to a creed.
Sometimes the CBF is called a group of “like-minded Baptists.” I prefer the term “like-spirited” Baptists. We all have very different minds – about all sorts of subjects – but spiritually we are all committed to the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. And we seek to help each other fulfill our call to help others be reconciled to God.
Scott
First thanks to all of you who were involved in the reflection, commemoration, and celebration of the life of Christ last week. It was a glorious Holy Week. Thanks to you who helped to coordinate (with lots of details!) the Seder meal on Thursday. Gay Mayse and her many helpers deserve our gratitude for a thoughtfully prepared Passover meal. The service on Good Friday was beyond a doubt one of the more moving commemorations of Good Friday that I have ever attended. Mark Lawson created a powerful program. It’s one thing to have someone of his talent in the congregation, it’s quite another to have someone like him who is willing to overwork that talent for the benefit of the congregation. The choir was glorious and the music nothing less than stunning. And Easter morning was a magnificent celebration! As I said on Sunday no human expression will ever get close to expressing all there is to the mystery of the resurrection, but none of the 647 people present would say we didn’t do our best!
Second, I want to thank Nell Lockhart. Next week (April 28-29) we will be hosting the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Missouri. Nell has done (and will do) a great deal of work to prepare for this weekend. She and her many helpers deserve our gratitude.
While no one is going to ask why our Good Friday and Easter celebrations are important, you might wonder why it’s important that we are involved with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I’m glad you asked. While there’s more to say on this than I have space, let me give you 3 reasons:
1) We can do more together than we can apart. Today “institutions” aren’t as popular as they used to be – but today they are just as important, if not more so. We need good universities to train our laity. We need good seminaries to train our clergy. No one church can create a college, but working together churches can start/support institutions and can create mission-sending organizations. The CBF partners with some great schools and has created a mission organization that is making an impact around the world. And it is an organization that embraces our priorities of Christ-centered compassion. I encourage you to come next weekend, and find out a bit of what we are helping to support in the CBF.
2) Churches need other churches. Just as you weren’t created to live in isolation, neither is any church. We learn from each other. Ministry ideas, theological ideas, ecclesiastical ideas come from our brothers and sisters in other faith families. We need fresh ideas, and new perspectives. We need to know how other churches are dealing with the same social issues we are. And we need to help other churches in their mission. Our food pantry is a great example of this principle – no one church could do as well as what we all do together.
3) The CBF has a special mission that KBC helped to form. Our “fellowship” of churches is centered on seeking to be the presence of Christ. In this effort we emphasize the Spirit over the letter, the person over the law, and compassion over convention. The CBF holds onto our Baptist ways of soul autonomy and congregational freedom. We seek a better balance between the individual’s conscious and the commitment to the community. We do this in a context where many Baptist churches have lost their roots. In an effort to hold onto what they believe to be fundamental to their faith (subjugation of women, for example), they’ve thrown out what is truly fundamental to being Baptist: the Spirit’s help in interpreting Scripture in light of present day historical/scientific understanding. Sure you can find texts that will allow you to put women down, just as you can quote texts to support slavery. But we know now that God calls all to leadership – depending on God’s gifting, not God’s granting of body-parts. Early Baptists rejected the silly superstitions of other groups for an enlightened understanding of Christ’s work in our world. They did this believing in the individual’s capacity to experience God’s help in the interpretation of the Bible. The CBF is a group of churches seeking to live out the call of Christ with commitment to him, not a commitment to a creed.
Sometimes the CBF is called a group of “like-minded Baptists.” I prefer the term “like-spirited” Baptists. We all have very different minds – about all sorts of subjects – but spiritually we are all committed to the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. And we seek to help each other fulfill our call to help others be reconciled to God.
Scott
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