Appeal to Texas Baptists: Lead the Way!
by Thomas E. Clifton
President, Central Baptist Theological Seminary

On our campus recently we had a dinner, a “Human Family Reunion.” The dinner is an annual multiracial ecumenical gathering to celebrate the great variety of our human family.

During the evening there is an open microphone which allows anyone to bring a word of greeting or personal testimony. One man identified himself as Native American with an office in Kansas City which deals with Indian issues.

We were told that 9,500 native American people live in our city. But the more striking part is that the Indian census in Kansas City includes over fifty distinct tribes. When this administrator deals with a tribe other than his own, he must make a leap across cultures, he confessed.

I thought: if an Indian has to make a cultural leap to deal with another Indian, no wonder so many of us have so much trouble crossing the lines and barriers that separate us according to color, race and class.

It should not have surprised me to learn that Native Americans are not uniformly shaped and interchangeable. After all, I am a Baptist. We Baptists are every bit as kaleidoscopic. Our shapes and colors seem limitless.

Great differences among and between us has always been a given. Our mission is to find a strategy appropriate to the challenges of a new century.

That question, of course, will not include all of us who claim the Baptist heritage. Many Baptists would not think of entering partnership with anyone connected to the Texas Baptists Committed organization.

Nevertheless, for those of us with a Baptist agenda which cherishes this movement’s historic freedoms, it is time to consider whether our organizational structures are adequate to our vision.

Why is it time?

The increasing diversity in our nation and hemisphere demands it. There are other reasons but this one stands at the top. The white population in the U.S. will fall in the next 50 years from the current 72 percent to 52 percent.

Among school-age children, whites will be in the minority within 30 years. Also, we can expect regional shifts in the 21st century. The Southwest will be predominately Hispanic. The Southeast will be predominately black. The West will be predominately Asian. And everywhere we will be less white.

The suggestion made by Dr. Herbert H.Reynolds that we explore coming together in a Baptist Convention of the Americas is, indeed, timely. It is time and timely for Baptists to organize for a new day and for new diversity.

The 19th and 20th century convention and missionary structures served us as well as we had any right to expect. In some ways our conventions did better than we thought possible. In other ways our structures grew tiresome and dysfunctional.

Certainly TBC, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the Alliance of Baptists have been creative attempts to recapture the Baptist “spirit” in the face of tiresome, dysfunctional and unexcitable structures of the past.

What Keeps Baptists Apart?

An analysis of the Baptist movement just past the mid-century mark, Baptists North and South, was published in 1964 by Samuel S. Hill and Robert G. Torbet.

“What keeps Baptists apart?” was foremost on the cover. At the present hour, given the fissures within Southern Baptists, the aging and decline of whites in the American Baptist Convention, and the marginal status of organized religion, how would that question be answered today?

Fear is the only good answer for Baptist fragmentation. Baptists are more fearful of each other, more obsessed with issues of control, more jealous of success across our lines than whether we are good stewards and faithful followers of our common mission.

In 1845 we divided over slavery. In 1964 we remained divided over regionalism. Today only fear keeps us apart. Will we allow fear to drive us into many tribes as the 21st century becomes increasingly a nation of diversity?

Who will bring us together?

Who will teach us to love those who are different?

Simple! Baptists who love each other should be in the mission together. Crossing racial, geographical and cultural lines is not the goal but the means by which we will be enabled, in the 21st century global village, to achieve a more effective witness.

I think Dr. Reynolds sees that. His calling Texas Baptists to embrace that vision and to share their position of strength to forward that vision is prophetic.

A decision by Texas Baptists to “hunker down” and take care of Texas can, assuredly, have tragic results. It will mean they will be a tribe, a large tribe to be sure, but still a kernel of what is possible.

Would a new Baptist Convention of the Americas mean the dissolution of existing bodies? Surely it would not. We would continue to seek fellowship according to geography and in light of historical affiliations.

Dr. Reynolds has outlined many advantages and strategies inherent in a Baptist Convention of the Americas already. How exciting a new coming together of Baptists in the Americas can be with revitalized mission efforts. They can charge local churches focused on survival with new life.

And why not be headquartered in Texas? Texas already is the America of tomorrow with its rich ethnic, racial and language diversities. Why not center Baptist witness where they are strong and can give leadership to the Americas, both north and south?

In my nearly six years as president of CBTS in Kansas City, I have moved constantly back and forth among Baptist groups, conventions and regions.

Baptist witness is alive in many places—the spirit of freedom, linked with passion for evangelism and mission. I have witnessed that spirit from Montana to Mississippi. What I don’t see is a strategy anywhere that can mobilize, unite, and empower us as effectively as a Baptist Convention of the Americas can.

I hope Texas Baptists will lead out. Others are ready for new partnerships that will enable the spirit of Baptist witness to bless a new century in a new way.

July 1999