An Insight Gained from the New Baptist Covenant

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

There has been much printed about the New Baptist Covenant event, so I don’t think another article talking about the meeting is really needed.  What I would like to share is a reminder, a caution, and a challenge the event pressed upon me.  The New Baptist Covenant was, most of all, a visual reminder to me of the disunity of Baptists, but even larger than that, the disunity of the church, the body of Christ.  There has been a real failure of cohesion.  We can share the same gospel, share the same cities, exchange pleasant words, and be busy getting many things done, yet not possess a mutual center or unifying purpose or deeply shared single alliance.  This happens throughout the body of Christ, including within the walls of a local church.

We call ourselves Baptists.  But that may not say too much about us, since there are Virginia Baptists, Southern Baptists, Cooperative Baptists, Free Will Baptists, General Baptists, General Six Principle Baptists, Independent Baptists, Missionary Baptists, National Baptists, Northern Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Progressive Baptists, Regular Baptists, and my personal favorite, the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists.  And there are dozens more Baptist groups just in this country alone.

Doesn’t that seem dumb to you?  It’s sad to me.  And it is kind of funny.  As if that isn’t enough, there are also divisions in the body that don’t have to mean divorcing each other.  We can sit in the same room every week and say the same Lord’s Prayer together and still be oceans apart.  The same thing can be said of a marriage, can’t it?  For decades a couple can share a house, a budget, a bed, but live separate lives.  And we know why this happens.  We are different people.  We are diverse.  And our diversity is supposed to be a good thing. The body of Christ has to be diverse – socially, politically, demographically, intellectually, temperamentally, theologically.  God help us if we are all alike.

Even Jesus’ group of twelve was a hodgepodge bunch – educated and illiterate, poor and moneyed, a sellout to the empire and a patriot sworn to fight the empire.  Those who traveled with him included women and Samaritans.  He gathered children to him, the old, Pharisees, and prostitutes.  According to Luke, on the day the church was born, there were Africans, Asians, Europeans, Judeans, and many others all joining together.  The body of Christ is diverse or it isn’t the body of Christ.

And yet there is a difference between diversity and the absence of unity.  It is one thing to differ on much, it is another to be adrift because nothing essential really binds us together and to be fundamentally separate because we serve opposing commitments.  This actually horrified Paul about the church in Corinth, a church divided into factions over different leaders.

Our differences these days tend to center around something other than leaders.  Is it that some want the rational and cerebral, while others prefer the stirring of the heart?  Is it because most of us are really quite conservative and many of us are more moderate?  Is it that some of us are very concerned with social justice and others are concerned with orthodox evangelical belief?  And others are mostly concerned with the majesty of worship, and others are concerned about human relationships, and still others are looking for deeply personal spiritual help.  I don’t know.

The truth is that none of these is the cause of substantial or harmful division unless all of us aren’t looking to Christ, clinging to Christ in faith, seeking to live in service of Christ, and seeing each other and the world through the eyes of Christ.  If our differences are all gathered into Christ as our source, our center, our goal, then our differences are a many colored, beautiful unity.  But if not, our differences become divisions – divisions that judge and endanger us and can even do harm among us.

I have learned that in marriage if all a couple does is look only at each other, seeing only each other’s finest qualities and worst faults, then it won’t be long before the clock starts ticking on their love.  But if they live a life together with much given to standing side by side and looking to something beyond the two of them, then that is what makes a marriage.  Likewise, if the people of God look beyond themselves to Christ in wonder and in faith and in obedience, then unity happens.

We do not dream of a perfect church because there is no such thing.  But we do know that our differences will empty us unless they and we are given in faith to live and serve together in Christ.  Loving our diversity will not be the thing that holds us together.  Loving our fellowship will not be able to hold us together.  It will only be Christ.  Christ died and lives for us all.  To trust this and to serve Christ together, however madly and wondrously different from each other we may be, is to become joyously one.  What a divine challenge.