Bavarian Baptists and Lutherans in dialogue

It recently came to my attention that after six years of dialogue, in May 2009 a joint working group representing Baptists and Lutherans in the German state of Bavaria published a significant agreed statement: "Voneinander lernen – miteinander glauben: „Ein Herr, ein Glaube, eine Taufe“ (Eph 4,5). Konvergenzdokument der Bayerischen Lutherisch-Baptistischen Arbeitsgruppe (BALUBAG)." (Translation: "Learning from one another--believing with one another: 'One Lord, one faith, one baptism' (Eph. 4:5). Convergence Document of the Bavarian Lutheran-Baptist Working Group (BALUBAG).") Currently available only in German, the 26-page document is published online in PDF (click on hyperlinked title above). A press release (also in German) preceding the document's publication is available here. The dialogue and document gave special attention to the soteriological themes of justification and discipleship (distinctive emphases of Lutherans and Baptists, respectively), ecclesiology, baptism, and the Lord's Supper. This rich agreed statement is the product of the working group's use of the "differentiated consensus" methodology that produced the Lutheran-Roman Catholic (and now Methodist, too) Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification: the identification of matters of "fundamental consensus" and matters on which a "consensus with remaining differences" is possible. (Thanks to Richard Pierard and Curtis Freeman for bringing this document to my attention.)