The Baptist Passion for Christian Unity

The January 2011 issue of Baptists Today (vol. 29, no. 1; p. 25) includes my guest commentary "The Baptist Passion for Christian Unity." Here's a snippet from the beginning of the article:

Enough non-Baptist Christians think the title of this guest commentary is oxymoronic that a few years ago my friend and former Campbell University colleague Glenn Jonas needed to write a pamphlet titled “Myth: Baptists are Anti-Ecumenical” for the “Baptist Myths” series sponsored by the Baptist History and Heritage Society.

But as many Baptists prepare to participate in this month’s observance of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (January 18-25), they can do so in the confidence that Baptists at our best have long been passionate about the quest for Christian unity.

Dr. Jonas’ pamphlet called attention to Baptist missionary William Carey, who in 1806—a full century before the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference marked the institutional beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement—proposed “a general association of all denominations of Christians from the four quarters of the earth.”

Baptists later participated in the formation of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches in the USA, and British Baptists leaders John H. Shakespeare and Ernest A. Payne even urged Baptists in the UK to pursue organic church union across denominational lines.

The passion of global Baptists for Christian unity is embodied by the Commission on Doctrine and Christian Unity of the Baptist World Alliance....

Interested in reading the rest of the article? If you don't already subscribe to Baptists Today or have library access to this news journal, print and electronic subscription information is available on the Baptists Today web site. (Otherwise, wait until public back issues are posted six months after publication. I'll post a link here at Ecclesial Theology when the back issue is available.)