Baptists and Episcopalians together?

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.


In my book Ecumenism Means You, Too: Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity, I suggested this as something that “ordinary Christians” can do locally to further the visible unity of the church: “If your own denomination has been in…official dialogue with other churches, studying and discussing these reports would be an ideal way to learn about other denominations and their relationship to your own tradition” (pp. 63-64).


Two churches in Shelby, NC, tried that suggestion out together this summer. For the second year in a row, Ross Grove Baptist Church and the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer combined their resources to hold a joint Vacation Bible School, which this summer also featured an “adult track.” The world communions of the two churches, the Baptist World Alliance and the Anglican Communion, held a series of conversations 2000-2005 that produced a substantial study text. In connection with that document, I led a group of members from both congregations in a study of the theme “Baptists and Episcopalians, One in Christ.” Here are the topics we discussed:

• “A Shared Story: From Separation and Persecution to Toleration to Ecumenical Engagement”
• “Common Prayer? Occasion for Division, Opportunityfor Convergence”
• “One Baptism? Comparable Journeys of Christian Initiation”
• “One Bread, One Body? Together at the Table”
• “So What? Living Into Our Unity”

This study was one of the most enjoyable local church Christian education events I’ve ever experienced. In many ways it was akin to one of the most enjoyable experiences in graduate-professional theological education I’ve had, an ecumenical theology course I taught at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, SC, that included 18Lutherans, three Baptists, two Episcopalians and two Methodists.

Participants in our adult VBS study were able to name and move beyond the stereotypical impressions they had of one another’s traditions. For Baptists and Episcopalians alike, it was also an opportunity to learn more about the rationales for the distinctive doctrines and worship practices of our own traditions, sometimes occasioning some intra-denominational questions that might not have occurred apart from this inter-denominational conversation. Some participants expressed the desire to visit worship services in one another’s churches sometime and gather for continued conversation afterwards.

Baptist participation in international ecumenical dialogue has yielded resources that could be used for similar studies with neighboring churches of other denominational traditions. Beginning in the 1970s, the BWA has engaged in bilateral dialogues with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Mennonite Conference, and the Anglican Communion. (The BWA has also held exploratory “pre-conversations” with the Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate and later this year will begin a series of conversations with the Pentecostal World Fellowship.) These dialogues have issued reports that can serve as study resources for the sort of grassroots dialogue we enjoyed in Shelby.

The Mennonites are Baptists’ closest denominational kissing cousins. If there is a Mennonite fellowship in your area, members of your Baptist congregation can get to know them by exploring together “Baptist-Mennonite Theological Conversations” (1989-92).

While Baptists represent a distinctively different stream of the Protestant tradition, its Reformation tributaries flow from the Lutheran beginnings of Protestantism. Join Lutheran neighbors in digging down to common roots by reading “Baptists and Lutherans in Conversation: A Message to our Churches” (1990).

Not all Baptists are Reformed with a capital “R” (i.e., Calvinist), but since the 17th century significant segments of Baptist life have identified with that expression of the Reformation. Whether you claim the heritage of Particular (Calvinistic) or General (Arminian) Baptists, the “Report of Theological Conversations Sponsored by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Baptist World Alliance, 1973-77” is an excellent entrée to stimulating theological conversation with local Presbyterians.

Dissent from the Church of England birthed the Baptists, but as we discovered in Shelby, contemporary Anglicans/Episcopalians and Baptists now have much more in common and many gifts to share with one another. Conversations Around the World 2000-2005: The Report of the International Conversations between the Anglican Communion and the Baptist World Alliance (2005), edited by renowned Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes, is a rich and engaging exercise in ecumenical theological reflection that will enlighten members of Baptist congregations and Episcopal/Anglican parishes as they read, mark, and inwardly digest it together.

It would be difficult to imagine a more polarized pair of ecumenical dialogue partners than Baptists and Roman Catholics. Yet the two communions have been able to issue “Summons to Witness to Christ in Today’s World: A Report on the Baptist-Roman Catholic International Conversations” (1984-88). Watch for a report from the 2006-2010 series of BWA-RCC conversations in 2013. Both documents will help Baptists and Roman Catholics learn to recognize one another, and learn from one another, as brothers and sisters in Christ.

At the grassroots, Christian laypersons of all denominations can be some of the most passionately ecumenical people one can meet, gladly embracing those whom they perceive to be following the same Lord. When they build on that instinct by reading and discussing these dialogue reports together, the dialogues will make their hope-for contribution to Christian unity.

[Note: The dialogue texts referenced in this post that are available online are hyperlinked. Most were also issued in pamphlet or booklet form, and all are included in the three-volume Growth in Agreement series published by the World Council of Churches: vol. 1, Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level, ed. Harding Meyer and Lukas Vischer (New York: Paulist Press; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1984); vol. 2, Growth in Agreement II: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level, 1982-1998, ed. Jeffrey Gros, Harding Meyer, and William G. Rusch (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans; Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000); vol. 3, Growth in Agreement III: International Dialogue Texts and Agreed Statements, 1998-2005, ed. Jeffrey Gros, Thomas F. Best, and Lorelei F. Fuchs (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans; Geneva: WCC Publications, 2007). One of my current writing projects is the publication of a complete collection of texts from international, national, and regional ecumenical dialogues in which Baptists have participated. In the meantime, churches interested in taking up the practice of grassroots ecumenical dialogue I’ve commended in this post can find relevant resources in the places I’ve noted here.]

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

Ecumenical dialogue at the grassroots

My post "Baptists and Episcopalians together?" appears today on the ABPnews Blog published by Associated Baptist Press. I'll post the full text here at Eccelsial Theology early next week. In the meantime, here's a snippet from the opening of the post:

In my book Ecumenism Means You, Too: Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity, I suggested this as something that “ordinary Christians” can do locally to further the visible unity of the church: “If your own denomination has been in…official dialogue with other churches, studying and discussing these reports would be an ideal way to learn about other denominations and their relationship to your own tradition” (pp. 63-64).

Two churches in Shelby, NC, tried that suggestion out together this summer. For the second year in a row, Ross Grove Baptist Church and the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer combined their resources to hold a joint Vacation Bible School, which this summer also featured an “adult track.” The world communions of the two churches, the Baptist World Alliance and the Anglican Communion, held a series of conversations 2000-2005 that produced a substantial study text. In connection with that document, I led a group of members from both congregations in a study of the theme “Baptists and Episcopalians, One in Christ.” Here are the topics we discussed....

Read the full post at the ABPnews Blog.

Sarah Coakley on the theological implications of "evolutionary dynamics"

Prof. Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley

Students of theology know that since their inception in 1888, the Gifford Lectures delivered in the Scottish universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen have featured some of the most notable figures in systematic theology (e.g., Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Jürgen Moltmann) and have yielded some of the most significant published contributions to the field. Thanks to my friend and fellow Baptist theologian Mark Medley, I've learned that lecture handouts, lecture texts, and YouTube videos from the 2012 Gifford Lectures delivered by Sarah Coakley are available online on a page hosted by the University of Aberdeen. Coakley's lectures on the theme "Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God" explore the implications of recent developments in the mathematical study of “evolutionary dynamics” for ethics, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and theology.

I've followed the work of Anglican theologian and priest Sarah Coakley since the 2003 publication of her book Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa in the midst of her tenure on the faculty of Harvard Divinity School. Now the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity and Deputy Chair of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, she is currently at work on an envisioned multi-volume systematic theology I've been eagerly anticipating for a few years. Its first volume, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity, is set for publication by Cambridge University Press in September 2013. In the meantime, I'll enjoy working through these Gifford Lectures along with readers of Ecclesial Theology.

Introducing "Running Heads"

Wipf and Stock Publishers, whose imprint Cascade Books published my book Ecumenism Means You, Too: Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity, has launched Running Heads: A blog from the editors of Wipf and Stock Publishers.The blog will feature a weekly rotation of posts from editors Charlie Collier, Chris Spinks, K. C. Hanson, Robin Parry, and Rodney Clapp.

I'm impressed with the work this stellar group of editors is doing to advance the cause of academic religious publishing in the midst of the challenges faced by the publishing industry as a whole. They're also thoughtful and witty folks, and their blog posts will not be confined to editorial and publishing matters. Follow Running Heads here.

So Far from So Close: The Eschatology of Mat Kearney's 'Young Love'

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

Six months ago I couldn’t have imagined writing an appreciative review of an album by an artist whose music is frequently described as a unique blend of folk, hip-hop, and Brit-pop (think Coldplay for the latter genre).

The Coldplay connection is ultimately responsible for this development. Despite the canonical status of U2 in my playlist, I confess to liking Coldplay’s sound enough to download a few songs. Early this year while writing at the Broad River Coffee Company across the street from Gardner-Webb University, I kept hearing a couple of songs I assumed were tracks I hadn’t yet heard from Coldplay’s latest studio release. A quick Google search for lyric fragments revealed they were actually by singer-songwriter Mat Kearney (pronounced “Carney”)—whose music, I realized, I’d heard before on Grey’s Anatomy episodes.

Kearney’s voice does sound a bit like Chris Martin’s minus the yodel-like effect, though pitched a little lower and with a hint of Bruce Hornsby. But I found Kearney’s songwriting and the perspective that informs it so much more compelling than Coldplay that soon his albums were soundtracking my weekly trips to teach ecumenical theology at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in South Carolina.

A good part of what attracts me to the music of both U2 and Mat Kearney, stylistically disparate though they are, is the eschatological framework that makes their art a Christian rendering of the world.

“Eschatology,” the division of Christian theology that deals with “last things,” isn’t only about what happens at the end. Baptist theologian James Wm. McClendon, Jr. helpfully defined eschatology much more broadly: it’s “about what lasts; it is also about what comes last, and about the history that leads from the one to the other.” Eschatology has to do with God’s goals for all creation, from creation to consummation and everything in between, as well as our participation in what God is already doing to realize these goals in a world where they are manifestly not yet fully realized.

That framework is indispensable for a full appreciation of Kearney’s music. By nurture and owned conviction, it’s the set of lenses through which he’s been reading the world since he began making music with his roommate’s guitar while majoring in English literature at California State University, Chico on a soccer scholarship. While he credits his personal embrace of Christian faith to a serious read of the Bible in a religious studies course, Kearney is the son of a pastor: his mother Shannon Kearney was founding pastor of SouthHills Church in Eugene, Oregon and continues to serve as associate pastor there.

Kearney’s songs rarely invoke the Christian framework they presuppose with direct specificity. In an interview published a few months before the release of his first major label album he explained, “My faith is a part of who I am and the music I make. But it has to exist within the world that does not necessarily believe what I believe.” In keeping with Emily Dickinson’s admonition, Kearney tells truth in his music, but tells it slant.

For those who have ears to hear, Kearney tells the truth of Christian eschatology on his current albumYoung Love (2011), his third major label release. Despite what the title may suggest, it’s not a collection of maudlin love ballads. Young Love is about the eschatology of relationships.

Its ten tracks occupy the theological space of the tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of those relationships—the sheer exhilaration of meeting, falling in love with, and pursuing the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life (“Hey Mama,” “She Got the Honey,” “Young and Dumb and in Love”), coupled with the inevitable conflict and struggle involved in continuing the relationship toward its goal (“Ships in the Night,” “Sooner or Later”), lived out in a world in which we all have our “backs against the wall” (an image invoked with precisely that wording in no less than three songs—“Count on Me,” “Sooner or Later,” and “Down”).

On this album Kearney deals honestly with the “not yet” of relationships in a way that sets his music apart from the overly realized eschatology of the CCM industry’s typical products, which tend to emphasize the present reality of “the power of his resurrection” with little place for “the sharing of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). “Sooner or Later” gets it right: “We’re all waiting on a dream that’s hard to own…Trying to feel the high without the low.”

Without losing the dream that what lasts and comes last can yet be experienced in the history that leads from the one to the other, Young Love names the low that belongs to this history: a marital spat and a wife’s fear that it portends the same eventual outcome as her parents’ dissolved marriage, a friend who keeps “Chasing the Light” but hasn’t yet found it, a lonely man who experiences redemption only at the point of preparations to end his life, a father-to-be who learns his house is headed for foreclosure, a teenage girl’s depressed existence in a broken home, an endless coffee shop parade of the faces of “falling love,” and a father’s struggles with the legacy of his relationship with his own father.

In the midst of these stories of lives longing for wholeness, “Hallelujah”—among the more direct lyrical allusions on the album to the biblical story of redemption—is transformed from a straightforward exhortation to praise God into a desperate embrace of God at the end of one’s rope. One instance is in “Learning to Love Again,” a gem of a song that re-narrates a life thought meaningless as the real self of God’s creative and re-creative work.

The other is in “Down,” which features a chorus that’s downright psalm-like in its questioning of whether the divine can “hear when we call, there where we fall, standing our backs against the wall”—questions answered in a song four tracks prior. “Count on Me,” ostensibly expressing a parent’s love for a child, is theological double entendre: “when your number’s called, back’s against the wall, pick you up when you call, be there where you fall…you can count on me.” Just in case anyone missed the connection, the set lists of Kearney’s concerts in support of the album have juxtaposed the two songs.

The narrative particularity of the history that leads from what lasts to what comes last is what Kearney does especially well. The essential stuff of Christian faith and faithfulness is the divine story that in Christ embraces the human story as well, giving us the story that helps us re-narrate our own stories and the world in which we live them out—which is another way of saying it’s all about eschatology. Like Augustine’s Confessions in which the ancient Bishop of Hippo re-narrated his own story in light of the story of God disclosed in Christ, Kearney’s music is almost always either autobiographical or rooted in the biographies of people he knows, the untidy details narrated within the framework of Christian eschatology.

“Ships in the Night,” for example, was sketched out on a plane flight after an argument between Kearney and his wife, model Annie Sims (who’s also the inspiration of the three songs about the exhilaration of young love). The album’s final track “Rochester” is the story of Mat’s father Michael Kearney and the gracious transformation of his life occasioned by a revelatory interaction with Mat’s older brother Benjamin.

These and other stories find their place in God’s story by virtue of their relation to the central experience and practice of the Christian story and its eschatological framework. In the words of “Down,” “we all need forgiveness”—the experience of receiving God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of others, and the practice of granting in turn to others the forgiveness we’ve received.

Young Love is music for those who know the wonder of young love yet feel “so far from so close,” whose “singing Hallelujah” comes when they’re “looking down the barrel,” who live “where pain and love bleed into one.” It’s for people who embrace what lasts and comes last but live fully in the history that leads from the one to the other, a history that includes both the pain of the present evil age and the hope of the age to come.

I’m looking forward to discovering how this framework informs Kearney’s next project, on which he’s reportedly been working during a break in his touring schedule. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy seeing his show when he comes to Charlotte as the opening act for Train on July 26—along with our six-year-old son Timothy the budding music critic, who recently made the pronouncement “Mat Kearney is awesome,” constantly listens to Kearney’s songs on his Kindle Fire, and really, really hopes that he will sing “Count on Me” in Charlotte.

And by the way—the "unique blend of folk, hip-hop, and Brit-pop" thing works for me, after all.

This post was originally published on the ABPnews Blog.

Baptists and Episcopalians, One in Christ

In my book Ecumenism Means You, Too: Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity, I suggested this as something that "ordinary Christians" can do locally to further the visible unity of the church: "If your own denomination has been in...official dialogue with other churches, studying and discussing these reports would be an ideal way to learn about other denominations and their relationship to your own tradition" (pp. 63-64).

Two churches in Shelby, North Carolina are trying that suggestion out together this week. For the second year in a row, Ross Grove Baptist Church and the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer are joining forces for a joint Vacation Bible School, which this summer also features an "adult track." The world communions of the two churches, the Baptist World Alliance and the Anglican Communion, held a series of conversations 2000-2005 that produced a substantial study text. In connection with that document, Sunday through Tuesday and Thursday evening this week I'm leading a group of members from both congregations in a four-part study of the theme "Baptists and Episcopalians, One in Christ." Here are the topics we're discussing:

• "A Shared Story: From Separation and Persecution to Toleration to Ecumenical Engagement"
• "Common Prayer? Occasion for Division, Opportunity for Convergence"
• "One Baptism? Comparable Journeys of Christian Initiation"
• "One Bread, One Body? Together at the Table"
• "So What? Living Into Our Unity"

I'll write more about this study and possibilities for similar steps toward unity at the grassroots in a future blog post for the ABPnews Blog, which I'll also link here and eventually post the full text here as well.

The eschatology of 'Young Love'

Today the ABPnews Blog published my post The Eschatology of 'Young Love'. I'll post the full text here later this week. In the meantime, a couple of teaser excerpts:

...A good part of what attracts me to the music of both U2 and Mat Kearney, stylistically disparate though they are, is the eschatological framework that makes their art a Christian rendering of the world....

...For those who have ears to hear, Kearney tells the truth of Christian eschatology on his current album Young Love (2011), his third major label release. Despite what the title may suggest, it’s not a collection of maudlin love ballads. Young Love is about the eschatology of relationships....

Read the full post on the ABPnews Blog.

Baptist World Alliance gathers in Santiago, Chile

This week members of the global Baptist community are participating in the annual gathering of the Baptist World Alliance in Santiago, Chile. I'm not in attendance this year, but my "Report on Pre-Conversations between Representatives of the Baptist World Alliance and the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate" will be presented in absentia to the BWA Commission on Doctrine and Christian Unity during the gathering. The Doctrine and Christian Unity commission will also hear and discuss reports in connection with the 2006-2010 series of conversations between the BWA and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and a new series of conversations with representatives of the global Pentecostal movement that will begin later this year and will discuss papers contemplating Baptist responses to the recently approved World Council of Churches Faith and Order paper on The Nature and Mission of the Church (an earlier draft of which is available on the WCC web site--click on hyperlinked title). Other BWA commission and affinity group meetings are listed in the annual gathering schedule.

In connection with the planned discussions of The Nature and Mission of the Church, BWA General Secretary Neville Callam issued this column in the electronic publication BWA Connect:


Thinking about the church and its mission
By Neville Callam


Recently, I had the pleasure of reading Graham Hill’s book, Salt, Light, and a City: Introducing Missional Ecclesiology. I started reading this book a mere two days after the Standing Commission on Faith and Order voted to approve what is expected to be a significant convergence text on the church. This text, which should soon appear in print, is the product of years of serious multilateral theological engagement by the Faith and Order Commission.

It is clear that Hill’s book also represents years of serious research and reflection. The book, the first of a planned multiple volume series, probes some of the existing understandings of the nature of the church and its missional activity with a view to developing a coherent vision of its central subject from the perspective of Protestant evangelicalism.

In the first section, Hill offers an overview of understandings of the church reflected in the writings of selected theologians. Perspectives from the various church traditions are discussed in concise chapters on “twelve important theologians” -- Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Karl Rahner and Hans Kung from the Catholic Church; Thomas Hopko, Vigen Guroian and John Zizioulas from the Orthodox Church; Letty Russell, Jurgen Moltman and John Webster from the Protestant Church community; and John Yoder, Barry Harvey and Miroslav Volf from the Free Churches.

In the second section, Hill offers a preliminary vision of the missional church that is informed by his “biblical, Reformed evangelical, Christ-centered, Free Church, charismatic, trinitarian, ecumenical, and missional convictions.” This vision comes out of a dialogue with the perspectives skillfully summarized in Part 1 of his book.

Hill’s is an important work that will be read by Christians who care that the corporate practice of Christian discipleship and mission that they affirm and teach is rooted in a defensible biblical and theological foundation.

Before criticizing Hill for engaging in dialogue with theologians from parts of the world where, he says, “Christianity finds itself now on the margins of a culture in which it once enjoyed a central place”, let us carefully note -- and eagerly await -- his promise of a second volume in which he will focus on theological reflections on the church and its mission as reflected in the writings of theologians from other parts of the world. Those whose theological contribution he intends to discuss include Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Juan Segundo, Samuel Escobar, Rene Padilla, Kwame Bediako, John Mbiti, Oliver Onwubiko, Tite Tiénou and Peter Phan, “to name a few.”

It will be interesting to see how Hill analyzes the interaction of context, culture, experience, and confessional/theological tradition in his assessment of the understandings of the church reflected in the writings of such scholars. Since the same interplay is at work in the ecclesiologies Hill analyzes and proposes in Salt, Light and a City,one waits to see whether there will be similarity in the recognition of the role played by these factors in the formulation of the theological positions analyzed in Hill’s upcoming publication.

For the time being, however, it is important for Baptists to read and reflect on the first text in which Hill offers much that justifies the time needed to read his book. Hill offers a window into existing understandings of the church and their implication for mission “from a Euro-American perspective” emerging in western cultures where churches “are mostly experiencing decline, marginality, and liminality.” He also engages the creative process of developing a constructive Australian missional theology that is “self-consciously western.”

The Faith and Order text, which one expects to reflect contributions and perspectives from the worldwide Christian community, focuses on the church and its unity in the service of its mission. This text is also informed by the ecclesiologies with which Hill engages in conversation -- and indeed some of the scholars whose work Hill has accessed and plans to draw upon actually participated in the deliberations of Faith and Order.

By the time we conclude our reading of Hill’s Salt, Light and a City and its upcoming companion volume, which together will harvest what Hill regards as the best fruits of conversations with theologians from the West and from the Majority World, the full sweep of Hills’ vision of the missional church will become clear. Only then will we be able to ascertain how Hill’s vision compares with that conveyed in the Faith and Order Commission’s differently-focused text on the church.

Hill’s book is a must read for church leaders and teachers who care about the church and its mission. I welcome Salt, Light and a City and, with the same enthusiasm, await his upcoming volume.