What Is the "Baptist Identity Movement"?

If I am a part of any "movement" in Southern Baptist life with regard to Baptist identity, it is detailed here. Anyone wishing to affirm, critique, or analyze any "Baptist Identity Movement" of which I am a part should do so in reference to that document.

In Pursuit of Biblical Literacy, Part Two

If I bring my children to your church every Sunday and Wednesday from birth until they leave home for college, what specifically ought they to know when they leave? And when I say "specifically," I mean items so specific that you could develop a standardized test (not that we ever would) with precise questions regarding items that you meant to teach.

I think that's a pretty important question. In my mind, it raises several other thought-provoking points to ponder, so I'll pass them along to you in the hopes of launching a conversation:

1. Whose job is it to ask this question? For many years I operated on the assumption that I didn't have to ask this question because somebody, somewhere in Nashville was asking and answering that question on my behalf. All I have to know is that I'm purchasing Lifeway literature, right?

   But now I'm convinced that it is my job as pastor to ask and to answer that question. It isn't Lifeway's fault that I had that false impression before—Lifeway's own mission statement clearly states their role as a helper to churches, not as some sort of vicar for designing and implementing our discipleship responsibilities as a church. It is my job to know what our church is trying to teach and Lifeway's job to provide biblical solutions to help me lead our church to accomplish our goals.

   The sort of thoughts that I posted in the first post of this series have arisen in my mind because I've been thinking more and more about the question at the top of this post and relying less and less upon other people to do this thinking for me.

2. How, specifically, does the work of the church dovetail with the work of parents and school in discipleship of children? As big a fan of church as I am, all of my "train up a child" eggs are not in the church-program basket. Most of them aren't there. My children are receiving deliberate biblical and devotional education at home. I regard such things as Sunday School and AWANA or TeamKid or Upward as resources in this overall task.

   But we have kids here whose parents are lost. And I'm not sure that we can assume that every family attending here has any sort of deliberate spiritual education ongoing for their children. How does the program of spiritual equipping in our church programming dovetail with home, or at least, how ought we to plan for it to interact with things going on at home as a basis for our church planning?

   Tracy and I are homeschooling. We have a lot of homeschooling families in our congregation. We have a lot of children in private Christian schooling in our congregation. We have a lot of children in our congregation who attend public schools. Each of these methodologies takes a slightly different approach toward spiritual education.

   And church programs do interact with a child's schooling. It may be as subtle as the fact that we start to presume at some point that the students in the classroom are able to read. One factor that impacts the design of most youth ministries is that assumption that youth are facing a barrage of temptations facilitated by their schoolday interactions. When you start to have a significant number of students who are studying the Bible in a structured daily curriculum, that impacts what you can expect of students in Sunday activities.

   So, when I ask myself what students ought to know when they go off to college, how much of that is the church supposed to accomplish, how much of it are the parents supposed to accomplish at home (ideally), and how much of that ought students to pick up in their formal education (however it is accomplished)? And how can the church communicate with these other institutions so that each of us knows what we're trying to accomplish?

3. Is attendance a large enough goal for discipleship? I don't think so. But I confess that it is easy to obsess over attendance. When our Sunday School directors meet to evaluate our Sunday School, we largely evaluate it on the basis of attendance. Johnny Hunt's poignant sermon at the Pastor's Conference in Indianapolis described a crisis in his own pastorate and his church over the fact that their attendance experienced a slight decline.

   But once we get those people to come, what are we doing with them? Do we know? Are we doing a good job at it? What's our goal? The question at the top of this post points in the direction of these other questions, and leads us not to stop looking at attendance, but to see attendance as something more important than a means toward self-aggrandizement—these are the people taking part in this marvelous journey of discipleship to which Christ has called us, which we have embraced, and which we are tackling in these specific ways.

4. Since we don't test, how can we measure our performance? Our state employs standardized testing not only to measure the performance of students but also to measure the performance of teachers and schools. Debate exists in the public schools as to whether this is the best way to evaluate teachers and schools. What about at church? Are we going to ask ourselves whether we're doing a good job? And if we will, how will we answer that question? And I mean not just the questions of whether this teacher is well-prepared, interacts well with parents and students, is doctrinally sound, shows up dependably, and all of the other things that we must watch and measure. Eventually, we have to ask the big question—is it all getting through to the students like we hoped it would?

5. What about those who show up in the middle of the process? Remediation is a big factor in determining a church's goals for spiritual education. How big of a factor ought it to be? Ought the church's programming to be "dumbed down" and designed especially for novices to the detriment of those I mentioned at the top of the post, whose children will be here weekly throughout their childhood? On the other hand, if your faithful core are going to be effective witnesses, isn't it going to discourage the fourteen-year-old friend whom they lead to Christ when that new convert perceives that he's in a decade-plus deficit that will take him years to overcome? Does he go into a different track? Or can the church achieve something of the ideal of the one-room schoolhouse, where we all mingle at different stages along the way, interacting with and helping one another? I think we can—that sounds pretty biblical to me. But it affects the way that we design discipleship, doesn't it?

I confess that I come to these questions with opinions the prejudice me. I found a great deal of my childhood at church to be unduly repetitive and boring. It seems to me that, since then, we've accommodated by adding glitz rather than substance. There are things that I didn't learn until Ph.D. studies that I think I could have (and should have) learned in Junior High. The Southern Baptist Texan published a special report two years ago on Biblical Literacy, and I am convinced that our efforts in biblical education for the past few decades leave room for improvement, not in sincerity or in the dedication of those involved, but in effectiveness.

And now I'm curious to hear from you. To get the conversation started, I pose a few pointed questions to guide our comments:

1. Does your local church have a detailed goal that defines what you're trying to teach and accomplish in the lives of students?
2. How does your church evaluate its progress in discipling students?
3. If you are a parent, what part do you see church programs playing among the other resources contributing to the spiritual development of your children?
4. How easy or hard do you think it is for new believers to "catch up" with more mature believers in your children's and youth programming?

UPDATE: My VBS-related workload has increased toward the end of this week. I may not get to participate much in the discussion, but I'm confident that you all can carry on well without me until I get back to it.

About the Association of Convictional Baptists

With the launch of the Resolution on Regenerate Church Membership came also the launch of a new website entitled Association of Convictional Baptists. Some speculation has ensued regarding who this group might be, what might be the significance of the name, and what is the nature of the group's beliefs. Consider this post the answer to those questions, and perhaps to some others as well.

Who Is the Association of Convictional Baptists? At the moment, Bart Barber. That's right—I reserved the domain name, built the site, and threw open its doors solely as an individual project. I hope that it will grow beyond this weak and meager beginning, but at the moment the membership list is pretty small.

What is the raison d'être for the Association of Convictional Baptists? The front page of the site currently contains (my apologies if you come to this post in the future and find other content there) the text of the Fifth-Century Initiative, a document that I wrote last year. Many other people have looked at that document and have generally affirmed its tenets. I believe that the principles articulated there represent a needed and important course of renewal for Southern Baptists.

I gave thought (and even performed some initial work) toward the possibility of developing and hosting a conference built around the Fifth-Century Initiative, but after lengthy and agonizing soul-searching, I decided not to do so. The idea sounded great at first, but the more I pondered it, the further away from it I journeyed. What did I mean to accomplish with the conference? I could never get away from that question. Too many times, I think that conferences become something akin to youth camp for adults—a time of isolated euphoric concentration upon important things. Youth camp is important (God called me to preach at one), but what makes youth camp important is the daily grind of ministry to youth as an influence to help the lessons learned at youth camp to take root when transplanted from the greenhouse into the common soil of everyday life.

Apply that thought analogically to the Fifth-Century Initiative. My passion is for providing day-to-day help for Southern Baptist churches to seek renewal. The best format for such help, I have come to believe, lies in a community rather than a conference. So that's what I hope to build. Someday, perhaps, we will have a conference, if it seems to fulfill some genuine need. But for now, what I hope to do is to make of the site a resource center and community gathering place for people orienteering this elusive pathway toward rediscovering who Christ has called us to be.

Where'd the Name Come From? Well, it's a three-word title. I'll take them in reverse order just to make things more difficult for you!

Baptist: This is an unashamedly Baptist site, not out of pridefulness but out of a sincere belief that the renewal that we need lies within the historic tenets of Baptist belief. The historic tenets I have in mind you'll find articulated in the Fifth-Century Initiative document.

Convictional: The ACB seeks to return us all to a convictional understanding of what it means to be a Baptist.

It is a movement pitted against the concept of congenital Baptists. Parentage does not a true Baptist make. There is no such thing as a blue-blooded Baptist. The only blood that matters was shed on Calvary. The congenital Baptist theory is responsible for at least two ills at lethal work among us. First, it has filled our churches with people who attend and worship where they do solely because of generational inertia. It is possible to be dead-set determined to be a member of a Baptist church, simply because of lineage, without even knowing the theological principles that undergird that august name. Second, and related to the first, it has led to the false notion that the "heirs" of Baptist theology can define it to mean anything (or nothing) at all and that the name must follow them wherever they would wander theologically, since it has been passed down to them as a birthright.

It is a movement pitted against the concept of coincidental Baptists. This movement is not for those who attend the Baptist church in town simply because it has the largest ad in the newspaper or the coolest praise band or the most active youth program. This movement is not for those who are staying with the SBC because they're going whichever way the Annuity Board goes. This movement is not for those whose Baptist beliefs arise out of a paycheck. Those who join a Baptist church merely to see a reduction in seminary tuition costs need not apply (not that there's an application).

Rather, this site is dedicated to the concept of convictional Baptists—a people who share the sincere, educated, and heartfelt conviction that the major distinctives of Baptist belief are found in the New Testament. For me, it is not about the beliefs of my parents, about the wording on a sign in front of our worship auditorium, or the place I just happen to be at this point in my life. I believe that I must be Baptist or be disobedient to Christ. It is a matter of conviction for me.

In saying so, I know that there are a great many in the world who believe (wrongly) that they must be non-Baptist (or at least a whole lot less Baptist than I am) or be disobedient to Christ. Such folk should be thankful that I am a Baptist, for as such I am firmly committed to their freedom to pursue their own convictions. But I am also committed to my freedom to pursue Baptist convictions, including the freedom of Baptists to associate voluntarily with one another around Baptist principles for mutual encouragement and edification. I do not violate the rights of non-Baptists in my desire for the freedom of Baptist institutions to be unashamedly Baptist.

Association: As I said above, the purpose of this site is to provide resources and community for Convictional Baptists laboring within the context of local churches to heed the instruction of Christ in the ministries that He has assigned to us. A history guy like me cannot conceive of any entity existing for the strengthening and fellowship of churches without gravitating to the word Association. The historic function of Baptist Associations has been precisely to provide resources and community encouragement to strengthen churches in their convictions and ministries.

The danger of employing this word, of course, is the fact that some will conjecture that I am attempting to supplant the geographic associations that have played and do play such an important role in Southern Baptist life. Not at all. As we all ought to know, Baptist Associations should be entirely autonomous creatures. They serve as a handmaiden to the churches, not as a spouse. The relationship between church and association is not a monogamous one, for local churches affiliated with local associations are also affiliated with state conventions and the SBC.

I do think that the work that I hope ACB to be doing in the future is work that local associations ought to be doing but sometimes (too often?) are not—the work of churches strengthening one another and giving one another healthy feedback with regard to our theology. But local associations are doing things that I don't think ACB will ever do. They are planting churches, they are helping local Baptist churches to find a common voice within a certain patch of geography. They are hosting training and other conferences at a frequency that no online site could ever accomplish. They are facilitating a level of fellowship among churches that mere electrons can never replicate. It is my prayer (and indeed, one of the planks of the Fifth-Century Initiative) that local associations are here to stay and will only grow stronger in their ministries. May the day come when every local association in the SBC has embraced these biblical keys to renewal. They will be far more effective than this little website will ever be, and on that day the ACB will promptly and gladly lock the doors forever due to lack of interest.

Besides, we all know that one preacher with a computer doth not an Association make. This part of the name is proleptic.

So perhaps any mystery vanishes with this post. Some of my readers will not agree with my goals—already have disagreed with some of them in other contexts. I love you in the Lord; I just don't happen to be building this site with you specifically in mind. But to those of you who feel the tug of the Holy Spirit toward things like Regenerate Church Membership and the other principles articulated in the Fifth-Century Initiative, I pray that together we can see the Head of the Church work great things in our congregations in the coming years.

The Fifth Century Initiative

I cannot claim authorship of the following for at least three reasons. First, several people have looked at drafts for the past several months and have suggested helpful improvements. Second, the concepts articulated below are biblical and historical, and are in no way an innovation attributable to me or to anyone else alive today. Third, a great many strong leaders like Mark Dever, Stan Norman, John Hammett, Malcolm Yarnell, Paige Patterson, Nathan Finn, Tom Ascol, and too many others to count, have championed in part or in whole the concepts listed below long before I came to the scene. So, I offer this text for your consideration. In the near future I will supplement these words with related proposed actions and invite your participation.

The Fifth Century Initiative
Recapturing the Baptist Vision

Baptists embark upon their fifth century of modern existence beginning in 2009.¹ Seventeenth-century Baptists asserted several New Testament precepts that we can isolate as the distinctive tenets of Baptist identity. These concepts coalesced for the seventeenth-century Baptists into a prescription of interconnected propositions for congregational reformation.

Four centuries have nearly elapsed. As the fifth century of modern Baptist existence dawns, the key New Testament precepts that define us have recently waned in influence and support among Southern Baptists. We are forgetting who we are—who Christ has called all Christians to be. At a moment when we once again need spiritual awakening and reformation, the New Testament prescription that served so well in the first and the seventeenth centuries beckons us again.

An initiative is in order to place before God’s people once again a vision for renewing the New Testament foundation of our congregations. Several tasks await faithful Baptists who would pursue this end:

• The Restoration of Biblical Literacy: None of the initiatives stipulated in this document are feasible in their fullest sense apart from a concerted campaign to acquaint the Southern Baptist people with the sacred text. Southern Baptists must develop viable congregational strategies for pursuing biblical literacy among our members.
• The Pursuit of the Great Commission: New Testament congregations are a construct intrinsic to the gospel and universally relevant to all people, cultures, and ages. Our congregations must visit afresh the Divine imperative to reproduce themselves throughout the world, embracing opportunities to engage the task with greater vigor than before.
• The Proclamation of the Gospel: Southern Baptists must regain a confidence in the power of the unadorned gospel to win the lost and to effect a lifetime of transformation. A confidence in the converting power of the gospel is in many ways the theological premise underlying the entirety of the Baptist vision.
• The Recovery of Regenerate Church Membership: Southern Baptists must restrict membership to visible saints.
• The Defense of Believer’s Immersion: Troubling signs of erosion have appeared on the bedrock of Baptist belief—the ordinance of believer’s immersion. Southern Baptists must assert not only the biblical certainty of this doctrine, but its biblical importance. Christian immersion is the nonnegotiable initial act of obedience for every Christian disciple.
• The Development of an Updated Southern Baptist Church Covenant: Many issues have emerged in the past century to pose new challenges to congregations. An updated covenant would greatly assist in recalling Southern Baptists to covenantal accountability as foundational to congregational life.
• The Renewed Exercise of Biblical Church Discipline: Several leaders have done significant work to commend to Southern Baptists the biblical mandate for church discipline and to provide practical guidance for the recovery of church discipline in lapsed churches. Building upon this work, the Southern Baptist Convention must assert these reforms not merely as one way to “do church” but as the New Testament model for mutual accountability among Christians.
• The Rehabilitation of Congregational Church Polity²: Baptist polity has far too often degenerated into the unholy pursuit of personal agendas. After an embarrassing hiatus, Southern Baptists have found once again the New Testament basis for congregational church governance. Now we need practical guidance to demonstrate how to restore the Lordship of Christ in the midst of congregational church governance.
• The Mobilization of the Universal Priesthood: Southern Baptists do well to consider one of the most robust New Testament doctrines for Christian mobilization—the recognition of all believers as members of a universal Christian priesthood with responsibilities for spiritual service. If the members of the congregation are all regenerate, then all are obligated to participate in the congregation’s mission.
• The Revitalization of Cooperative Association: Pragmatism and an inappropriate competitive spirit have sometimes marred relationships between sister congregations. Also, the waning of Baptist identity has diluted the fraternal doctrinal accountability that has historically marked the relationship between churches in their associative bodies. Southern Baptists need to recover a healthy cooperative life that encourages healthy congregational life.

¹The year 1609 is, if nothing else, the first year to which the vast majority of historians—successionist or non-successionist—can point and identify genuine Baptists. Whatever disputed Baptist existence occupied 1608, the modern phase of the movement begins in 1609.

²Congregational church polity describes a broad category of polity with many viewpoints on such matters as the number and role of elders.

WikiCovenant

What ought a Baptist congregation's church covenant to contain in this day and time? With an equal admixture of eager anticipation and sheer terror, I announce the WikiCovenant project. It is a wiki page containing, at this moment, the text of J. Newton Brown's church covenant from his Baptist Church Manual of 1853. This is the text that has become the most popular church covenant among Southern Baptist Churches. A wiki is a web page that is fully editable by those who view the page. So, I'm opening Bro. Brown's text to you for editing. The interface is the same as that of WikiPedia. I invite the Baptist web community to produce a new Baptist church covenant. I believe that it would be helpful for Southern Baptists today to give some increased attention to the matter of church covenants. I inaugurate this project in the furtherance of that cause.

Where We Need Reform

Today I journeyed to hear Dr. Russ Moore speak about contemporary issues in the SBC. He spoke passionately for nearly three hours. Other than in direct responses to direct questions, he said almost nothing about national issues in the SBC. And yet everything he said was directly connected to every national issue in the SBC. It was a masterful presentation. Dr. Moore realizes, as I myself believe, that the most pressing issues facing us today have to do with the local church. The institutional local congregation was founded by Jesus Christ, and it must adhere to the New Testament pattern to realize the divine genius in its nature. In the process of restoring my older posts, I actually paused to read most of my older posts. In doing so, I realized how much I have allowed other people's agendas to shape my blogging in more recent days. I hope to be more intentional and less reactionary in the coming year. Dr. Moore's lecture reminded me of my sentiments expressed in this post from the early dawning of my blogging enterprise. My agenda is expressed in the Fifth Century Initiative, which I will be posting at the beginning of August. As a postscript, please allow me the personal privilege of expressing how much I dislike Dr. Moore:

1. I don't mind when people are a little bit smarter than I am, but it really bothers me to encounter people who are a whole order of magnitude smarter than I am.
2. On top of all that, Dr. Moore is younger than I am. For a man who is only thirty-five years old to have read so much, written so much, spoken so much, and learned so much is obscene. To think that, at his age, he holds such high position at the second-greatest seminary in the SBC is astounding.
3. Finally, and worst of all, for an Arkansan to be forced to concede such things about a Mississippian is quite nearly a violation of my Eighth-Amendment rights.

At least I can take some consolation in being so much better looking than he is.

Enlarging the Place of Our Tent

Enlarge the place of your tent;
Stretch out the curtains of your dwelling, spare not;
Lengthen your cords
And strengthen your pegs.
(Isaiah 54:2)

While a significant portion of the Baptist blogosphere is busy retreating, regrouping, and reorganizing, Praisegod Barebones is preparing for a major expansion. For the month of July, I will be offline (let's face it, I've pretty much been offline throughout the last half of June). When I return in August, I will do so bigger and better. I want to be careful not to overpromise, so I'll give you a few things that I think are practically certain at this point:

• Podcasting: I plan to produce occasional podcasts. In fact, if all of you would send in donations, I could listen to them on one of these. You know, maybe I'm going about this all wrong. My first podcast will announce that God will take me home on Labor Day if the good Southern Baptist people haven't purchased an iPhone for me by then. Or maybe I should leave that tactic to Art Rogers, since he lives in Tulsa.
• The Fifth Century Initiative: I am very hopeful that the Fifth Century Initiative will cease to be "my" project and will become a conference involving a large group of faithful and visionary Baptists.
• Online Sermon Calendaring: I have authored a web application that allows me to plan my preaching easily and from anywhere with Internet access. The resulting content is available to display online with great creativity in presentation. I've been hard at work over the past year modifying the code to make it accessible to multiple users. I hope to debut it in August. I'm not promising a "killer app" or anything—it is software written by a preacher who is self-taught in C#, T-SQL, AJAX, Javascript, and ASP.NET. Of course, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
• And, of course, Southern Baptist political commentary will continue apace. During my blogging vacation, I recommend that you spend some time getting to know Dr. Thomas White. His blog is here.

My Blog Journey So Far

In May 2006 I embarked upon a conversation with my computer. Even my wife wasn't reading my blog. I told nobody about it. So why would any rational person start writing essays to nobody? I read a document entitled the Memphis Declaration. I differed with its analysis of the Southern Baptist Convention. It made me feel better to express my thoughts in writing—so I did so. Thus began what is now more than a year of periodic contributions to this forum. I have provided here the barely-filtered sentiments of my mind and heart. Some of it has been personal (the birth and adoption of our daughter, the discovery that our congregation included a sexual predator preying upon our community), a bit of it has been embarrassingly wrong, a bit of it has been prophetically correct, all of it has been very human, and the vast majority of it has been denominationally political. So, here we are today, a year later. Some of you comment, so somebody somewhere is reading with regularity (I don't use a hit counter for fear of the sin it might provoke in my ego, either by being too high or by being too low—thus, I don't really know who all is reading. Maybe I should commission a poll? :-) ). The denominational politics continue. An historic meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention is right around the corner. It is important for every voting messenger to understand the issues. Between now and Monday, I will provide a series of posts seeking to articulate my views on the topics that seemingly differentiate myself and those with whom I have disagreed so often throughout this journey. Although the themes will obviously cover ground that I have treated before, I do hope to bring some fresh insight to the task. I trust that every reader will digest these posts carefully, if you wish to be an informed observer of current events. Unlike Bro. Burleson's latest posts do with me, I will not at all seek to caricature his position. I am simply going to speak for myself about some things that are important to me. After the convention is over, I am going to be presenting a multi-post series entitled The Fifth-Century Initiative. Most presently-living Baptists trace the origins of the modern phase of Baptist life to John Smythe's Baptist church, founded near Amsterdam in 1609. Two years from now, we will embark upon the fifth century of modern Baptist existence. Now is a good time to contemplate how the New Testament witness will endure until Christ's coming. The Fifth-Century Initiative will close with a set of proposals to be considered at the 2008 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.