Letter to the Baptist Union of Great Britain

 

Rev. Tim Presswood

President, Baptist Union of Great Britain

Dear Rev. Presswood:

Congratulations upon your election as 2023-2024 President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. To have the honor of leadership within one’s own family of local churches is, in my experience, greatly satisfactory. To have the responsibility of leadership within that family of local churches during seasons of controversy and change can also be burdensome. In my first year of service, I have been borne up by the faithful prayers of my fellow saints. I wish as much for you in your forthcoming year.

I write as something of an anglophile as it pertains to our common heritage as Baptists. Although I wrote my dissertation in Church History about an episode in Southern Baptist life and have given greater attention to writing about Baptist life on this side of the Atlantic since my graduation, one cannot competently read, write, or teach about Baptist life in America without paying full attention to the Baptists of England, Scotland, and Wales. Dr. Karen Bullock led us in a year-long study of British Baptists. I fell in love with Smyth and Helwys for their courage, with Dan Taylor for his zeal in planting churches, with Andrew Fuller and William Carey for their missionary industry, and for Spurgeon’s pulpit skills. I chose to preside over our meeting with a gavel made from Bunyan’s bed. I could go on to speak of Keach, Grantham, Crosby, Kiffin, Ryland, Gill, and a whole host of others all the way down to George R Beasley-Murray. If we are not siblings, we are cousins at least. My heart yearns for the health and effectiveness of the Baptist Union of Great Britain.

These sentiments provoked me to lead my church into a partnership with Abbey Road Baptist Church in Westminster several years ago. Facing challenges related to their meeting house, the church welcomed our support in terms of finances, encouragement, and volunteer labor in a few ministry endeavors. My interests, you see, are not limited to the past history of British Baptists. I am cheering for your work in the present as well.

The relationship between Baptists in America and those in the British Commonwealth has featured both commonality and controversy. It is easy to write with gratitude for our seasons of fruitful and agreeable partnership, but I wish to do the harder thing today—I write to thank the Baptist Union of Great Britain for an episode in which British Baptists found in their hearts enough love for us to disagree with us and to do so publicly.

In the 1830s, Thomas Waters served as the secretary of the historic Midland Association. Rev. Waters had participated enthusiastically in the efforts to create a general union of Particular Baptists in 1813. As you know, his work in this regard was an important precursor to the formation of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. 

During the 1830s, Waters and many other British Baptists were endeavoring to rid the British colonies of the scourge of slavery. The United States of America was no longer a British colony as a matter of international law and politics, but on the basis of shared heritage, Waters led the Association to publish a resolution aimed at the Baptist churches in America.

In the text of that resolution, the Midland Association firmly called upon Baptist Churches in America to labor for the overthrow of slavery in their land. The association made their plea upon several grounds. They noted their past joy over the progress of the gospel in the United States of America. They lamented the necessary attenuation of that joy upon their contemplation that “many of the ministers, deacons, and private members of Baptist churches, participate equally with others in [the] hateful abomination [of slaveholding].” They expressed their conviction that slaveholding was contrary to the teachings of the Christian scriptures. They worried that their profound differences on the question of slavery threatened the possibility of any future cooperation between British Baptists and American Baptists. This line of thinking culminated in these words:

…[we] solemnly warn, and earnestly entreat, our American brethren faithfully to exert themselves to put from them the accursed thing.

The Midland association was not alone in these efforts. Indeed, so widespread was the adoption of resolutions such as this that a contemporary Congregationalist envied Baptist labors, saying, “the movements which have taken place in England are almost entirely confined to the Baptist body.” Resolutions from Kent and Sussex and Birmingham exemplified this genre. London Baptists recognized that American Baptists were being carried along in our support of slavery by “commercial and political bearings of the question” and requested that we instead regard slaveholding “as a palpable violation of the law of God.”

American Baptists, especially in the South, did not receive these words kindly. Even American Baptists like Francis Wayland, who did not personally approve of slavery but who was trying to keep the peace at a fraught moment, wished that the British Baptists would desist from exacerbating tensions that threatened to rupture the fellowship of American Baptists. British Baptists were nevertheless undeterred in their condemnation of slaveholding among Baptists in America.

Thank you, British brothers, for the faithful wounds of a friend that these historic resolutions represent. At a moment when you might easily have yielded to the impulse to “mind your own business,” instead you spoke. You loved us too much to leave us to ourselves. You loved God’s word too much to leave it undeclared among brothers and sisters in Christ. You loved the name of Christ too much to ignore what we were doing in His name and without His consent. You had too great a hope for our future to remain silent while we damaged that future.

Inspired by what you did, I cautiously bring up the upcoming deliberations of the Baptist Union of Great Britain on the subject of removing your restrictions that disqualify gay and lesbian members of your churches from serving as ministers within the Baptist Union of Great Britain. I do so in my personal capacity and without any formal authorization from the Southern Baptist Convention, although I believe that the preponderance of our churches would agree with what I wish to say. Knowing that our own house as Southern Baptists is not perfectly in order, that whatever I write may be received as intrusive and unwelcomed, that the very thought that an American has found for himself any standing whatsoever to speak to an internal decision contemplated by an autonomous body of churches—knowing all of these things, I am inspired by your example in years past to write, nonetheless.

I will make my case upon the same lines as those that abolitionist Baptists in England chose two centuries ago.

First, I have already offered evidence of my love and admiration for the history of Baptist work in the British Isles. We are children of the same spiritual parents! I desire with all of my heart to love you and to celebrate your health and success as churches.

Second, I call to your attention one salient difference between the movement calling for the abolition of slavery and the movement to normalize same-sex romantic relationships. Support for slaveholding among American Baptists in the 1700s and 1800s was a temporary anomaly; support for the Christian sexual ethic is an ancient and ever-present force in Christian history.

The advance of Christianity was the driving force behind the ultimate rejection of Greco-Roman slavery in the Pre-Constantinian era. Even early Baptist work in the American colonial period produced mixed-race churches that were not pro-slavery. The freeing of slaves has been a Christian tradition from the Patristic era down through today.

In contrast, there simply is no tradition of Christian support for normalizing and approving same-sex romantic relationships that pre-dates the birth of the oldest people alive today. The tradition of faith and practice for which I advocate today is the position of the apostles and their generation, of Polycarp and Perpetua and of their generation, of Augustine and Anselm and Aquinas, of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Smyth and Helwys—of every Christian denomination in every corner of the world until what, in the grand scheme of things, is but a few ticks of the clock of Christian history.

Third, I observe that the biblical case against these modern sexual innovations is solid. Jesus Himself, asked about the nature of marriage and divorce, affirmed in Matthew 19:1-12 that (a) people are created as a dioecious species of male and female, (b) marriage arises out of and is built upon this difference in sex, (c) divorce is contrary to God’s created order except in the most extreme of circumstances, and (d) these things are true even if some people consider them so burdensome that they are unwilling to “accept this statement” and are uncertain that they can ever find fulfillment within the sexual ethic that Christ declared. The Christian sexual ethic is Christian (that is, articulated by Christ Himself), is clear, and is important. When the apostles and the Jerusalem church were choosing only a handful of top imperatives to impose upon Gentile believers, abstinence from sexual impurity ranked alongside abstinence from idolatry.

Fourth, I echo the concerns of abolitionist British Baptists from yesteryear when I note the deleterious effects that your actions may have upon the prospect of future cooperation among global Baptists. Subsequent to my election as President of the Southern Baptist Convention last summer, I have consistently heard from Southern Baptists asking me to explore a renewed relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baptist World Alliance. Such a prospect faces, in my estimation, at least two hurdles that it would have to clear. A post-institutionalist sentiment among some of our Southern Baptist people struggles to see the value in partnerships like the BWA, although I cannot join them in that way of thinking. The second hurdle is the reminiscence of major doctrinal differences that led to the SBC’s departure from the BWA in the first place. The BUGB is free to make its own choices about homosexuality and ministry (or even membership) in her churches, but choices like this one, if the BUGB should make this change, will sound a death-knell for any hope of renewed partnership between our families of churches.

This danger would likely be of little consequence if Southern Baptists were alone in our sentiments. We both know, however, that this is not the case. The strongest opposition to the change within your ranks, from what I hear, arises out of those quarters of the Baptist Union that are the least British and the least white. What damage will be done by this action, not only to your relationship with Southern Baptists in America but also to your relationship with Baptists in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East? When these global churches can no longer partner with you in good conscience, will they and we be forced to create a separate partnership of our own? I hope not.

Fifth, I wish to encourage and stand with those among your number who hold these concerns. They deserve to know that they do not stand alone.

And so, with all of these things in mind, I appeal to you and to the churches that you lead. Just as was true in the 1830s with regard to slavery, I know that there are political bearings to the question that you face. We feel the same pressures here. There are economic factors that threaten you. A vast societal movement in the Euro-American milieu insists upon your submission to the spirit of the age. There is, however, the clear and consistent testimony of the Christian scriptures and of Christian history from which you may draw strength in your convictions. I request that you not modify the Ministerial Recognition Rules in Appendix 3.

Yours in Christ,

Bart Barber