Church Division in An Internet Age

Further Thoughts on Connectivity, the Past, and Church "Market Share"

The big news in my religious part of the world is that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had its annual meeting this week. I’m not Southern Baptist, and haven’t been for decades, but it’s a theological conviction that it is right and good to pray for those with whom I deeply disagree, and perhaps particularly those with whom I deeply disagree.

I direct the Baptist Studies Center at Abilene Christian University. That alone usually brings up a number of questions, the first of which is “What?” The short answer is this: it’s time for Christians to stop thinking in narrow denominational terms about their mission, and to start thinking ecumenically. I’m here to help make that a reality, teaching theology, ethics, and a couple of particular courses for Baptist students preparing for ministry.

The longer answer to “What?” is something like this: Baptists do a terrible job of uniting for anything except missions, and for some two decades now, I’ve been persuaded this is a theological error. And so, being able to be in an institution which commits itself not only to a specific theological heritage (the Churches of Christ), but to building bridges beyond that heritage is my kind of place.

If the first question I get regularly is “What?”, the second question is “What kind of Baptist?”, which is a good question to ask. I’m not Southern Baptist, and have not been since high school, and the Center I direct intentionally tries to feature the work of Baptists from a variety of directions. But online forums and skirmishes only reinforces the market share tendency among Baptists, pushing us into distinctions which don’t really matter. This happens while simultaneously being terrible at providing opportunity to talk about distinctions that should be discussed with some nuance such as women’s ordination¹, whether or not Baptists should talk about sacraments², or whether autonomy is a misguided concept theologically³.

When you do a search for “Southern Baptists”, the first thing that will pop up is the bombshell report about sexual abuse which the governing committee of the SBC knew about, and knew about for decades. It’s damning, full stop: there is no other hand. And with Baptists of various varieties, I was happy to see the more reactionary and Twitter-famous versions of Baptist leaders not get the reins of anything, and to see a pastor who had advocated for the religious liberty of Muslims to win.

In talking about the SBC, there are two cheap versions of history about the SBC: 1) that it began out of desire to be able to affirm slavers or 2) that it began out of a desire for independent churches to cooperatively send missionaries. The more complicated version is that both are true. And in the mode of argumentation popular today around ethics, the genealogical argument is enough: whatever fruit there might be today is bad fruit, despite appearances.

As a non-Southern Baptist Baptist, this is where it gets complicated, precisely because of how the Internet helps us to remember the past.