A Texas Baptist who sounds like Jim

Posted by Christine on: 02.20.2008 /

by Christine Wicker

As some of you know from past posts (years ago now) I’ve written a new book about evangelicals. It’s called “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church.” It won’t publish until May 1, but I’ve been re-connecting with some of my sources and friends from when I was a religion reporter at The Dallas Morning News. One of them is George Mason, the senior pastor at Dallas’ Wilshire Baptist Church. George spoke at the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta.

For those of you who don’t know a lot about Baptists, the Southern Baptist Convention was taken over by ultra-conservatives, some say fundamentalists, a couple of decades ago. A lot of Texas Baptists opposed that takeover. George has been a leader in the alternative Baptist convention called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

I asked to see his remarks at the Atlanta meeting. I’ve always admired George and know that he is fearless in being willing to think through hard questions. He is a conservative guy. I’ve been told that he’s a Republican. Together we experienced what we both felt was a “God” moment once. But that’s another story.

He started his remarks in Atlanta with some examples of how people like to divide the world into two camps and how they use the idea to put themselves among the good and others among the bad. Then he says,

“Baptists of all kinds have been susceptible to this divide-and-conquer approach. We have even made salvation seem more like an offer than a gift. We have carved up the world into the lost and saved, counting ourselves among the saved and looking upon the majority of the world as damned to hell. We seem to prefer a sparsely populated heaven that proves our rightness, instead of a vastly populated one that proves God’s mercy. Our missions and evangelism efforts must call people to faith - no argument there; but in doing so, we must not make Christ’s work on the cross seem lacking until we set the world to rights. Faith does not establish the ground for salvation; Jesus did that. Faith grants the experience of it. Jesus said from the cross, It is finished.”

That a Baptist minister of any ilk would say such a thing just blows me away. I know it’s happening now in all sorts of circles, but BAPTISTS? There is change afoot. George continues:

Instead of understanding our election as mission, the way we should - as our responsibility to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, we have taken it to be that we are fortunate insiders in a world of unfortunate outsiders. It’s time we stopped this administrative “us and them” game of sorting the elect and the non-elect, the saved and the damned, and left this up to God. It’s time we got on with the missional work of bearing witness to the grace of God that isn’t waiting for the world’s recognition of it, but is waiting for our proclamation of it. It’s time we got out of management and into marketing. On second thought, it’s time we got out of the business of religion altogether and got into relationship with the world for which Christ died.

That’s a stunner. Out of the business of religion?

It’s not up to us to account for the standing of others before God; it is up to us to stand before God and give account of our witness of good news to the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed - they, too, are included.

He then goes on to talk about Islam and his own regrets about supporting the war as much as he did, and he touches on the wrong idea that God is favoring or punishing either side.

As one theologian puts it: We should not wish divine judgment on anyone or any nation; we should wish them God’s shalom. When you imagine that God hates all the people you hate, then you can be sure you’ve created [God] in your own image. … German pastor Martin Niemoeller who was imprisoned by Hitler for eight years … [said it well], ‘God is not the enemy of my enemies; he’s not even the enemy of his own enemies.’

Neimoeller’s bold claim needs nuancing. To say that God is not even the enemy of God’s enemies is not to say that God doesn’t have enemies, or that we don’t. God does, and we do. We do. But it means that, like God, we are not permitted to be our enemies’ enemy. As Dr. Shaw said yesterday, We must not reject our rejectors.

And yet, we cannot be naïve about evil. We must not ignore evil or deny its existence.

And then this:

The line between good and evil runs right down the middle of every human heart.

And then this:

I told the story of a woman interrogator at the Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba. She had served a year in the military and then went back to Iraq as a civilian contractor. She quit after the Abu Graib prison scandal, feeling that she could no longer abide the work. She joined up as an interrogator some time later, trying do some good and chase the demons from her own soul.

“My job,” she said, “was to obtain information that would help keep U.S. soldiers safe. We’d meet, play dominoes, I’d bring chocolate and we’d talk a lot. There was one detainee, Mustafa, who joked that I was his favorite interrogator in the world, and I joked back that he was my favorite terrorist - and he was. He’d committed murders and did things we all wished he could take back. He asked me one day, suddenly serious, You know everything about me, but still you do not hate me. Why?

“His question stopped me cold,” she said. Then she mustered this reply: “Everyone has done things in their past that they’re not proud of. I know I have, but I also know God still expects me to love Him with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. That means you.

“Mustafa started to cry. That’s what my God says, too.

“Accepting Mustafa helped me accept myself again. … People say, Hate the sin, not the sinner. That is easier said than done, but I learned that there is true freedom in accepting others unconditionally.”

Reading such things gives me hope for us all. New Baptist Covenant 08

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