This morning the public schools in Clinton, MS heard the
reading of President Obama’s declaration that today is “Patriot Day.” Faculty
and students alike heard the emphasis on remembrance, memorial, and solidarity
as Americans that many of us are familiar with in these years after the events
of 9/11. I was nearly brought to tears as my principal read the declaration and
as memories of my own experiences on that day came flooding back to my mind.
My students, though, were unaffected.
I teach 8th-11th grades. Most of my
students were born between 1997 and 1999. They have very little recollection of
the events of 2001 if they have any at all. They were unmoved by the powerful
statement that my Principal read, and had no response whatsoever when I asked
them about their emotions as they think about what today means in our society.
When I asked one group of students how they felt about our
brief time of remembrance they reported that they had no emotional connection
to the actual events of 9/11, and that they considered it in the same category
as the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had no real first-hand experience with the
events of the attack and therefore had no reason to be emotionally affected or
even intellectually interested in our remembrance.
I understand my students’ perspective. They feel about 9/11
like I feel about Pearl Harbor: I understand that it was a trauma and a
grotesque attack on our people but I do not have any real emotional connection
to that event. My students care about
the 9/11 attack, but they do not and cannot have a real connection to the
emotions that I feel when I remember that day.
My students’ (in)experience with 9/11 has led me to think
about our Baptist emphasis on personal salvation and how that should affect our
local church ministries. Now that we are 12 years removed from the actual
events of 9/11 more and more people understand that day in a disconnected,
academic way. They understand the facts of the event and perhaps the
motivations behind them, but they have no emotional connection with the horrors
I experienced. In a similar way, those in our congregations who have not
personally experienced the Risen Lord through the work of the Holy Spirit
struggle to understand the regeneration of those who have.
Our distance in time and experience render our connection
and commitment to a cause or movement weaker and weaker. The further removed we
are from the founder of a movement or from a specific event, the less
conviction we have. This is the very reason Baptists have emphasized and must
continue to emphasize a personal conversion experience with Jesus Christ.
Baptists have emphasized a personal profession of faith in
Jesus Christ from the earliest days of the Baptist movement. Bill Leonard
comments, “For the early Baptists, all who claimed membership in Christ's
Church were required to testify to an experience of grace through faith.
Baptists are one of the first Reformation- based groups to require a
"profession of faith" as a prerequisite to baptism and church membership.
From the believers' church, Baptists derived their emphasis on believers'
baptism, congregational polity, and freedom of conscience, ecclesial and
political dissent, and religious liberty. Indeed, all other distinguishing
marks of Baptist identity grow out of their early commitment to a regenerate
church membership.”[1]
The personal experience with Jesus was and is the ground of
all of Baptist life. From it comes an understanding of church membership,
church polity, and certainly the traditional Baptist distinctive beliefs:
Priesthood of the Believer, Soul Competency, Autonomy of the Local
Congregation, and Religious Liberty. Believer’s baptism likewise became “the
outward and visible sign of a believer’s church” which was predicated in every
case by a personal conversion experience.[2]
Without demanding that every member of a Baptist
congregation have a personal faith encounter with Jesus Christ the Baptist
project cannot stand. We begin to rely on the traditions, habits, and
motivations of our ancestors rather than on the compulsion of God’s love for
the world made manifest in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We are
“unashamed particularists, demanding conversion of all who would claim
salvation in this life and the next though Jesus Christ.”[3]
This is the very essence of the Baptist identity, and is the motivation behind
our various evangelistic emphases and revivalism.
Baptists have many versions of salvation theology, but
underlying each is the fundamental theological and philosophical demand that
every person who calls himself or herself a Baptist has had a personal
experience with Jesus Christ. Whether a particular congregation’s identity is
Calvinistic or Arminian, each demands that salvation be the doorway to
regenerate church membership.[4]
This is certainly an inefficient way to organize the church.
It would be much easier if we had hereditary membership based on the salvific
experiences of parents or ancestors. Or perhaps we could have an
attendance-based theology or a giving-based membership; if you show up once per
month or give 10% of your income to the congregation than your salvation is
assured!
Instead, Baptists commit to the never-ending work of
evangelism. With each new birth, new immigration, or new social shift the Great
Commission compels us outward again, proclaiming that Jesus Christ, the only
Son of God, has died for our sins and defeated death on our behalf. The work of
catechesis - the work of teaching and forming people in godliness before and
after their conversion - is a continuous and mandatory work of any Baptist
congregation because we believe so firmly that every soul should meet and know
Jesus Christ as Lord.
If we believe that people must be born again by grace
through faith, then we must treat the congregation as a community constantly
being re-born and re-shaped because people within the congregation change and
thus the church changes. We cannot rely on the momentum of habit to prolong and
preserve the mission and ministry of the church; we must continually re-tell,
re-assess, and re-envision who we are and what we do for all those who are
newly-born in our community.
We must do the work of telling the stories of our
congregation so that new believers and new members can commit to the work God
is doing in our midst with the knowledge of what God has done before. We must
see the congregation as a Body - one that grows, stretches, changes, is
wounded, and heals. We must, as Baptists, demand regeneration in our brothers
and sisters. We must promote godliness within our churches and within our
communities. And everything, everything we do must be based upon our own
experience with the risen Lord.
My students will never understand the emotions I feel on
9/11, and they should not. I pray that they never experience anything as
horrible as that day, though they probably will. Demanding that they act or
feel or believe anything in particular toward a day they cannot remember is as
fruitless as demanding that our congregations demonstrate passion in worship,
zeal in evangelism, persistence in prayer, or conviction in their choices we do
not first reveal to them the God whose love triumphs even the grave.
Consider an oft-skipped verse of “It Is Well With My Soul"
My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious
thought,
My sin, not in part, but the whole,
Is nailed to the Cross, and I bear
it no more!
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh
my soul!
If we have no experience with such bliss, this is just a
song. But if we have tasted the glory of that thought, then we sing even more
powerfully and passionately. May we lead one another to that moment and then
onward on this Way, knowing why we sing and just what we’ve been saved from.
[1]
Leonard, Bill, “Salvation and Sawdust: The Rise and Fall of a Baptist
Conversion Liturgy.” Baptist History and
Heritage 45 no 3 (2010), 8.
[2]
Leonard, Bill, “Changing a Theology: Baptists, Salvation, and Globalism Then
and Now.” Perspectives in Religious
Studies 31 no 3 (Fall 2004), 252.
[3]
Ibid, 253.
[4]
For an interesting overview of Baptist salvation and spirituality, see E. Glenn
Hinson, “Baptist Approaches to Spirituality.” Baptist History and Heritage 37 no 2 (Spring 2002), 6-31.
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