VOICE OF THE TURTLE Online

Unlike many of you who have come to find in this old Baptist church a spiritual home and sanctuary, I have been Baptist all my life. And not just any generic shading of Baptists either, among all the configurations of Baptists out there. I have been American Baptist through and through from the day of my birth nearly 40 years ago. In the span of those years I have been compelled over and over again to decide for myself whether the American Baptists were worth my allegiance, whether they reflected in their life together an understanding of Jesus and the Bible that resonated with my own, whether there was room or not in this particular family for me to be welcomed to my own special place at the table. I have weighed the merits of being American Baptist in the midst of life crises and faith crises. I have done so when discerning my call to ministry as a young woman fresh out of college with the entire world at my feet. I have especially done so when American Baptists have denied my call, denigrated my personhood as a lesbian in church leadership, and not so gently shown me the door and encouraged me not to look back as they closed that door behind me. For those of you who don’t much care about American Baptists, those of you who come to this place with a different kind of faith background and have been surprised to find yourself returning week after week to a Baptist church, those of you who love this collection of souls here in Granville and would no matter what the sign out front declared our denominational affiliation to be, I am sure that my lifelong struggle to define myself as Baptist may be puzzling to you. Just what is the big deal anyway, you may think. Who really cares if we stay American Baptist or not?

That is the question I wrestle with on the heels of the Rochester Summit. I have realized gradually over the past months that I am tired of being part of a denomination which never seems to tire of asking me to leave. I have grown weary of the fight to be included and to make sure my voice and the voices of others like me remain heard in the ABC. Especially of late, I am burdened by the attempts of some to blame my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and the churches who welcome and minister to us for all the woes which have befallen this grand old denominational tradition. Ah, that we only had that much power! A friend of mine has helped me recently to see that a dysfunctional system depends upon a perceived victim always standing on the outside, pleading to get in. What happens if that victim refuses to participate anymore? The cycle of the system can be broken by the simple decision to stop playing that role for even one more minute. What would happen if we stopped asking, individually and corporately, for inclusion into a system that inherently seems not to have a place for us? What would it mean if we decided, just this once, to ask the ABC to leave us?

I am not alone in thinking this way, I must tell you. As the Rev. Daniel Pryfogle, interim director of the Association of Welcoming & Affirming Baptists, reports in his many conversations with other AWAB churches across the breadth of the ABC, there is no energy at all to fight a denominational battle. None. On one hand, I believe that churches like ours take this position because we have already fought this fight and engaged in this war. Wherever we all ended up as a result of that, no one wants to head back into that sort of energy-sapping, resource-draining confrontation. Yet on the other hand, churches on the margins of the ABC because of their stance on acceptance and valuing of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have discovered that these are precisely the places where transformative, life-changing ministry truly occurs. The more time and energy we spend dodging the jabs of those who would have us knocked out of the ABC for good give us less of these precious commodities at our disposal to tend to the mission of Jesus Christ in our communities and our world. Hence the recent shift in AWAB’s own visionary course from being reactive to the denomination to becoming proactive in looking for ways to empower emerging leadership among our GLBT youth and new ministry initiatives in our churches. This is a means of refusing to play the game anymore, of deciding that there is more hope and life in ceasing the pleading always to remain a member of the ABC family and in claiming our own right to name who we will be and what we will believe. This, in essence, is what it would mean if we decided, just this once, to ask the ABC to leave us.

These are the kinds of discussions that took place at the Rochester Summit. Some folks gathered to talk about how to stand up against the ABC yet one more time, how to strategize politically and organize counterproposals to some of the awful documents that have been circulating as threats against churches like ours of late. Others, thankfully so many others, gathered to brainstorm ideas about how to care for one another in this contentious time, how we stop the wounding that is going on in God’s name, how we define ourselves anew as Baptists in the coming days. All 158 or so of us in attendance talked and shared, laughed and cried, ate and worshiped together and came to the realization after two short days that none of us carried this burden alone, no matter where we were, where we had been, or where we were going. That alone would have been enough for many of us. Yet for me and many others with whom I spoke, something bigger and much more powerful happened for us on that weekend – we reclaimed our passion to be Baptist.

Truly being Baptist means that there is freedom to gather together, to discuss dissenting or unpopular ideas of any stripe, to organize ourselves into associational bodies however we see fit. Being Baptist means that you and I and every other Baptist across the country can disagree vehemently on matters of theology and ideology and still gather together to worship, to welcome, to work, to be the incarnation of the living Christ. Being Baptist means that we don’t have to subscribe to any creed or dogma, that we don’t have to sign off on any statement of beliefs, in order to stay at the table. There is a growing movement within the ABC in these days to make us become precisely the opposite of these things – a body of homogeneous churches which all believe exactly the same set of doctrines and affirm the same social positions and need to put their names at the bottom of a page saying that they do. American Baptists last faced this kind of national movement in 1946 and decided unequivocally at that time that there was no room in Baptist circles for such a rigid and strident push toward silencing our individual principles and rights of disagreement and unity, held in tension at the same moment. Records of that epic gathering report that the delegates in attendance held that this matter had finally been settled and laid to rest. If only that were so!

Among all that I experienced at the Rochester Summit, the greatest gift to me was a reclamation of those Baptist principles of soul liberty, freedom of association, autonomy of the local church, and the individual’s right and responsibility to interpret the ways of the Christian life for themselves in the context of the larger community. This collection of folks looking for a breath of new life among the ABC found just that by dusting off the principles of old, the basic tenets of our faith tradition which have been embraced for many, many years. At this crossroads of my own personal wrestling yet again with whether or not to stay American Baptist, the answer became clear. Being Baptist is not what I have to be; being Baptist is what I choose to be. Whether the ABC collectively abandons or not that which makes it Baptist, whether this church chooses to leave the ABC or stay or whether that choice is made for us is really immaterial to me in the long run. I am Baptist because I can be within that framework truly who I am in all my unorthodoxy and dissension and I am free to embrace anyone I choose no matter where they stand and they are free to embrace me.

So what is important in these days? Do we stay American Baptist or not? Perhaps the best response is that given by the Council of AWAB in their letter protesting the Regional Executive Ministers’ November 2004 drafting and approval of a document addressing the issue of homosexuality. This response reads in part:

We have always approached our detractors with goodwill and love, and have worked tirelessly for the preservation of the unity of this denomination. But ultimately, our passion about this [document] does not derive from our passion for this denomination. Our passion is for the Good News of God’s love, proclaimed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We write because we believe the letter is wrong and unchristian, and will become a tool for the powers and principalities in dismantling the capacity of the ABC to proclaim this Good News. By means of misleading tools like this, the powers may well “win”, insofar as they succeed in dismissing all who believe that Christ’s love is also for God’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and allied children. But they will be like soldiers at the foot of the cross, gambling over Christ’s clothes: such will be the meager spoils of their victory. For us, and our households, of whatever blessed configuration ordained by God, we will serve the Lord.

Some Thoughts on the ABC Biennial and Recent Events

By Chris Boisvert

Every two years since 1991 I have packed up at the end of June, this year in July, and headed to the American Baptist Churches Biennial meeting. From the beginning my experience with the greater American Baptist family has been one that comes with missed blessings. On one hand it is a time to join with my fellow Baptists, from across the nation and the world, and to rejoice in the common celebration of what it is to be one in Christ. At the same time, it is a time of exclusion and abuse. As a man who is both Christian and gay, I have been marginalized, excluded and made to feel an outcast by members of my American Baptist family. I have heard many wrong, misinformation and un-Christian things spoken during plenary sessions and statements of concern hearings.

At the last biennial in Richmond, VA, a group of Christians, not directly associated with the ABC, protested the AWAB worship service. People held up signs saying things like "God Hates Fags" and "Death to Sodomites". This group enlisted children as young as ten to help hold up the signs and to call worshippers names as they entered the church where the worship was being held. We are not quite at this point of disrespect of our fellow Christians in the ABC. However, those of us who are members of an AWAB church, know lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people, or are a sexual minority person ourselves, feel hurt just the same. We don't understand why our more fundamentalist brothers and sisters are trying so hard to exclude those who want to be active participants in the life of our denomination. But it is now more than just trying to exclude LGBT people. It is about purging churches from the ABC. It is about purification based on what "some" people define as the pure. Have we forgotten that Baptists do not have a pope or bishop to interpret the meaning of scripture, that we are a thinking people who are free to interpret scripture with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

AWAB churches have a diverse ministry, just like non-AWAB churches. Many AWAB churches help feed the hungry, have outreach ministries, day care centers and schools. AWAB churches are made up primarily of heterosexual people, young and old, of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Yet because AWAB churches welcome LGBT people, other ABC churches cannot associate with Welcoming & Affirming folks. If we cannot live together as Baptists and Christians, what does this say to the world? How can we expect people to live in peace if we cannot set that example ourselves?

I'm still going to this year's biennial gathering. However, I know clam my Baptist identity through an association with The Alliance of Baptists, not the ABC. In the Aliance, they remember what it is to be a Baptist.