The importance and urgency of the New Baptist Covenant Celebration

By Dr. Jimmy Allen

This article is the first in a three-part series in the run up to the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in 2008.

The gathering of Baptist believers of North America in the World Congress Center in Atlanta January 30-February 1, 2008, is unprecedented and long overdue. It is filled with positive possibilities. It was born, as many of the most effective movements of God have been, in the hearts of two Baptist laymen. Bill Underwood, lawyer and new president of Mercer University and Jimmy Carter, Sunday school teacher and former president of the United States, invited a cross section of leaders represented in the North American Baptist Fellowship of the Baptist World Alliance to explore what could be done to discover common ground around the mandate of Jesus in Luke 4.

The meeting has met with a ready response by the majority of leadership groups of Baptists in North America. Participating Baptist organizations represent more than 21 million of the 37 million Baptists in North America. It will reach across the chasms created by racial, economic and regional barriers that have divided us for more than a century. The last time a meeting of all kinds of Baptists came together to worship, plan, and prioritize our witness in the world was in 1814. That meeting, known as the Triennial Convention, centered on foreign missions. The 2008 meeting centers on fulfilling the command of Jesus to preach good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, restore sight to the blind, set at liberty those who are oppressed, and proclaim the acceptable year of our Lord. Tragic divisions over racism and slavery issues divided our nation. It also divided and diverted the efforts to join the local churches of the Baptist movement in a united effort that could grow to reach across regional, racial, economic, and doctrinal lines.

A few decades ago the rumor was spread that God was dead. Conferences were held to perform autopsies, lament disappearance of signs of life, and search for ways that humanity could grope its way into a faithless future. It turned out that people were weeping at the wrong funeral, sorrowing over the wrong things. An energetic resurgence of searching souls spilled over the levees of organized religion and into many levels of our culture’s youth, business, megachurches, interest in the mystical, arts and books, movies, sports. God was not dead after all. He was simply moving in new and powerful ways in a secularized and materialistic society.

Now the rumors center on post-denominationalism. The fragmented, fractured, and failing structures of religious denominations have many of us grieving over what might have been. We see the erosion of the mission passions we once knew. There was a day when we were introduced to the world through our church houses. That day is gone. Thomas Friedman is right in his pivotal book on globalization titled The World Is Flat. The forces of change coming out of instant communication through the Internet mean that our young can develop personal communications instantly across the globe. Travel throughout the world has created not just a tourist touch with other cultures but economic ties and relationships across the globe. We get our instructions on how to use our electronic equipment from people sitting in India, Bangladesh, or Indonesia. Hands on participation missions means that we go personally to help build homes, treat people in medical clinics, teach short term classes in Christian nurture, and feed the hungry. We need to discover means to share God’s unchanging good news in this changing world.

A society being reshaped by forces beyond our comprehension has caused some institutions of religion to seek to use the powers of the state to preserve their places of influence. Ego struggles, isolation of people of diverse opinions despite the vitality of their faith, an erosion of denominational loyalty, “mountain out of mole hill” religion plagues us. But we are weeping at the wrong funeral, sorrowing over the wrong things. Denominations are not dying, they are changing strategies. They are essential ingredients of what is and face the changing challenges of what must be.

I had no idea almost three decades ago as I presided over the formation of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship that we were creating out of our woundedness a laboratory for change and renewal. Networking is the key! God is moving again in new and powerful ways. Now we are ready under God’s guidance to move into the whole new movement of national and international impact.

Dr. Herbert Reynolds, Baylor University President Emeritus, said the week before his death that “this tremendously important initiative can have the most profound impact on the advancement of Christianity in this hemisphere since the First Great Awakening in America in the 18th century.”

Don’t miss it! Come join us in Atlanta January 30-February 1 at the Celebration of the New Baptist Covenant!

— Dr. Jimmy Allen is on the program committee for the New Baptist Covenant Celebration. He also serves as chair of Baptists Today and is a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. This article originally appeared in the August edition of the Baptist Studies Bulletin produced by the Center for Baptist Studies.