Last Friday in Tampa, tucked away in one of the small meeting rooms of the Marriott Waterside hotel, twenty Baptists gathered to worship with the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America. This was one of the many breakout meetings of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, which attracted over 1600 registrants over a four-day period.
Our group shared a meal, sang hymns, and heard a devotional from the Reverend Julie Pennington-Russell of the First Baptist Church of Decatur, all of which revolved around the biblical principle of forgiveness. Ours was a prayer of confession penned by John van de Laar: “Forgive us our wrongs, God, forgive us as we do not deserve; forgive us against the demands of justice; and forgive our obsession that justice be done to those who have wronged us.”
Forgiveness. A word that, in my own faith formation last week, seemed to change the tone of the Cooperative Baptist General Assembly as a whole. In every Assembly I’ve attended, I get fired up about missions and ministry. I become passionate about what God is doing all across the globe. I am proud to be the type of Baptist that cherishes liberty and champions diversity amongst the leadership.
The topic of forgiveness did not diminish my fire, quench my passion, or squish my pride; rather, forgiveness reminded me of the interior space from which this zeal originates. The liturgy brought me back home to myself, to the root of my faith. It invoked a simple conviction from a Jesus who encourages us day after day to “forgive seventy-seven times” (Mt 18:22).
I once had a conversation with a friend in which we theorized how human history might be different if President George W. Bush forgave the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. It’s not that our nation could not forgive; in fact, with an annual military budget nearly twice the size of the budgets of the next two most powerful countries in the world combined, ours is a nation that can afford to forgive with incredible resolve.
Then it hit me. After twenty wonderful years of ministry, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has matured to be an effective presence in the world. Our partnerships and parishes have become meat-and-potato Baptists; we have outgrown the spiritual milk of our youth. We have built up spiritual capital and garnered some serious ministerial and prophetic assets. We stand on two feet, and we give powerful voice to an alternative, inclusive Baptist narrative that looks a lot different than that of our Southern Baptist counterparts.
And, despite a budget shortfall, we can afford to spend that spiritual capital with joy. Consider, for instance, that our Fellowship has wrestled with its identity and future over the past few years. Only organizations with enough spiritual capital can afford to wrestle like that. This kind of struggle is something with which I am familiar–the little Baptist church I pastor has been discussing its own identity in recent years. We do this because we know that God is not finished with us yet even though we have a small attendance; it communicates to the world that we can afford to move forward in the face of a high unemployment rate and a fragile socio-religious atmosphere.
If the Fellowship can afford to talk about identity, then it can afford to forgive. After our breakfast, I asked several Fellowship Baptists if any CBF assemblies broached the subject of grief and forgiveness. Since this year’s assembly was only the second one I’ve attended, I certainly did not want to jump to conclusions. I explained that the CBF’s missions emphasis is ahead of its time, but our humorous barbs and jovial approach to Baptist life throughout the sermons and skits during the assembly appeared to point to an unresolved grief.
I cannot speak to previous assemblies no more than I have the authority or audacity to speak to grief in our fellowship. As a person of mixed denominational upbringing, I did not experience the terminations, divorces, or odious conflicts that plagued Baptist life over the past three centuries. Any good pastoral care practitioner would advise an outsider to avoid saying to this grieving family, “I know what your going through.”
Yet, I too make up a small patch in the larger quilt of Fellowship Baptist life despite my newbie status; and, assuming clergy positions will be plentiful in the near future, I have my whole ministry ahead of me. Baptist life is where I intend to spend most, if not all, of that ministry. It only makes sense to chart a future for me and so many ministers like me who want to walk mercy-paved bridges of grace and unbounded love, even if the other side of that bridge is hostile territory.
Using our spiritual capital as a Fellowship in order to forgive those who have hurt us and excommunicated us, then, seems reasonable and necessary if we want to build an identity that is proactive in charting this type of future. To put it another way, if we want to be a Fellowship known for its unique ministry instead of its existence as a marginalized fringe community, then we need to cash in on the type of forgiveness and public confession that might shape a clear path of freedom from the shackles of conflicts of yesteryear.
My prayer for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is not that we Baptists will sing jolly hymns that help us forget our past and the struggles that so many brothers and sisters have fought in building this wonderful family. My prayer is that we can include forgiveness in our spiritual repertoire and reflect the grief process in a way that envelopes our past in the very mercy and grace with which our Lord envelopes us. How might we shape Baptist history differently if we were to forgive all those other Baptists who have attacked us, and to forgive boldly all in the name of Christ?
Baptist Spirituality 
As I understand the article, it is about forgiveness. But the phrase that jumped out at me in this article: “I once had a conversation with a friend in which we theorized how human history might be different if President George W. Bush forgave the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.”
President Bush is known as a forgiving man, a man of great faith, but his job as president was to protect our nation from all enemies (as President Obama swore to do as well.) People of faith can disagree about how best to strive for peace in the world; until the people of both the CBF and the SBC understand this, there will sadly be no reconciliation (or forgiveness). We hated to see the SBC get embroiled in partisan politics years ago – and are sad to see CBF making the same mistake.
Ahem! You will forgive my skepticism about such high sounding language when I tell you I have seen a much, much darker side to this so-called fellowship, and though we are all of us mere works in progress, it produces a surplus of bile in the digestive tract when one reads words written with such eloquence about forgiving others as though this body of Sadducees had authority to pronounce upon such matters when in fact this selfsame and erstwhile fellowship, this pretender to the status of koinonia stands deeply in need of prostrating itself in abject repentance and requesting forgiveness from those individuals whom it has damaged with its callous conniving and its cynical use of legal maneuvering to avoid the ethical obligations not to mention the highest demands of charity laid upon it by Holy Writ and that Word that stands above the Word, the one who continually says to the churches, “you have heard it said . . . yet I say unto you . . . ” Cavalier presumption, I say, most cavalier.