In an article titled “Meeting for Minutes? Baptist Congregational Life in the Age of Twitter,” Martin Sutherland of Laidlaw College in New Zealand offers the following reflections on the importance of local church membership and congregational polity in an age of social networking:

In Christ, by the power of the Spirit, Christians have been reconciled to God. Thus, in us too the plan for the end of time is now mysteriously fulfilled. The church plays an integral part in the unfolding plan of God. We are imperfect to be sure. We may still groan and wait for adoption to become evident in our midst, but, for all that, we are the body of Christ, declaring God’s new order to the universe. This is what is signaled in Ephesians 3:21. Amazingly, God may be glorified in the church as well as in Christ. The concept of “glorifying” God here is a rich one…. Christians do not merely offer praise; they participate in God’s glory as they participate in Christ. Conversely, in manifesting the fulfillment of the mission Dei, the church glorifies God, displaying to the universe who God is and what God has done, demonstrating by its very existence the divine nature.

Now, this notion that the church tells forth the glory of God is a little troubling for those of us who know the church! We think of our own congregations and wonder just what exactly this poor specimen of the children of God is unveiling to the universe. But this is only problematic if we have an over-realized eschatology that imagines we become some perfect community in this time. We are fallen, often inadequate, frequently quarrelling, “a fractious and divided people.” That being so, what can a congregation hope to show of the mission of God? It shows the mission in action. It shows the reconciling power of the Spirit being worked out in real time.

This is our role in the mission of God. This is the cosmic dynamic that we call non-believers to join. As an incarnation of the mission Dei, church does not merely do mission, it embodies it. Crucially, the mission is demonstrated not in our perfect being but in the development of our becoming. In this openness to the transforming power of the Spirit we incarnate the missio Dei.

I use “incarnate” deliberately, not to diminish the unique role of Christ of course but to emphasis [sic] it. If we are to “glorify” God we will do so incarnationally. Here congregational life becomes crucial. We may joke that “we love the church but it is Christians we can’t stand,” but that jibe does identify a key issue. Jesus came to his own in flesh and blood. The Baptist vision forbids us to pretend we can be church in general without being congregations in particular. It is a conceit to imagine that we love the people of God otherwise than in loving these people of God.

Thus, I suggest the face-to-face-ness of the congregation simply cannot be escaped. It does not glorify God to press “delete” on difficult relationships, or on those who don’t look, smell, or sound like us. Facebook and Twitter attract the easily connected; the gospel brings together the irreconcilable.

Rich stuff here. You should read the whole essay. See Martin Sutherland, “Meeting for Minutes? Baptist Congregational Life in the Age of Twitter,” in Beyond 400: Exploring Baptist Futures, eds. David J. Cohen and Michael Parsons (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), pp. 53–54.

I was excited to learn about a new blog connected to Patheos, cleverly titled The Anxious Bench. The early posts are promising. The contributors include historians Tommy Kidd and Philip Jenkins of Baylor, John Fea of Messiah College, and John Turner of George Mason University. I look forward to regularly reading their insights.

(Image credit)

Unfortunately, the BHHS meeting often conflicts with our spring graduation at SEBTS. In part for this reason, and in part because most of my fellow Southern Baptist colleagues are involved in other scholarly societies and annual conferences, in recent years I’ve participated more in the Baptist Life and Thought Study Group at the Evangelical Theological Society (I’m a member of the steering committee), the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, and the International Conference on Baptist Studies. (The latter is a triennial meeting that is being hosted by SEBTS this summer. More on that in a later post.) Nevertheless, I’m delighted that BHHS is meeting close by and that I’ll be able to attend. It’ll be nice to catch up with some friends I don’t get to see in person all that often.

The plenary addresses for the conference are as follows:

Glenn Jonas (Campbell University Divinity School) – “Nurturing the Vision: Highlights from a 200 Year Old Baptist Church in Raleigh”

Bill Leonard (Wake Forest University Divinity School) – “Conviction and Contradiction: Reassessing Theological Formation in Baptist Identity”

Fisher Humphreys (Beeson Divinity School) – “To Go Forward We Must First Go Back: Baptist Theology since 1950”

Parallel papers will be read by a wide variety of historians and theologians, including my SEBTS colleague John Hammett, my Sunday School class member Jan Martijn Abrahamse, my favorite Baptist iconoclast Curtis Freeman, my first Baptist history professor Doug Weaver, and the troubler of Israel himself, Aaron Weaver (the lesser Weaver).

I want to especially encourage my SEBTS faculty colleagues and students to consider attending this conference. You can register for the BHHS annual meeting online.

Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.

As you can imagine, this amendment has elicited strong support and strong opposition from various sectors of society. Two  Southern Baptist pastors in the Raleigh-Durham area have offered helpful, substantive thoughts on the marriage amendment: David Horner of Providence Baptist Church and J.D. Greear of The Summit Church. Like these brother Triangle pastors, I will be voting in favor of the amendment.

If you want to read more about the amendment, I’d encourage you to check out this list of resources provided by The Biblical Recorder, the state paper of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina. I would also strongly urge you to join me in voting in favor of the marriage amendment next week.

(image credit)

In the New Testament the doorway into the fellowship of a local congregation of Christians was baptism. By it a person separated himself from the world and joined himself to the church. Take the day of Pentecost as a case in point. Peter’s final appeal to his hearers was, “Be saved from this perverse generation.” In other words, come out from among the sinners you are presently standing with and join us. And Luke says, “Then those who gladly received his word were baptized, and that day about three thousand souls were added to them” (Acts 2:40–41).

By their baptism these new converts separated themselves from the Israel that had rejected Christ, to join the new Israel that owned his salvation and sovereignty. And they committed themselves to meet regularly for teaching, fellowship, prayers, breaking of bread and contributing to one another’s needs…. (Acts 2:42–47).

Today, unfortunately, in some churches baptism and church membership are treated as separate issues. People feel that as long as they belong to the invisible, universal church, that is all that matters. But this is quite wrong. The apostles believed and taught that the invisible church must be expressed through the visible church on earth. They saw each local congregation as a visible manifestation of the one true church. The term “the church” and the term “the body of Christ” are applied in the New Testament both to the local visible congregation and the invisible universal church. The one is as much “the church” as the other. So Paul writes “To the church of God that is at Corinth” (i.e. local church 1 Cor. 1:21), and that “God gave the Lord Jesus to be head over all things the church” (i.e. the universal church, Eph. 1:22).

It is therefore quite wrong to suppose that you can belong to the universal, invisible church without belonging to its local, visible counterpart in the place where you live. The New Testament never considers the possibility of a believer living his Christian life outside the context of the local church. Membership of the invisible church should automatically express itself in membership of some local visible church.

Here, then, is the double confession of baptism as far as church membership is concerned. It is an opportunity to declare yourself a Christian and to be declared a Christian. In his baptism a person confesses that he is a Christian and asks to be acknowledged as such. He wants to be identified with his fellow-believers as a follower of Christ. In baptizing him, the members of the church signify their wholehearted acceptance of is profession of Christianity and receive him into their fellowship. Thus it is only after a person is baptized that he is allowed to break bread with the particular group of believers and come under the care and control of the elders.

To sum up, by the Spirit we are baptized into the invisible church, the church as God sees it. By water we are baptized into the visible church, the church as man sees it. No one should be baptized who is not also prepared to become a church member. And no one should be received into membership who is not willing publicly to declare their faith in Christ by baptism (pp. 107–08).

While I would push back against the language of elders “controlling” their church members (I’d suggest “leading” as the better word choice), overall I appreciate Russell’s thoughts on this matter. I’d recommend his book, especially for those Baptists who are inclined toward Covenant Theology and might be flirting with pedobaptism.

The best way for Christians to hold forth truth is with a Bible in our hands since, as David rejoiced, “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple” (Ps. 19:7). Yet in proclaiming our biblical message, we Christians should never set ourselves forward as the arbiters of truth. Even as we set forth Jesus Christ as the final and truest revelation of God, we do so only as servants of our hearers (see 2 Cor. 4:5). Listening to the critiques of our postmodern neighbors and admitting that the arrogance of modernity has sometimes influenced our own heritage, Christians should speak with a chastened repentance that is less triumphalistic than may previously have been the case. We are finite and fallen, so the message we proclaim should be compared constantly to the Bible.

Yet for all our humility in holding forth truth and our charity in critiquing the claims of others, Christians must still insist that what we proclaim from God’s Word is truth. We reject the notion that our doctrine consists of nothing more than the subjective experience of our own faith community, since the Bible we proclaim presents truth revealed from God. Thus guarded, we remain committed to the authority, power, and unique revelation of the Holy Scriptures through which God speaks to people today (The Gospel as Center, pp. 36–37).

I think this is a good word. In fact, I’d like to despoil my Presbyterian brother and apply his keen insights more broadly to the topic of confessionalism. When we confess our convictions, our confidence is never in our interpretations and traditions in and of themselves, but in God and his written revelation, the Bible. Confessions are valuable, to be sure, but they aren’t sacrosanct; the Bible is the measure of a given confession’s worth.

This is in part why most Baptists embrace a less stringent confessionalism than some of our sister traditions. There is no uniform Baptist confession that has been embraced by most Baptists in most places. Even our more noteworthy confessions, such as the Second London and New Hampshire confessions, have often been revised, summarized, amended, or abstracted when adopted by particular churches, groups of churches, and schools. It’s not that most Baptists oppose confessions or creeds, regardless of the arguments of progressive revisionists. Rather, we simply think our confessions should always be open to modification as our knowledge of the Scriptures is refined and/or new cultural contexts call for new issues to be elevated to the level of confessional priorities.

Southern Baptists have revised the Baptist Faith and Message three times, amended it another time, and will likely tinker with it again in the future, assuming the Lord tarries his return. This isn’t a bad thing. No confessional approach is wholly without weaknesses, but it seems to me that a “chastened confessionalism” is better than either elevating a particular confession to near-canonical status (at least in practice) or rejecting confessions as incompatible with liberty of conscience. It’s a healthy practice to periodically revisit and, when necessary, revise a confession, so long as it’s done with an open Bible, a humble spirit, and sensitivity to both history and contemporary context.

I can’t begin to estimate how often I’ve heard some variation of this story. Home churches or associations want to provide a college or seminary scholarship, but on the condition that the recipient remains a member of his home church while he is a student in another city or even another state. I even know of one state convention that provides scholarships to seminarians, but only if they remain members of a church in their home state. That state doesn’t have a Southern Baptist seminary within its borders.

I’m very grateful for churches, associations, and state conventions that provide scholarships to students. I was blessed to be the recipient of an associational scholarship that funded about half the cost of my M.Div. studies. Many students wouldn’t be able to afford school without these scholarships. So thank you to every local church, association, or state convention that ministers to students in this way. It’s an important ministry and it’s very appreciated.

Nevertheless, I’d urge these groups to lift the ban on joining a church near the college or seminary in which the scholarship recipient enrolls. This policy, which again, is extremely common, inadvertently cheapens the importance of church membership. Students need to covenant with a local body of believers while they are away at school. They need to be shepherded by faithful pastors, they need to contribute financially to the church they attend, they need to have a voice in the affairs of the congregation, and they need to be subject to the church’s discipline. They need to be members, not mere attenders.

I’ve seen this sort of policy contribute to an unfortunate and unintended consequence: students who bounce from church to church because they know they can’t actually join a new congregation. This cultivates a bad habit that is endemic among American evangelicals, including many Southern Baptists. Many students are making personal church involvement decisions for the first time in college or seminary. They need to have the freedom to join a local church, not float from place to place. In fact, they need to be strongly urged to join a local church.

To be clear, I know that some students enroll in schools that are within a reasonable commute to where their home church gathers. Others may live a bit further away, but they return home regularly on the weekends. These students may choose not to join a church in their college or seminary town, and I think that is entirely reasonable. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if a student is away from her home church more than half the Sundays in a given year, then she needs to join another church closer to the school. And even if she does return home, say, two-thirds of the time, she needs to regularly attend the same church in her college town the rest of the time. Continuity of involvement is the key.

I would recommend that every scholarship-granting church and other ministry that requires home church membership revisit this policy. Instead of asking scholarship recipients to remain members of their home church, require them to either remain a member of the home church if they still live close by or join a sister Southern Baptist congregation within a semester of relocating. Bless the student and encourage him to take local church membership seriously. This seems like a win-win proposal.

Again, thanks to every church, association, or state convention that provides scholarships to collegians and seminarians. Please encourage your students to be faithful churchmen even as you provide them with the means to be good students.

In addition to the sharp new look, we’ve also added some new features, one of which is a series we’re calling “For the Record.” This will be an ongoing series where we’ll interview a SEBTS faculty member or other individual about an important topic. The first installment of For the Record is an interview with me on the topic of Baptist identity and the future of the Southern Baptist Convention. For the interview, my friend Bruce Ashford asked me the following questions:

1. Baptist identity seems to be a hot-button issue in some SBC circles. How do you understand Baptist identity?

2. Do you think there is such a thing as a uniquely Baptist understanding of doctrines such as Scripture, salvation, last things, etc.?

3. We hear a lot about Baptist distinctives. What are the Baptist distinctives?

4. Which Baptist distinctive do you believe is most threatened in our contemporary context?

5. One of the recurring debates among Baptists is the origin of our tradition. What do you think about Baptist origins?

6. The SBC is being asked to consider adopting Great Commission Baptists as an optional second name for our network of churches. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you like the name that has been proposed?

7. It seems likely that Fred Luter will be elected the next president of the SBC. What would his election mean for Southern Baptists?

8. What do you think is the biggest challenge Southern Baptists will face over the next decade?

I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in on these questions. I hope you’ll head over to Between the Times and read the full interview. The links are included below.

For the Record: Nathan Finn on Being Baptist (Part 1)

For the Record: Nathan Finn on Being Baptist (Part 2) 

(Image credit)

Please pray for South Durham Church. Pray for Adam and his wife Heather. Pray for Christian Jernigan, another SEBTS grad and a former IMB missionary who is also part of the leadership team. Pray for the new church’s soon-to-be charter members. Pray that the Lord of the harvest would work through the members of South Durham Church to draw many people to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Pray that South Durham Church would become a gospel-driven local church that would in the near future be able to help plant other like-minded churches here, there, and everywhere.

Check out the South Durham Church website to learn about the church’s mission and values, doctrinal beliefs, and affiliations. You can also learn when and where they gather for corporate worship and community groups. If you live near the Southpoint area and are looking for a church home, consider covenanting with South Durham Church and partnering with them to proclaim Christ in South Durham and beyond.

Here’s the concluding paragraph to my review:

Chapman’s biography is a model for critical, but sympathetic engagement with a leading religious figure. He paints a picture of Stott that does not gloss over shortcomings, including struggles with pride, theological oddities, pastoral frustrations, and interpersonal conflict with other evangelical leaders. Yet Chapman argues that Stott was sincerely motivated by an earnest desire to see the gospel proclaimed, the hurting cared for, Western culture revived, and Christian leaders adequately trained. Stott was a devoted evangelical who was shaped by many factors, including his background, his conversion to fundamentalism, his ecumenical interests, and his ministry successes and failures. For pastors and other Christian leaders, Chapman’s book provides a glimpse into the real world of ministry, where mixed motives and unrealized dreams can still be used in the evangelical cause. For scholars, Chapman’s book is the starting place for any future studies of Stott (there will be many) and a template for how to write a good biography that balances appreciation for the subject without resorting to hagiography.

I hope you’ll read the review and, more importantly, read Godly Ambition.