Baptists: We Should Love Them

My beloved Uncle Charlie is a Baptist minister so I have good personal reasons to love Baptists. He served his country in the Air Force, then dedicated his life to serving communities all over the south-eastern United States.

Reflecting on this reminded me of one good reason to love Baptists. There exists no town so small or no urban area so far gone that a Baptist cannot be found trying to minister to it. My atheist friends really need to note that I will only take them seriously when they send good hearted, well-educated workers to every hamlet and block in America to help people.

My Dad, not himself a Baptist, often pointed out that if we were lost or in trouble the easiest way to get some food and a ticket home would be to find the local Baptist church. He is right. The community that has lost its last Baptist church has really died, but that merely puts it on the list for the next Baptist church.

And this is another reason to love Baptists. Whenever I talk to Baptist pastors or laymen who are serious about the Faith, they are looking for people to help. When Vermont is proclaimed “most secular,” my Baptist friends begin plotting ways to help Vermont. When Detroit is viewed as broken beyond repair, my Baptist colleagues start figuring out ways to church plant.

Simultaneously, I have never known a more self-critical group.

Baptists almost always get bad mainstream press. Jimmy Carter was worrisome, because he was a Baptist until he started attacking Baptists. But I have discovered Baptists don’t like themselves any better than the “liberal media.” If a Baptist church fed a million people, they would apologize when asked about the one they missed. If they have political success, they worry about pride. If they have spiritual success, the worry about pride.

I have met a great many humble Baptists, but never a contented one.

Baptists love to read, argue, and study. The down-side of this is obvious. Find two Baptists and you are likely to see two churches starting over some disagreement, but that often leads to growth. When not rancorous, and Baptists are not nasty as a whole despite the stereotypes, taking ideas seriously enough to start a new ministry is a good thing. Anglicans hijack someone else’s project and pretend it is there own. Baptists are intellectually fruitful and multiply.

Even “narrow-minded’ Baptists, I have run into a few that insist on the King James only, love ideas. They will argue with me and care about the outcome of intellectual debate. In a nation where pictures are replacing words, Baptists are people who read books, publish books, and think about books. They may denounces your book, but at least they have read it. And after all loving the King James Bible too much, the most beautiful translation ever made that helped create the English language, is not the worst of vices.

Baptist can still be found who preach holiness. While the rest of us worry about our image, as if America were in the thrall of too much pietism, Baptists still hate sin. Sometimes they pick the wrong things to label sins, but at least they haven’t given up on the idea! My problems are not helped by a therapeutic god who listens and then asks Rogerian questions about my pain. My sins are helped by repentance and change.

I can always count on a Baptist to thunder like John the first Baptist.

Still, as my Aunt Jean and Uncle Charlie demonstrate daily, after they hold the line on sin, the Baptists I know will hug you, bless your heart and try to help. The sheep are wounded and often stupid and they don’t pretend otherwise. Still, at their best, Baptists I know will not beat the sheep. They correct, they cajole, they corral, but they never kill.

As I start work at a university founded by Baptists just before I was born, I am thrilled to get to learn from the bulwark of American Christendom: American Baptists.

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