I recently had the privilege of attending the United District Women’s Mission Auxiliary’s (WMA) quarterly meeting to present the message. The meeting was held at Denver Street Baptist Church in Greenwood on Saturday, Jan. 6. The group elected officers for the new year, heard reports, worshiped God, received an offering for Central Baptist College and shared a meal. As I reflected on their meeting and this group’s effectiveness in supporting various ministries, I realized yet another thing that gets my gears spinning — our ability to work together.
I know spending time around church people and doing church things has insulated most readers of this column from experiencing people who can be bitter, gossiping, insincere, guarded or unwelcoming. I’m glad people who fit that bill don’t spend any time at church. (Of course, this is only my delusion.) The Philadelphia Baptist Confession of Faith states that “the purest churches under heaven are subject to mixture and error.” The reality that all persons on this side of glory have personality and character flaws is an unavoidable truth. Nevertheless, we can work together!
Looking at our history, culture and foundations, the Baptist Missionary Association (BMA) churches have accomplished astoundingly great things for the glory of God because of this simple fact — we can work together. The secret to our past and future success is the healthy balance of doctrinal fidelity between churches.
When I surveyed some different confessions of faith, I noticed they are different lengths:
• The Philadelphia Baptist Confession (1742) is 14,871 words long.
• The Baptist Faith and Message (2000) is 4,058 words long.
• The New Hampshire Confession (1833) is 2,449 words long.
• The BMA Doctrinal Statement is 2,159 words long.
Our associational Doctrinal Statement is on the short side. It is, after all, intended to keep our various churches doctrinally united with the explicit purpose of working together. Our Doctrinal Statement is not a complete list of beliefs. If we tried to include every nuance of belief in an association, we would limit who we could work with more than necessary. A Doctrinal Statement that exhausted every belief we hold at the local church level would exclude who we could work with, and that is why having a true and balanced Doctrinal Statement is important.
Interestingly, if we looked at each section of the BMAA Doctrinal Statement, we would find that we have given disproportionally more attention to a single section. The average length for each section is only 163 words, but Article X — The Church has nearly 3.5 times that amount. Our historical focus on believing the right things about the church is the key to our past success. The church is God’s plan for accomplishing his mission on Earth. Our God doesn’t have a plan B. His single and sufficient plan for making disciples of all nations is the church. Understanding this is the secret sauce to success in ministry, and it is why we can work together.
Despite different attitudes, temperaments, backgrounds, preferences, traditions and sinfulness, churches can work together when we understand what the Bible teaches about the church’s nature, function and purpose. Unfortunately, our American culture of individualism has gotten in the way of our work in the past 20 years. John Stott wrote in The Message of Ephesians: God’s New Society: “One of our chief evangelical blind spots has been to overlook the central importance of the church. We tend to proclaim individual salvation without moving on to the saved community. We emphasize that Christ died for us ‘to redeem us from all iniquity’ rather than ‘to purify for Himself a people of His own.’ We think of ourselves more as ‘Christians’ than as ‘churchmen,’ and our message is more good news of a new life than of a new society.”
I want us to realize that our doctrinal position on the church is not just a pet doctrine from our Landmark heritage but an integral part of our success. Stott points out how our understanding of the church relates to the purpose of salvation. How can we compellingly proclaim the gospel if we cannot answer what we have been saved from or to? What is it that was damaged when sin entered the world? What about humanity makes us different from the rest of creation? We are different because we were created in the image of God. Sin damaged that image, but it couldn’t destroy it. The image of God is best explained by our ability to have relationships. We have a relationship with our Creator, His creation and each other. Sin damages all these relational areas. Sin causes separation from God. Sin made the ground hard so that man needed to work the land to live off it after the fall. And sin is the reason people are hard to get along with.
There are a lot of professing Christians who imagine Heaven to be an open field of isolation. Country folk, get ready because Christians will live in the city on the other side of eternity (Rev. 21:2). I agree with why you prefer the country. I love bringing up my family in Greenwood. I have a list of reasons why I like it here more than I did when I lived in the metropolis of Northwest Arkansas. All those complaints are dismissed when sin is removed. The reason Christians aren’t beamed up to Heaven at the moment of conversion is that while we are granted time on Earth, we can work together.
