Southern Baptists Return to Roots
Later today Fred Luter Jr., a former street preacher from New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, is to be installed as the president of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention.
This appointment has attracted more press than usual, with good reason: the Rev. Luter is African-American, and the Southern Baptists broke away from the main Baptist branch in this country in the 1840s over the issue of defending slavery.
But that was a long time ago, and today's Southern Baptist leaders were more impressed with Fred Luter's magnetic sermons and his building of the moribund Franklin Avenue Baptist Church into a thriving congregation of some 8,000 souls. He did it twice, actually, the most recent resurrection of his congregation coming after Hurricane Katrina flooded the church and scattered its parishioners.
Throughout that crucible, the motto of FABC has remained the same: "Exalting the Savior, Equipping the Saints, Evangelizing the Sinner!"
In choosing the Rev. Luter as their new president, it might be said that the Southern Baptists are returning to their denomination's own roots.
The man most often credited for forming the Baptist Church in America is Roger Williams. The real story is more complicated. Born in England, Williams experienced a religious conversion as a boy, subsequently left the Anglican Church and pronounced himself a Puritan. After immigrating to Massachusetts, he clashed with John Winthrop and other local religious authorities, however. They considered him an Anabaptist, partly because he rejected the church's government-sanctioned hierarchy, and partly because he underwent an immersion baptism as an adult.
Banished to unsettled Rhode Island, Williams helped build a city, a local government, and along with John Clarke, a house of worship that still stands: The First Baptist Church of Newport. Williams, who coined the phrase "wall of separation" between church and state, soon left the Baptist Church as well.
His critics called him "a Seeker," but Roger Williams considered himself a "Separatist." As devout as he was, Williams had trouble finding a denomination that fit his demanding concepts of Christian faith. In the end, he mostly worshiped alone.
Among Williams' ideals were his unease at attempting to convert the native Narragansett people, whose language he learned and whose tribal society he came to respect. Williams was also outspoken in his opposition to slavery, a stance based on his religious beliefs.
But the Indian lands were taken, their cultures devastated; and long before the Southern Baptists split away -- long before the Revolutionary War, in fact -- Newport, Rhode Island emerged as a center of the slave trade. Although Roger Williams lost both of those debates within his own community, he was not wrong about race. He was merely ahead of his time, as today's events in New Orleans underscore.
