Associated Baptist Press - 3/11/2008

Associated Baptist Press
March 11, 2008 (8-27)

IN THIS ISSUE:
Leaders’ statement on climate change suggests Southern Baptist divide
Evangelical turnout for Democrats in Ohio shows diversity, experts say
Broadway Baptist votes to retain pastor amid gay controversy
Ethicist describes recipe for global warming skepticism
More than 4,800 people accept Christ in Caracas outreach effort
Opinion: Unity in the church at the expense of truth

Leaders’ statement on climate change suggests Southern Baptist divide
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- A group of prominent Southern Baptists -- including the denomination’s president -- released what some are calling a mild statement on climate change and environmental stewardship March 10.

But the names of several prominent denominational leaders are conspicuously absent from the statement, and the head of the Southern Baptist Convention agency charged with public-policy engagement has pointedly distanced himself from it.

The apparent divide may reflect changing ideological and generational views in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

SBC president Frank Page, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Danny Akin and other prominent pastors and agency heads released “A Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative” March 10. The statement laments the fact that the denomination’s previous engagement with environmental stewardship has been “too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice.”

It continues, “Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. We can do better.”

The declaration also says that Christians have a responsibility to protect the environment. It says that, while there remain legitimate disagreements among scientists and Christian thinkers about whether climate change is caused by human activity, Southern Baptists nonetheless have the responsibility to embrace principles of “creation care” and take “prudent” actions to protect God’s creation.

“[E]ven in the absence of perfect knowledge or unanimity, we have to make informed decisions about the future,” the statement says. “This will mean we have to take a position of prudence based partly on science that is inevitably changing. We do not believe unanimity is necessary for prudent action.

“Though the claims of science are neither infallible nor unanimous, they are substantial and cannot be dismissed out-of-hand on either scientific or theological grounds.”

While the scientific community has come to an overwhelming consensus in the past decade that human activity contributes to global climate change, a vocal minority has claimed the global-warming scare is a hoax.

Many scientists and environmental activists dismiss the argument, noting that many of the studies mounted to disprove global warming were funded by organizations linked closely with the oil industry.

But some pro-business political conservatives have taken up the doubters’ arguments nonetheless. Southern Baptists who question the reality of human-induced warming won a victory during the SBC’s annual meeting this year, when they weakened an already-tepid resolution on global warming before the convention’s messengers approved it.

They removed provisions from the resolution that would have encouraged “government funding to find definitive answers on the issue of human-induced global warming that are based on empirical facts and are free of ideology and partisanship” and “economically responsible government initiatives” to develop energy alternatives to oil.

The resolution as passed mentioned many pieces of evidence cited by global-warming doubters and urged Southern Baptists to be cautious in advocating the subject of climate change.

Richard Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, noted the resolution in a March 12 letter about why he did not sign the new statement.

“Southern Baptist public policy advocacy is most effective when it is supported by the broadest possible consensus among Southern Baptists,” Land said.

He noted that his agency’s role is “to express the consensus of Southern Baptists on public policy matters when they have reached such consensus. If the ERLC asserted Southern Baptists were in a different place on an issue than they actually were, we would lose the trust of Southern Baptists, and we would rapidly lose our credibility in Washington as well.”

Therefore, Land said, “it would be misleading and unethical of the ERLC to promote a position at variance with the convention’s expressly stated positions.”

Land also disagreed with the declaration’s assertion that the denomination had been “too timid” in dealing with environmental issues.

But in a March 10 conference call announcing the environmental initiative, its backers claimed it did not conflict with the 2007 SBC resolution.

“It’s not contrary to that statement; it simply builds on it,” said Southeastern Seminary’s Akin. “It has, I would say, a greater sense of urgency. I see it … building upon what Southern Baptists have said in previous statements and position papers.”

Both Akin and Jonathan Merritt -- a seminary student who is the spokesperson for the initiative and son of former SBC president James Merritt, who also signed the statement -- said the document incorporated several suggestions from Land’s ERLC staff.

The organizers took pains to say that, while the document calls Southern Baptists to engage further on the issues, they aren’t making any specific policy recommendations.

“We readily acknowledge that, at this particular moment, we don’t think it would be prudent for us to step out in terms of policy statements, to be specific,” Akin said.

Nonetheless, the press call with organizers featured an appearance by Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Warner and his colleague, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman (I) are co-sponsors of the first major greenhouse-gas-reduction bill to make it to the Senate floor. In December, when the bill passed the Senate Environment Committee, Warner was the only Republican on the panel to vote for it.

“I took on this challenge of global warming thinking that I’d like to achieve one more piece of legislation before I retire,” Warner told reporters. “I think it’s in the interest of my children and my grandchildren that I’m a trustee of our environment -- a steward of our environment, as are you.”

The SBC’s news arm, Baptist Press, led its March 10 issue with a story headlined, “Seminary student’s climate-change project is not SBC’s.” It quoted Land extensively and noted that “the so-called ‘Southern Baptist’ statement is not an initiative of” the denomination. However, it acknowledged that its supporters include “a number of high-profile Southern Baptist leaders.”

Besides Page, Akin and Merritt, other signers included Jack Graham, a former SBC president and pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas; Ronnie Floyd, a former SBC presidential candidate and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Springdale, Ark.; David Dockery, president of Union University; Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University; Anthony Jordan, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma; and Ken Hemphill, former president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and current professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

One prominent signatory’s name was removed from the initiative statement between the time it was released March 10 and the afternoon of March 11. The name of Malcolm Yarnell, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, disappeared from the initiative’s website, www.baptistcreationcare.org.

Yarnell’s boss, Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson, is one of the most glaring omissions from the names of supporters. Patterson is one of the architects of the successful effort by theological and political conservatives to take control of the SBC’s governing structures from moderates during the 1980s.

David Gushee, a Mercer University professor and Associated Baptist Press columnist who has advocated for Southern Baptist attention to climate-change issues, said March 11 that the apparent divide over the statement indicates larger faults within the SBC.

“If you know the Southern Baptist landscape at all and you look at the names of who signed and who didn’t sign, this may be the first public revelation of real differences in the currently existing Southern Baptist Convention leadership between center-right leaders and more hard-right people,” he said. “I see this as a center-right statement, and it was just a little bit too far, a little bit too much, for those who would be more right, hard right.”

-30-

Evangelical turnout for Democrats in Ohio shows diversity, experts say
By Hannah Elliott

NEW YORK (ABP) -- Polls showing that 43 percent of white evangelical voters who participated in Ohio’s recent primary election voted for Democrats are further evidence that mainstream media are missing a key story, according to a group of pundits.

Figures from the March 4 contest also showed that no single candidate -- from either party -- won a majority of white evangelicals’ support.

The poll was another in a series commissioned by organizations critical of the media consortium that has sponsored the most widely-reported statistics from the primary elections and caucuses. The consortium -- comprised of the Associated Press and the major broadcast and cable news networks -- have asked only Republican voters if they consider themselves “born-again or evangelical Christians.”

That oversight, said Christian leaders in a March 10 conference call with reporters, is leading media to miss “something big afoot” for the 2008 election.

Jim Wallis, author of The Great Awakening and president of the Christian anti-poverty group Sojourners, said evidence pointing to a significant change in white evangelical voting patterns has remained the same throughout primary contests nationwide.

“My question for the media really is: How much data does it take to change old media scripts?” he asked. “Because this data is consistent; it will shape the outcome of the election. And I just wonder when the media script is going to change. I mean, the data is now clear all around the country. There has been a dramatic sea change in the evangelical agenda.”

Wallis, whose group was one of the sponsors of the poll, said the apparent shift of white evangelical voters away from the Religious Right reflects a “wider and deeper” agenda than evangelicals seemed to embrace in 2004. Poverty, climate change and war are joining abortion and sexuality as core evangelical issues, he said.

Indeed, the survey found that 42 percent of white evangelical voters said job security and the economy were the most important issues to them. Only 14 percent said abortion and same-sex marriage were paramount.

Economics eclipsed the traditional hot-button issues even among white evangelicals who voted in the Republican primary, with 29 percent citing jobs and the economy as their lead issues and 23 percent citing abortion and gay marriage.

Rich Nathan, pastor of the Vineyard Church of Columbus, Ohio, said he has seen a similarly growing diversity of voting patterns among his flock over the last eight years.

With 12,000 members, Nathan’s congregation is Ohio’s second largest. And while sexuality and sanctity of unborn life are certainly important to his members, he said, they’re not definitive anymore.

“At our church, we run a free medical clinic, a free legal clinic, job-training programs, after-school programs, and dozens and dozens of services for immigrants, and all of that is volunteer-based. And as people are engaged with people who have needs, that also impacts their political perspectives,” he said. “That’s changing the people in the church.”

Church attendees overall may not be as monolithic as previously supposed, the poll suggests. In Ohio, 59 percent of voters who said they attended church at least weekly voted in the Democratic primary.

Past primaries seemed to show the same results. The Feb. 5 “Super Tuesday” primary in Missouri saw 53 percent of total voters reportedly attending church weekly. Democrats got 47 percent of those voters. Meanwhile, in Tennessee’s Super Tuesday contest, 61 percent of voters reported attending church at least once a week. Fifty-four percent of those voted in the Republican primary, while 46 percent voted in the Democratic race.

Shaun Casey, a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said the shift is accelerating because evangelicals have lost their previously held illusions that Republicans would end abortion and ban gay marriage. That, in effect, has “loosened them up” to realize a “growing moral horizon,” he said.

“This poll indicates a real political and theological restlessness among evangelicals,” said Casey, who is an ethics professor at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. “It’s too early to tell where they’ll end up, but we may have seen the high water mark for evangelical voting.”

The poll included results from 400 Republican voters and 400 Democratic voters, with an over-sample of 200 Democratic and 200 Republican white evangelical voters. The left-leaning groups Center for American Progress and Faith in Public Life also sponsored the survey.

Wallis and others cautioned Democrats that just because the shift away from the Religious Right means a broader evangelical agenda, it doesn’t mean that most evangelicals will automatically join the Democratic Party. And it certainly doesn’t mean abortion and gay marriage aren’t important any more.

Evangelicals will respond “to a candidate who speaks the moral language of politics,” he said.

“I think my own view is if Democrats make a woman’s right to choose the only language they use in this election campaign, they will not speak to this concern” about abortion, Wallis said.

But, he added, “If abortion reduction is a primary plank … if Democrats speak to this with some substance, they will win many of those votes.”

The bottom line, each of the experts said, is that white evangelicals are realizing that no party’s platform will ever square completely with the gospel. That, they added, is a healthier, more limited view of the capabilities of political involvement. It also makes presidential politics less predictable than in recent years.

“Half the evangelical electorate is in play,” Wallis reiterated. “Now where it comes down is not clear, but it is in play. It’s real. I’m telling you, I’m on the road every single day. It’s very real.”

-30-

Broadway Baptist votes to retain pastor amid gay controversy
By Robert Marus

FORT WORTH, Texas (ABP) -- A prominent Texas Baptist congregation embroiled in a highly public controversy over homosexuality and other issues chose March 9 to keep its pastor.

Members of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, voted 499-237 against firing Brett Younger. He has served as the church’s senior minister for nearly seven years.

“The vote means that two-thirds of the congregation wants to continue to be a church that goes beyond what's expected of a church,” Younger said, in an e-mailed response to a request for comment. “Broadway is an amazing congregation that’s willing to deal with difficult issues. The church will keep challenging its members to think and serve."

The decision to retain Younger came weeks after a group of disgruntled Broadway members submitted a petition attempting to force a vote to declare the church’s pulpit vacant. The congregation’s deacons initially recommended a three-month period during which the church would hire a consultant to rejoin the opposing factions. But in late February, Younger asked church leaders to schedule the vote on his fate.

It was the second controversial vote at Broadway in as many weeks. On Feb. 24, the congregation approved a compromise to end controversy over whether gay couples in the church should be pictured alongside other families in a new church directory. Some members objected to having those photos included, saying that would move from simply welcoming gay couples -- which Broadway has done quietly for years -- to actively affirming their homosexuality.

But the gay couples and their supporters opposed removing the photos from the directory. The compromise will feature neither family nor individual photos but instead picture every active member in candid and group photos.

The controversy made its way to the blogs of Broadway members and other interested Baptists and then appeared in both the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Dallas Morning News. Associated Baptist Press, gay news organizations and other national news outlets then picked up on the controversy.

It soon ballooned into a dispute over Younger’s overall leadership.

The anti-Younger group, calling itself Friends for the Future of Broadway, said the handling of the directory and other issues proved that Younger’s leadership was divisive and that he had led the church away from its “historical moderate Baptist theological heritage.” They cited other recent disputes, including one over a ministry to the homeless and Younger’s invitation of controversial theologian Marcus Borg to speak at Broadway.

A larger group signed a counter-petition supporting Younger’s leadership and calling for continued dialogue over sexuality and other divisive issues within the congregation.

Robert Saul, a spokesman for the group opposing Younger, responded to a request for comment with a prepared statement. It said Friends for the Future of Broadway accepted the congregation’s decision.

“Our desire was for the congregation to be able to vote. Now the members have spoken,” he said. “We respect the will of the majority and pray for the congregation's healing, recovery and continued service to the community that befits a 125-year-old church.”

However, Saul added, as a result of the turmoil, about 300 members have already left or plan leave Broadway.

Younger, for his part, interpreted the vote positively. “The people at Broadway seemed to feel like a two-thirds vote was amazingly affirming,” he said.

Broadway, founded in 1882, has long been one of the most prominent churches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and in so-called moderate Baptist life nationally. Among its previous pastors was Cecil Sherman, the founding coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. CBF’s current moderator, Harriet Harral, is a longtime Broadway member.

Generations of students, professors and administrators at nearby Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary have been active Broadway members.

While it has always differed in its theological approach and worship style from many Southern Baptist congregations, Broadway has since 1979 increasingly charted away from its historic denomination. That year, increasingly conservative leaders began taking over the Southern Baptist Convention’s governing structure.

-30-

Ethicist describes recipe for global warming skepticism
By Ken Camp

SAN ANTONIO (ABP) -- Conservative Christians have turned a cold shoulder to concerns about global warming, but ethicist David Gushee says he knows why.

“Climate change is among the most heavily reported stories -- and in my view, one of the most significant human challenges -- of the 21st century,” said Gushee, a professor at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology.

Gushee spoke March 3-4 at the Texas Christian Life Conference, in San Antonio. Attendees gathered to address a theme of “Faith, Science, and Ethics.”

Cultural, ideological and theological factors combine to make many evangelicals skeptical about global warming, Gushee added. He said the “die-hard anti-climate-change soup” follows a recipe of distain, distrust, mistrust, party loyalty, misunderstanding and a reluctance to “believe the unbelievable.”

It all begins with disdain for the environmental movement, he said. Some conservative evangelical Christians associate environmentalists with the 1960s counterculture and “flower power” hippies, he noted.

Others equate the environmental movement in general with “non-Christian or eclectic eco-spiritualities: “It’s Pocahontas talking to spirits in the trees.”

A distrust of mainstream science also plays a role, because the scientific method that produces evidence for global warming also runs contrary to the biblical literalism that teaches the Earth was created in six days less than 10,000 years ago, Gushee said.

“Some use climate change as a proxy for endless fighting of evolution battles,” Gushee said. And Christian talk-radio thrives on generating conflict, he noted.

Furthermore, many conservative evangelicals fail to understand the scientific peer-review process. They seize on a few the findings of a few dissenting scientists rather than the peer-reviewed findings of international scientific panels.

“Think of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as peer-review on steroids,” he said.

A mistrust of mainstream media also contributes to the reluctance of some to take action. Gushee characterized the attitude as “if it’s in the New York Times, it must not be true.”

Conservative niche news outlets and Christian talk-radio reinforce preconceived perceptions that do not challenge the conventional wisdom of political ideologues, he said.

“There’s a need for Christian exposure to diverse new sources,” he said. “The niching of the news has made it so that we never have to encounter an idea we don’t like.”

In recent years, environmentalism has been linked to the Democratic Party. Former Vice President Al Gore “has become a lightning rod” attracting people who are skeptical about global warming because they view the issue through a political lens, Gushee said.

But that could be changing. Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, has bucked the right wing of his own party by supporting legislation to reduce the level of greenhouse gasses.

“Whoever is elected president from among the remaining candidates, I believe we will have significant climate change legislation. And it’s about time,” Gushee said.

The belief in libertarian free-market economics as God’s will proves another challenge, since conservative Christians with a commitment to unfettered capitalism inherently are opposed to government intervention in the marketplace.

“Real or exaggerated worries about the economic effects of climate legislation,” particularly on the poor, also figure into the equation, Gushee said. Some evangelicals genuinely fear that efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses will cause a loss of jobs and negatively impact the poor.

A resurgence of an extreme form of Calvinism “cuts the nerve of acute human responsibility,” Gushee said. The belief that God ordains all things and therefore whatever occurs is destined as part of his plan leads to “the obscenity of complacency.”

Dominion theology finishes the mix of reasons why some adherents to the Religious Right overlook global warming as a legitimate concern.

A reading of Genesis that focuses on the idea of human dominion of creation -- the idea that God gave people free rein to exploit the earth for their own benefit -- needs to be reexamined, Gushee urged.

Rather than sipping the stew of die-hard climate-change skepticism, Gushee offered another entrée.

“A better path is to apply the best scientific resources in conversation with the best theological reflection to discern what it means to be disciples of Jesus Christ today,” he said.

-30-

More than 4,800 people accept Christ in Caracas outreach effort
By Kaitlin Chapman

CARACAS, Venezuela (ABP) -- More than 1,150 Baptists from Venezuela and the United States shared the gospel roughly 10,000 times during a recent evangelism effort called Caracas Crusade 2008.

Jacobo García, director of missions and evangelism of the National Baptist Convention of Venezuela, said he felt “indescribable joy” in working at the event.

“God, in his grace, considered us a group that loves the faith [enough] to work in evangelism in the five zones that compose the capital region and to see several thousands of people coming to the feet of Christ,” Garcia said. “To him we give the glory.”

During the crusade, participants worked alongside Baptist churches within the five geographical zones of Caracas, with congregations hosting nightly services and teams of four doing door-to-door and other evangelism during the day. A team from Tennessee, for instance, held baseball clinics for children while church members shared the gospel with their parents.

A Texas team was assigned to help Iglesia Bautista Monte Carmelo in a part of the capital region called Guarenas-Guatire. Baldemar Borrego, president of the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas, preached nightly at evangelism services there. Leaders from the Texas team said they shared the gospel with more than 300 people. Half of those came to believe in Jesus, they said.

Borrego said a particularly memorable event happened during the second week in Guarenas, when an alcoholic man entered the service.

“He prayed and accepted Christ,” Borrego said. “After that, he just started crying and couldn’t stop. He knew something had changed him.”

The team also preached at a public school that typically doesn’t allow Christians to speak to students. Lupe Rando, pastor of New Life Baptist Church in Vernon, Texas, spoke for five minutes and said 136 children received Christ as their personal savior.

Borrego also spoke during the annual assembly of the Venezuela Baptist Convention. He said “the people were very excited about this partnership with Texas.” They have committed to pray for every church in Texas because they want Texas to be reached with the gospel as well. Borrego challenged every Texas pastor to do the same for churches in Venezuela.

The convention emphasized follow-up of the new believers -- local churches started 53 new Bible study groups in order to disciple them.

Steve Seaberry, director of Texas Partnerships, said the Caracas Crusade was the perfect way to start a long-term partnership between the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Venezuela convention. Both groups are excited about the joint venture because Venezuelans are ready to receive the gospel, he said.

“The people are very open right now,” Seaberry said. “Times are difficult economically, which makes people open spiritually. We are very excited about what the future holds.”

García also said he realizes the importance of both conventions taking advantage of this opportunity.

“I believe with all my soul that God is giving us the honor of living in the best historic moment for presenting the gospel,” García said. “We do not know for how long this great door will be open.”

The Venezuelan convention is planning another evangelism event for April 24-27. It will work to start new Bible study groups and disciple those who accept Christ during the event.

-30-

Opinion: Unity in the church at the expense of truth
By Beth Newman

In his speech at the recent New Baptist Covenant celebration, John Grisham urged his hearers to spend as much time ministering out in the streets as they do in the church. No doubt this is in many ways an admirable sentiment, although I do wonder how much time the average Baptist spends in the church to begin with.

What bothers me about Grisham’s comments is the implication – not so subtle – that the real business of the church is out there. By contrast, what goes on inside the church is at best ancillary to her real business.

Such attitudes are not confined to Baptists, of course. I spoke recently on the topic of hospitality at a Catholic college. In the dinner that followed my remarks, another guest said to me, “Well, really, all religions are about the same thing: caring for one another.”

Really? I’ll leave aside for the moment the question of what other religions are really about and focus on Christianity: Is caring for others what binds us together?

It ought to be obvious that words such as “love,” “care,” and even “service” are meaningless outside a complex structure of memory, language and action that makes sense of them.

You will recall, perhaps, the words of Tevye to his wife, Golde, in Fiddler on the Roof: “Do you love me?” She refuses to answer directly, but points instead to their life together and her part in that: “For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes/ Cooked your meals, cleaned your house/ Given you children, milked the cow/ After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?”

“Love,” “care,” and “service” flourish in a particular kind of life together, one that, as Paul reminds in the familiar 13th chapter of First Corinthians, involves kindness, patience, lack of arrogance and joy in the truth.

But what is truth? Attempts to circumscribe “truth” often create hostility and division. As is well known, Paul reminds us at the end of the Corinthian chapter that now “we see in a mirror dimly.” Some have concluded from this passage that we each have only part of the truth and that we ought not “impose” our truth on others. The sentiment “doctrine divides but ethics unites” reflects the idea that we can all agree we ought to care for the poor or the elderly even if we disagree on dogma.

And yet, it doesn’t take us long to realize that ethics does not unite; there are all sorts of ethical issues, dilemmas and positions that create as much division as they do unity.

One solution to this dilemma has been to stress that “we must agree to disagree.”

The draw of this statement is that we do not want others to force their beliefs on us. And yet, in practice, “to agree to disagree” typically means that we’re going to table questions of truth, or relegate them to the private, non-public sphere.

A philosopher colleague of mine tells his students at the beginning of each semester: “We’re not going to agree to disagree. We’re just going to disagree.” He means by this that we’re going to keep the public conversation going because a truth is at stake.

At the First Council of Nicaea (325) the truth at stake in the life of the church had to do with how to understand the divinity of the Son. Was he similar to God (as Arian claimed) or fully divine (as Athanasius held)? Our late modern perspective might see this debate on one in which different dogmas divide. Why can’t Arian and Athanasius, both deeply pious men, come together to serve the poor and the needy in their midst? Yet to do so would have been to relinquish love in the “joy of truth.” Instead, the early church had this prolonged, and acrimonious debate.

It is quite common today to hear that earlier theological debates were really more political than anything else: Constantine’s convening the First Council of Nicaea (325) was primarily to unify the empire rather than to discern any theological truth. Unity had to do with power and control. No doubt such politics were involved. But the discernment that grew out of these debates cannot be reduced to Constantine’s machinations.

Disagreement can be a form of care. Conflict can be consistent with charity. The kind of love Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 13 is agape, love of the other that goes beyond expectation of return. Agape includes love of enemy; it rests on the assumption that we will have adversaries. It cannot therefore mean that such love is ultimately for the purpose of simply “getting along.”

You can’t have love without truth. The kind of love that Paul refers to is grounded in and made possible by a particular way of life. Such a way is centered on the faithful worship of God in Christ through the Spirit. Love and truth are not our possessions to be coercively defended but gifts to be received and graciously shared.

Our task as disciples on the way is not the creation of unity among Christians where none presently exists, nor it is to re-create a unity that has been lost. Rather, as Brian Daley, S.J., notes, it is “to allow the unity that already exists among us as God’s gift, and is hindered or clouded by our sinfulness and ‘slowness of heart’ (Luke 24:25), to become more fully evident in the way Christians look upon each other, articulate their faith, carry out their worship, and act in the world.”

-30-

-- Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. bnewman@btsr.edu