Associated Baptist Press - 4/10/2008

Associated Baptist Press
April 10, 2008 (8-580)

IN THIS ISSUE:
BTSR budget shortfall leads to faculty lay-offs
Baptist clergy launch organization to minister to Caribbean ‘diaspora’
Samford scholarship program targets ministers-in-training
Detroit pastor to deliver 2008 Shurden lectures
Opinion: Is Jesus really our Lord?



BTSR budget shortfall leads to faculty lay-offs
By Robert Dilday

RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) – Faced with “worrisome” financial challenges, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond will downsize its faculty and staff, the school’s president announced April 8.

Four full-time professors and at least three administrative staff members will be let go in an effort to reduce costs, according to BTSR President Ron Crawford, who was elected to his position about a year ago. Though he did not release the names of the professors to be dismissed, Crawford said he has communicated with each one and that the school is offering severance packages that exceed a full year’s salary and full personnel benefits.

The 19-year old seminary is burdened with a $6 million debt and faces a significant deficit in its budget this year -- about $450,000 out of an overall budget of $3.6 million, Crawford said in a statement distributed to the school’s alumni and supporters.

“Our immediate fiscal challenge is related to the capital campaign that was completed last summer as I became BTSR’s president,” he said. “The campaign included the purchase of two buildings along with two unanticipated financial challenges: significant debt and a payroll that overreaches annual revenues.”

BTSR, which enrolls about 160 students, currently employs 15 full-time professors and about 16 administrative staff, including the president and dean of the faculty. About 14 visiting and adjunct faculty members also teach classes.

The school’s campus is adjacent to Union Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution, and the seminary owns buildings that once housed Union’s Presbyterian School of Christian Education.

At a March 17-18 meeting, BTSR’s board of trustees asked Crawford to devise a downsizing plan and present it at a called trustee meeting in late April. The president informed the seminary community of the developments at a March 28 meeting of faculty, staff and students.

“Once the downsizing is complete we will be left with a tenured faculty member in each of the disciplines we have traditionally covered, with the exception of one, where a visiting professor will be employed,” said Crawford. “With nine full-time faculty members, at least three visiting professors and other adjunct faculty members, we will continue to have a profoundly strong faculty.”

Crawford also said that the reduced faculty will have less impact on BTSR than it would on most seminaries. The school is part of the Richmond Theological Consortium, which includes Union Seminary and its School of Christian Education, as well as the school of theology at nearby Virginia Union University, a historically African-American Baptist institution. Students in the consortium’s schools may take courses at any of the institutions for no additional cost.

“On the administrative side, we are losing three and a half positions,” said Crawford, in separate e-mailed comments to an Associated Baptist Press reporter.“Our idea is to replace full-time support staff with part-time students. We’ll train the students on the business inner-workings of a nonprofit, church environment. It should be a win-win.”

Founded in 1989, BTSR was one of the first institutions established by moderates who began leaving the increasingly conservative Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s and 90s. Though a number of other moderate seminaries and divinity schools have sprouted since then, many former Southern Baptists still retain passion for the first one, and Crawford is counting on that to get BTSR through the financial strain.

“I continue to say, ‘The future of BTSR is very bright, the short-term is worrisome,’” he noted. “BTSR will survive and, eventually, thrive. We fully anticipate going through a few very lean years. We will use the time to restructure and refocus our efforts on responding to the challenge of providing theological education in a 21st century world.”

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Baptist clergy launch organization to minister to Caribbean ‘diaspora’
By ABP staff

NEW YORK (ABP) -- With a worship service March 30, a group of ministers officially launched a Baptist fellowship to minster to the Caribbean “diaspora” in English-speaking countries.

Caribbean Diaspora Baptist Clergy Association kicked off its life with a “celebrative service” at Grace Baptist Chapel in the New York City borough of the Bronx, according to the Baptist World Alliance.

The chapel is home to a congregation of mainly Caribbean immigrants. The service, a BWA statement said, was designed “to give recognition [to] an organization which has become a reality after a decade of discussion and deliberation.”

According to Alfred Johnson, a former Jamaica Baptist Union pastor who now serves in New Jersey, “Over the past 40 to 50 years, what started as a trickle has now become a steady stream of [Caribbean] immigrants into this country…. We were indeed strangers in a foreign land, living in exile from our home in the Caribbean, away from our Baptist fellowship.”

According to the BWA, the worldwide umbrella group for Baptists, such a fellowship has been discussed since at least 1993. After a mission conference in the Jamaican town of Ocho Rios in 2003, the Jamaica Baptist Union Mission Agency stated its intention “to participate in mission to Caribbean people in general and to Jamaicans in particular who are in the Diaspora (e.g. United Kingdom, USA and Canada).”

The clergy association was incorporated in 2006 and signed a partnership agreement with the Jamaica Baptist Union in April 2007 at the Bronx church to aid in “facilitating mission in both regions of the world,” meaning the Caribbean and North America.

In October, the clergy association, the Jamaican union, and the Caribbean Baptist Fellowship, one of six regional groups affiliated with the BWA, signed the Montego Bay Accord following a Jamaican missions conference in the resort town of the same name. Among other provisions, the accord includes the development of “meaningful ministries with cultural relevance,” while the parties agreed “to submit ourselves to periodic reviews, and to hold each other accountable under God.”

CDBCA draws membership mainly from Caribbean clergy living and working in the northeastern United States. U.S. immigration from the Caribbean over the last several decades has been concentrated in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.

Last year, BWA installed Neville Callam, a former Jamaican pastor, as its general secretary. He is the first person of non-Anglo descent to direct the more-than-century-old alliance.

The Caribbean Diaspora Baptist Clergy Association’s president is Delroy Reid-Salmon, pastor of Grace Baptist Chapel.

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Samford scholarship program targets ministers-in-training
By ABP staff

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (ABP) -- In what may be the first program of its kind, an Alabama Baptist school is targeting future ministers with undergraduate scholarships.

Samford University has created a pre-ministerial scholars program aimed at students who are called to full-time ministry in traditional, church-related positions. The Birmingham-based school announced the program April 10. In a press release, school officials said the institution plans to offer the scholarships to as many as 50 students over the next several academic years.

The merit-based grants will begin at about $11,000 a year per student, with the potential of increasing to $16,000 annually for scholars who meet certain academic criteria.

Samford recently admitted 16 high school seniors to the program for the fall semester of 2008. This group will represent the first freshmen to be awarded the scholarships, which are available to students of any denomination. A trial run of the program last year provided scholarships to eight undergraduates already enrolled at the school.

James Barnette, a religion professor who directs Samford’s ministerial-formation program, said scholarship recipients must meet certain academic standards as well as demonstrate a clear calling to, and giftedness for, traditional ministerial roles.

The students must feel called to such positions as senior pastor, associate pastor, other local-church staff minister, non-medical career missionary, hospital chaplain, campus minister, pastoral counselor or religion professor.

“Just as there are pre-med, pre-law and pre-pharmacy programs, Samford wants to develop a pre-ministerial program that will train up the most capable ministers of tomorrow,” Barnette said, according to the Samford release.

He also said that Samford is, as far as he knows, the first Baptist undergraduate institution to offer such scholarships to incoming freshmen.

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Detroit pastor to deliver 2008 Shurden lectures
By ABP staff

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- One of America’s most renowned African-American preachers will deliver the third annual Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and the Separation of Church and State.

Charles Adams will give the speeches, which are scheduled for April 14-15 on the campus of Wake Forest University.

For nearly four decades, Adams has served as pastor of Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit. The 10,000-member congregation has been noted for its innovative ministries, credited by many with the economic revitalization of large parts of the poverty-addled city.

In addition to his pastoral duties, Adams serves as a professor of applied ethics and ministry at Harvard Divinity School, his alma mater.

He is also a longtime board member of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. The Washington-based watchdog organization sponsors the lecture series, which was endowed by, and named for, longtime Baptist leaders Walter and Kay Shurden of Macon, Ga.

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Opinion: Is Jesus really our Lord?
By David Gushee

(ABP) -- The New Testament declares that Jesus Christ is Lord, that followers of Christ are those who live under his lordship now, and that one day Jesus will be acknowledged by all as Lord:

“Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10-11).

Jesus taught that mere verbal confessions of his lordship are not enough; he wants to see us do God’s will, and this is the true test of whether he is our Lord:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21-22).

Jesus also taught that his authority extends to the whole cosmos and that therefore no arena of life can be exempted from obedience to his rule:

“All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt.28:18-20).

The earliest pages of the New Testament teach that the lordship of Jesus Christ is deeply threatening to this world’s powers:

“’Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east, and have come to worship him.’” When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matt. 2:2-3).

The last pages of the New Testament reflect on the price paid by those who affirmed that Jesus Christ alone is Lord amidst the hostile Roman Empire:

“They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their loves so much as to shrink from death” (Rev. 12:11).

Jesus Christ may be Lord of all, but woe be to those who suggest that this might have implications for how Christians spend their money, what they do with their bodies, how they vote, or how they think about the laws and policies of this nation.

Woe to those who suggest that being a Christian means more than just being a good middle-class American who finds time for church among his or her many other civic activities.

Woe to those who suggest that the policies of a beloved president or party might in some cases fall short of the moral standards taught in the pages of the Bible.

Woe to those who suggest that the United States is not God’s chosen nation and that even the behavior of our own beloved country must be tested by the criteria demanded by the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Woe to those who suggest that defending this nation is not the highest good for those who have pledged their lives to Jesus as Lord.

Woe to those who suggest that torture, humiliation, degradation, and indefinite detention of prisoners in the name of national security might have to be rejected by those who claim Jesus Christ as Lord.

I gave an interview yesterday for a film on the “German church struggle” of the 1930s. The questions involved reflecting on how so many German Christians did not see any contradiction between their loyalty to the Nazi party, or the Nazified German state, and their loyalty to Jesus Christ, their purported Lord. And I was asked to try to delineate what -- if anything -- set apart the resisters (like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer) from those who capitulated to Nazism.

The basic answer is that Barth and Bonhoeffer really meant it when they said that Jesus Christ is Lord, and they understood the radical implications of that claim. Christ’s lordship meant that the nation, the party, and the Fuhrer could not claim and did not deserve total lordship over any Christian’s life; that the Bible rather than any other authority must have supremacy; and that in situations of radical evil, Christians are called to offer an even more radical and unflinching witness to Christ’s lordship.

Baptists argued for decades over theories of inspiration while many churches were slowly dying the death of a thousand cultural assimilations. I think it is clear that we should have been arguing over whether we really mean it when we say at baptism that we are committing our lives to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.

I forecast that the days of cultural, Southern, Baptist Christianity are passing -- the days of just good regular American folks going to church because that’s what their mama and grandma did. Our churches will survive -- if they do -- not on cultural Christianity, but on people totally committed to the lordship of Christ.

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-- David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com