The Hope of the Believer . . . Restoration Review, Vol. 31, No. 8, October 1989 Visiting
Other Churches: New Series, No.8... THE BAPTISTS: "THE STATE CHURCH OF TEXAS" The
joke I sometimes share with my Baptist friends about the Baptist church
being the state church of Texas I first heard at Harvard where there are not
all that many Baptists around. When I first met one of my professors, he
said, "Ah, from Texas. Are you a Baptist? I hear the Baptist church is
the state church of Texas!" By
sheer numbers alone Texas does seem to be in the hands of Baptists. There are
2.3 million of them in the state, and on any given Sunday 500,000 of them
will be in church. There are twice as many Baptists than Methodists and
eight times more Baptists than Presbyterians. Texas Baptists have their own
journal, the Baptist Standard, with a circulation of 335,000. Nashville may be
the Baptist capital of the world but Texas is its heartland. The Southern
Baptist Convention (SBC) has 50 colleges, the largest, Baylor University, is
in Texas. There
are 54 SBC churches in my home county, and I have visited all of them that
fall within the Denton city limits, which was quite a feat, especially when
you add a number of non-SBC Baptist churches that I also visited. I thought
I would never get around to them all, and I was not long in concluding what
some Baptists themselves acknowledge: There are too many of them. Some are
small and struggling. One independent church I visited (started years back
by some preacher who wanted his own church), with no more than 25
in attendance, petitioned the SBC for membership so as to survive. The
SBC turned them down since they had a church only two blocks away! The
most unusual of all my church visits was to an independent Baptist church,
where the minister actually owns the church along with the adjoining
parsonage. He reigns not as a lord but as a tyrant. It was the first time I
ever heard a pastor berate and abuse his members with incredible harshness.
I was one of some 20 people who took this abuse. He called us liars, cheats,
fornicators, and condemned us all to hell, and this went on and on. He also
berated all the modernists and infidels in the other Baptist churches in
town. I could hardly believe what I was witnessing, and I wondered how he
could possibly have anyone at all there to hear him excoriate Sunday after
Sunday. I at last decided that it was a case of a sick man preaching to a
sick audience. It was sadistic. His subjects enjoy being horsewhipped once a
week. I afterwards spoke gently to him of the grace of God, but I got
nowhere. But I left with more pity for him than censure. There
is, however, another church in town, named McKinney Street Baptist, an SBC
church, that I would rank near the top of all churches I've visited. It is
very friendly and has lots of enthusiasm, and a good mixture of young and old.
They have a new building and are growing, and they take spiritual matters
seriously. No gimmickry that I noticed. The pastor, one of the best in town
I'd say, speaks from his heart and from the Word, and he says something
without shouting. On the Sunday I heard him he gently criticized Oral
Roberts for his "God will kill me unless" means of raising money.
"God is not in the hostage taking business," he said, which I
thought was too good not to jot down. The man preaches grace. First
Baptist is of course the big church with an elegant edifice, and the visitor
has to concede that their ad "We've got something for everyone" is
right on target. They do everything right for the visitor: welcome and tag
him, make over him, and at last write him a letter. Everything is punctual
and professional, as if run by a computer, and yet it is not cold. When
one goes from the wealthy First church to the poor Mexican and black Baptist
churches the contrast is depressing. One sees that irrespective of
denomination it is our culture that shapes our churches and not the other
way around. The minority churches and the white churches are two different
worlds, divided between the haves and the have-nots. That they are of the
same denomination means nothing. The apparent injustice of some having so
much and others having so little, when all bear the name of Christ, does not
seem to be a problem to the white middle-class churches. The
showpiece of Baptist wealth and power is the First Baptist Church in nearby
Dallas, which has 24,000 members and an $8 million annual budget, the
largest SBC church in the world. Its facilities, which cover several square
blocks of downtown Dallas, is valued at $200 million. It has a radio
station, day school from kindergarten through high school, a seminary, three
parking garages, a gym, etc. During this entire century it has had but two
pastors. Its present pastor, W. A. Criswell, who began his ministry in 1944,
is known for his business acumen as much as for his preaching. He made one
real estate deal for the church that netted $4 million. He has also made
himself personally rich. They tell the joke on him that when he appeared
before the pearly gates and sought entrance on the basis of being a minister
of the gospel, there was some delay. At last the gates opened with an
apology, "Sorry for the delay. We had you listed under real
estate!" First
Baptist in Dallas is a leader in the present controversy over liberalism and
inerrancy, which has all but split the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr.
Criswell has his own seminary - fundamental, premillennial, evangelical -
which stands in contrast to the more moderate, mainline Protestant
seminaries, such as nearby Southwestern Baptist in Ft. Worth, the largest of
SBC's six seminaries. The inerrantists (no errors in the Bible) have gained
control of the SBC power structure and threaten to fife the moderates and
liberals in the seminaries. Some think the inerrantists will split the SBC
and start another denomination before they will yield power to "the
liberals." So far a split has been averted, but the SBC is a church
walking on eggshells, caught between a demand for conformity and a desire to
be free. A secretary at the local Denton County Baptist Association told me
when I asked her about the controversy expressed the way most Baptists feel,
"I wish it would just go away." The
inerrantists are the old-line fundamentalist Baptists after the order of the
late fiery J. Frank Norris, who once shot a man dead in his Ft. Worth church
office and a hero to Criswell, who have been resistant to change. They gave
up segregation with reluctance, oppose gay and feminist causes, barely
tolerate blacks, resist all efforts to bring women into the ministry
(Criswell says a woman can be a pastor if she is "the husband of one
wife" like the Bible says), and never hesitate to mix religion and
politics. They managed to keep a progressive state like Texas dry by law
until 1971, and kept horserace gambling out of the state until only
recently. They keep school prayer, the teaching of creationism, and
supervision of biology textbooks lively political issues. They are not
ecumenical and can be very sectarian. The head of Criswell's seminary said
with all sincerity on national TV that Mother Teresa could not go to heaven
unless she had the "born again" experience that fundamentalists
talk about. But
to understand the Baptist story one must see the great diversity of the
Baptist world. There is W. A. Criswell and the fundamentalists, but there is
also Harry Emerson Fosdick, the gifted liberal pastor of the famed Riverside
Church in New York, who led the fight against fundamentalism a generation
ago with his famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" There
are those who would fife those in the seminaries who believe in modern
Biblical scholarship, and then there is Kenneth Scott Latourette of Yale,
the dean of church historians. All Baptists! This
diversity is evident in the Baptist World Alliance, representing 30 million
Baptists from 100 Baptist bodies in 117 nations. The SBC, the largest with
14 million members, represents less than half of all Baptists. There are 11
million in black conventions, the National Baptist Convention with 6.5
million being the largest. The largest liberal group is the American
Baptist Convention, to which Harry Emerson Fosdick belonged, with 1.6
million. The oldest convention is also the smallest, the General
Six-Principle Baptist, with only 160 members, which basis its faith on the
six principles in Heb. 6:1-2. The
Baptists have a great heritage that goes back to 17th century English
puritanism. Immigrating to Colonial America for the sake of religious
freedom, they were not tolerated by the colonists. Roger Williams led them
to Providence where they set up a colony that allowed for freeedom of
religion and kept church and state separated, hallmarks of the Baptist
heritage. The first Baptist church was organized in Providence in 1638.
Baptists continued to immigrate from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and
from eastern Europe. By 1775 they were the largest denomination in America
with 1,150 churches. They founded Brown University, one of the "Ivy
League" colleges, in 1764. Besides the doctrine of separation of church
and state, the Baptists have long stood for the equality of all Christians,
local church autonomy, individual freedom, baptism by immersion, salvation
by faith, and a Biblical basis for doctrine and practice. The visitor might see them at their best in the
small Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, a black congregation in my hometown.
Its pastor, the Rev. M. R. Chew, spoke for them all when he said in his
sermon on March 27,1988 when I was present: "No matter how bad things
are, a little talk with Jesus makes a difference. And Jesus was nourished on
Scripture, not Shakespeare." Easter season was in the offing. The
pastor announced that for the next seven weeks he would preach on the seven
sayings of Jesus on the Cross, one each Sunday. That would include the
saying, "It is finished," he added. And I'll be telling you that
he said "It is finished"
not "I is finished"! —
the Editor
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