Texas Baptists Chose a Faithful Message
By Robert Newell, pastor, 
Memorial Drive Baptist Church, Houston

Baptists have existed since the early 17th century without a creed. Our appetite for freedom and our celebration of an individual's conscience-driven conclusions has mitigated against ultra-precise, rigidly enforced, theological uniformity. Our origins as a dissenting people and our history as an oppressed minority, punished by the powerful theological majority for our unique take on things, have kept us from developing and applying litmus tests for belonging.

We have held steadfastly to spiritual competency because we are anchored by God's saving grace as personally encountered in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have insisted every soul be able and responsible for answering to God for himself or herself.

Baptists are a freedom-loving, freedom-allowing, freedom-encouraging people. When God created us in His own image and saved us by His only Son, He also trusted each soul, and only that soul, with the right and the responsibility to make his/her own decisions about whether and how to relate to Him.

Never a Believe-Anything Group

Also, Baptists have not been a believe-anything group. The very right to come to one's own conscience-directed conclusions must be safeguarded by some commonly held parameters. Although we can and must grant every soul the liberty to answer to God personally, that person does not, necessarily, answer to the name Baptist.

We must never allow the proud family name to become a collective term for anyone who believes anything. While we have worked hard to create and celebrate the context in which dissenting souls can choose even to reject Jesus if they must, we have not called the holders of every theological conclusion Baptist.

As the middle ground between the ultra-loose, believe anything, approach and the heavy-handed, enforced theological uniformity of creedalism, Baptists, early on, established a practice of drafting confessions of faith. As early as 1611, Thomas Helwys and his group adopted a confession, signaling that it included some commonly held and unifying beliefs of those who signed it.

By 1644, the London Confession of Particular Baptists was a temperature reading, showing the consensus of beliefs of that specific group of Baptists. Since then, Baptists have periodically adopted confessions. These usually have risen as theological flash-point indicators, in response to some issue that happened to be hot then.

Baptists always have understood, however, that confessions reflect only the conclusions of those adopting them. Confessions are always incomplete, and people should never use them to compel belief or to violate conscience.

Motion Made To Reaffirm Earlier Confession

At the annual meeting of the BGCT, in El Paso, I made a motion that our state Baptist families reaffirm an earlier confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message statement, adopted by Southern Baptists, meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1963. This is the same statement that most Baptist churches have used for years as a good, general summary of the beliefs of many Baptists. I have studied this statement, preached on it, and taught it, as have many others. We have done so on the assumption that you, as a believer, are a priest unto yourself, requiring no intermediary, save the Holy Spirit, to tell you what to believe.

God's inspired, authoritative and trustworthy Word, as empowered by the Holy Spirit and the Living Word, Jesus the Christ, can be trusted to lead you into all truth. In addition, the shared experiences of others in Christ will help to illuminate what God would have you to believe.

The press has wanted to make a story out of my motion, since it did not include a recently added insertion to this confession by another group of Baptists, convened at the 1998 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Reporters have interpreted this as another chapter in the family feud that has been going on among the Baptists. The newly revised version of this older confession requires that wives submit to their husbands, but omits the equally binding scriptural expectation that husbands submit to their wives.

I trust that other group of Baptists to come to their own, equally finite, conclusions on these matters. I would not dare tell them how to state their current consensus of beliefs, even when I disagree with their most recent modifications. I can call them my siblings-in-Christ and my fellow Baptists, even when I steadfastly maintain a powerful difference of conviction regarding their latest tinkerings with this confession. Changes they may want to make to this statement is their right, their business and their responsibility!

Reflects Deep Convictions

I intended my motion to reflect my own deepest Baptist convictions, not theirs. I am pleased that the overwhelming majority of my fellow Texas Baptists, gathered in El Paso, seems to agree with me. They should give me no credit for calling Texas Baptists to reaffirm and restate a position they have taken for years.

Texas Baptists do not need, nor should they allow, another autonomous group of Baptists to tell them what to believe. We should see differences between the statement we have reaffirmed and the add-on one the national Southern Baptist Convention recently developed as a bright example of the Baptist celebration of diversity and respect for conscience.

So be it if the current statement of Texas Baptist belief and practice disagrees with the current one of national SBC emphasis. We should never allow anyone to pressure us into falling in line. To do so would violate our conscience, compromise our autonomy, and hinder our unique witness for Christ.

The national Southern Baptist leadership should never try to enforce the pressures of theological conformity upon Texas Baptists, or any other Baptist. If a fear that they may lose the lucrative financial support that Texans have so generously provided through the years generates their pressure tactics, then shame on them!