BAPTISTS UNITE IN ARUNACHAL PRADESH The Arunachal Baptist Church Council (ABCC) in India was

accepted by the Baptist World Alliance as a member organization during the Annual Gathering in Vancouver, Canada, in July. The current ABCC came out of a merger of two Baptist bodies

in Arunachal Pradesh, one of eight states in Northeast India that form the so-called “chicken neck.” Most Northeast Indian states have a sizeable Christian presence relative to the rest of the population.

Several Baptist groups in the “chicken neck” region are part of the Council of Baptist Churches in Northeast India (CBCNEI), formed in 1950 and, at one time, a full BWA member organization. However, CBCNEI withdrew BWA membership after restructuring in 1993 to enable its own affiliate groups to gain full BWA membership. CBCNEI was, in turn, accepted as a BWA associate member in 2011.

ABCC was the only original CBCNEI member not to gain full

BWA membership, unlike others such as the Nagaland Baptist Church Council, the Manipur Baptist Convention and the Baptist Church of Mizoram.

The two groups that merged to

form the new ABCC in Arunachal Pradesh both came out of field work that began in the 1960s by two mission agencies in the United States – the Baptist General Conference (BGC) and American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA) – with BGC operating in the northern part of Arunachal Pradesh and ABCUSA in the south. However, all missionaries appointed by the two American groups were indigenous to India, with several coming from nearby states in the northeast such as Nagaland and Mizoram.

REAL BAPTISTS PURSUE CHURCH UNITY continued

it needed to be most fully a church and that these resources are found not only among neighboring Baptist churches but in the whole body of Christ. When seven local Baptist congregations in London together issued the London Confession of 1644, they explained their congregational interdependence in discerning the mind of Christ for their faith and practice as a corollary of being “one in Communion, holding Jesus Christ to be our head and Lord; under whose government we desire alone to walk, in following the Lamb wheresoever he goeth,” and insisted that inclusion in such an interdependent communion was their hope “for all [the] saints.” This early Baptist consciousness of ecclesial interdependence

in walking together under the rule of Christ is what would later give rise not only to larger associations of Baptist churches in the form of national Baptist conventions and unions and in 1905 the formation of the Baptist World Alliance as a Christian World Communion, but also to various forms of Baptist participation in the modern ecumenical movement. Several Baptist unions were founding members of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and many more are members today. The BWA has participated

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in international ecumenical dialogues with several Christian World Communions, and Baptists have participated in similar conversations in national and regional contexts. While there is much in the Baptist story to substantiate the stereotype that Baptists are intrinsically divisive and suspicious of ecumenical alliances, our tradition is also rich in stories of “real Baptists” like denominational and ecumenical statesman Ernest Payne, a former general secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and co-president of the World Council of Churches, whose passionate pursuit of church unity was deeply rooted in Baptist ecclesiological convictions. May we imitate their saintly example in our local churches, Baptist unions, the BWA and the church universal. Steven Harmon is Visiting Associate Professor of Historical Theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the United States. He is the author of Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future: Story, Tradition, and the Recovery of Community (Baylor University Press).

Because both groups had separate missional histories, “the churches planted were disconnected from each other,” explained Ajoy Lama, former CBCNEI general secretary. “The north was not connected to the south. Southern churches belonged to the [original] Arunachal Baptist Church Council, which was, from the very beginning, part of the Baptist World Alliance (through CBCNEI) but the northern churches were not.” The quest to bring both groups together began in earnest in 1984, an initiative led by the young people, according to Lama: At that time we had around 300 churches. We wanted to bring all of them together under one umbrella but it did not work because the senior leaders were not willing to sit together. They were afraid of losing the support of the mission agencies. They were also having conflicts as to who would lead the Baptist Church Council. Lama was one of those young people urging unity back in

1984. “I vividly remember attending the first conference where we invited all the senior leaders. It was actually a youth effort. All the young people wrote a letter to all the church leaders to come together,” he recalled. “There was a disagreement about who would be the general secretary. Both groups wanted to have their candidate. That was the conflict.” Another attempt was made

five years later, encouraged by the original ABCC, of which Lama was a part. “But that also didn’t work,” Lama said. “Somehow the northern churches were finding it difficult to trust us. Somehow they viewed us with suspicion. Probably they