ECCLESIOLOGY OF THE BWA continued

to the several competing Baptist bodies in Zimbabwe. This was strange, since the issue of competition within one domain had long been part of the scene in the United States!] Problems are increased in an age of ecumenical relationships

when other church bodies and ecumenical agencies [and sometimes the state itself], themselves invariably centrally organized, look for authoritative statements from national and even international Baptist bodies, who are in no position to make such statements or to bind local congregations. On the other hand, the wider company of Christ’s people can

hardly be ignored. George Beasley-Murray has argued, “Our discussion of Baptist identity must be set in the context of our place in the body of Christ, graciously granted to us by the Lord of the church. Our primary identity is that of members set within that Body who seek to understand what it means to be in Christ and to be his church. . . . That Baptists should join the number of those who identify only those of their order as the ‘true Church’ is quite surprising!” How then do Baptists hear what the Lord of the church is saying to them through other parts of the Christian family? It is perhaps worth noting that when the Evangelical Alliance

was established in the 1840s the most that could be achieved was an alliance of individuals and not of churches. By contrast in 1948 the World Council of Churches (WCC) brought into relationship independent [“member”] churches. In recent years it has begun to invite churches into binding covenants but Baptists as a congregational denomination find it difficult to respond to such invitations.

At the Copenhagen Assembly of the BWA in 1946, Henry

Cook spoke in favor of Baptists having a formal relationship with the new WCC which was shortly to be founded; others opposed. Wisely, E. A. Payne argued that the whole debate was out of order in terms of the BWA constitution, for the BWA had no authority to commit member churches either way.

The BWA has enabled Baptists to secure a voice

within international councils, beyond the capacity of both local church and national union.

I believe there is evidence to suggest that we are encountering a worldwide unwillingness to give trust to other than local bodies, or put differently, a reluctance for local groups to own the strategies of regional and national bodies as their own, a new form of parochialism if you like, which must present difficulties to the BWA when enthusiasm seems to concentrate on the local and the immediate, rather than the national and the global. Fundamental to the life of the Alliance must be a sense

of mutual need of one another, the recognition that isolated churches are churches that are denying themselves the richness of experience that Christ intends for all his people. The Christian gospel is about the re-establishment of relationships: men and women with God, and in Christ with one another. That relationship will find expression in a variety of ways: material aid; exchange of mission personnel, including Global South missionaries working in the Global North; and mutual encouragement through shared experiences. As a matter of record the BWA has played a particularly

important part in undertaking advocacy on behalf of persecuted evangelical minorities, and has enabled Baptists to secure a voice within international councils, acting beyond the capacity of both local church and national union, doing for them what they could never do for themselves. John Briggs was editor of the Baptist Quarterly from 1985-

2008; former director of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford; senior research fellow in church history and professor emeritus at University of Birmingham; and chair of the BWA Commission on Baptist History and Heritage.

GETTING ALONG WITH OURSELVES By Elizabeth Newman

A joke told by my husband, a Methodist pastor: You have, perhaps, heard of the shipwrecked Baptist who is rescued after many years on a desert island. His rescuers wonder about the three huts that line the beach. “That’s my home,” he answers, “and that one’s my church.” But what about the third? “Oh,” he replies, “that’s where I used to go to church.” Question: Could we tell this joke about a Methodist or a

Lutheran? We Baptists are often known for our tendency to separate and divide. Why? A key reason has been a desire to purify the church by returning it to the essentials of a New Testament model. But such purity carries within it the temptation to cut ourselves off from the larger body of Christ. What if a greater purity and holiness lies in discovering how we are part of “one body and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. . . .” (Eph. 4:4-6)?

In the body of Christ, holiness and unity go together. There are misunderstandings of unity, however, that are to be rejected. The first is the image of separated churches as a beautiful

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garden. Some prefer roses, others daisies, etc. Analogously, this thinking goes, some prefer this kind of church or denomination, others a different kind. While this image does register that unity is not uniformity, it nonetheless fails to see that being church is not about one’s preferences or needs. Rather, in the Body of Christ our needs are transformed so that we discover how we need one another. We learn to see how our gifts are given for the building up of the whole (1 Cor. 12). A second distorted understanding dismisses our differences

as unimportant. “Why can’t we just get along?” one asks. The difficulty with this question is that it fails to see that unity and truth are deeply intertwined. In the great fourth century debate between Athanasius, who defended the divinity of Christ, and Arius, who did not, neither said their differences did not matter. Athanasius, later to be known as Athanasius contra mundum (“against the world”), was exiled five times for defending the divinity of the Son.

Christian unity rests ultimately in the truth of Divine unity. Jesus prays that his disciples may be one “as you, Father, are in me