Lance Lawton: an Anglican ponders the fallout from the NSW/ACT Baptists’ decision to remove two churches for failure to align with a denominational ‘position statement’ in support of man-woman marriage.
A strand of Australian Christian news that’s brought pain to many friends, climaxing this past week, after a slow burn of months and years, has been the disaffiliation, by helplessly, painfully anticipated assembly vote, of two Baptist churches from the Baptist Association of NSW/ACT. The prevailing cause: the doctrine and discipline of marriage in an age of changing conscience.
I’m not a Baptist, so I reflect as a concerned outsider, hearing voices of division and variously either loss or a sense of right, according to perspective. I’m not moved here at least to canvas the cause, its application or its rightness. (Though I have views). Instead I’m thinking on a wider canvas about how the Baptist journey speaks to me of my own evolution of conscience and that of the Christian community I belong to.
It’s been one interesting journey among others for me over the space of the past maybe 15 years, listening to Baptist friends and acquaintances, mainly on Facebook (the only social media I use consistently) reflecting on Baptist history and the character of the ‘movement’. (And this Anglican has had to catch onto that term, in preference say to ‘denomination’ or indeed even ‘church’, in the corporate institutional sense). That journey of slow appreciation has given me as the Anglican I am quite a bit to ponder on the nature of being a denomination; nay movement. All very good stuff. This seems as good a time as any to elaborate.
I married a Baptist who joined me, becoming Anglican, and in time as thoroughly as I am. That was still the era when Anglican cultural myopia had not yet grasped that it’s possible to have been fully initiated through baptism into Christ’s church without the necessity for a bishop to ‘complete’ the job. Especially where there was no bishop and the absence unmissed. And so she had to be confirmed, her baptism even on personal profession not enough. The idea would repulse me now, but it was fine then.
She was from a strong rural Baptist family of a couple of generations’ depth, and more than a couple before that in broader English nonconformity prior to emigration. The picture of “Baptist” that all gave me was basically Methodist with more water. Just one of the range of congregationalist protestant evangelical churches that all looked much the same as eachother to me.
Then we went to Bible College, moving as a young married couple from our family base in the Canberra region, to Victoria. The college had been established by Anglicans, but expressly multi denominational from the start, unequivocally evangelical and relatively conservative. Over the decades following, as far as membership of the board, teaching staff and student body, it had become dominantly Baptist. So I, my Anglican tag firmly affixed, was swimming in fairly Baptisty waters, for which I’ll ask forgiveness of the pun, just once.
That meant to me a generic style of doing church, again as before much like several other protestant denominations, non liturgical, evangelical to the core, and marked by strong vibrant multiplying churches (nearly all the ‘big’ and alive Melbourne churches I could have named at the time, apart from a handful of Anglican ones). The only thing distinctive? “Believer’s Baptism”, as Baptists have titled the baptismal approach of their tradition. Baptism into Christ and his church on once-only mature personal profession of faith.
Looking back now, unconsciously at the time on my part, I think I had acquired a culturally American picture of ‘Australian Baptist’. Billy Graham, plus Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), add gum leaves, stir well.
I gradually came to learn that there were Baptist churches around that weren’t like much of the above, marked by characteristics like smaller congregations, not middle class, majoring on social justice and even liturgy and contemplation (quelle horreur!). Kind of Anglican wannabes as it looked to me, some tending high church at that. But I just assumed they were a loony fringe of unknown origin, which really was how my Baptist friends at college seemed to regard them too.
What I learned nothing of in those years when Baptist Christians and ministries were prominent in my world by association (and have continued to be), whether by marriage, shared koinonia or local ministry, was the British (much more than American) history of Baptist and Anabaptist Christianity, and it’s shaping of an Australian incarnation. I did grasp that Baptist churches were governed congregationally, which of course, in addition to baptismal practice, distinguished them from my long and deep allegiance to Anglican expression. But I missed entirely another distinctive, which I sense matters even more to my Baptist peers than say congregationalism. And that is the weight of conscience. Even ‘weight’ may not capture it. Perhaps almost ‘gravitas’? It matters. A lot. It matters for individual Christians within a congregation. It matters for gathered congregations within an association.
And therein is my stepping off point for a particular line of personal reflection, as an Anglican (which I shall remain very contentedly) and importantly in this context, an evangelical one. First to say is I’m seeing something I’d never noticed about the way a Christian movement or church might define and manage itself, out of its particular institutional history.
What initially puzzled, even slightly shocked, me as my mostly evangelical Baptist friends were engaging the present NSW/ACT controversy, was their evident strength of feeling against the very idea of a Baptist association adopting a formal public position on a moral subject such as sexuality generally or same sex marriage in particular, let alone the further step of mandating that position as a condition of a member local church remaining in the tent. (Note: Obviously in NSW/ACT there’s a sizeable, even majority, proportion of that demographic who think differently. But I seem not to know or recognise so many of them). That puzzled me because instinctively I’ve taken it for granted that a church / movement would naturally define itself in such ways among others – be they traditional or progressive – so everyone knows where they stand; and that no sensible person would bother joining, or ideally remaining, if that weren’t their own considered position. Simple, right? It must be both simple and right, because not only do Anglicans do it that way; so do other Reformed streams such as Presbyterian, and the Lutheran family too, and even Uniting if a bit differently. So why wouldn’t Baptists?
This NSW/ACT Baptist hoo-flung dung has all played out before my eyes in parallel with my lot – the Anglican Communion, the Anglican Church of Australia, the synods of the Dioceses of Melbourne then Canberra & Goulburn, the other 21 Australian dioceses I haven’t been in, and assorted more local Anglican networks, doing the same about the same. The difference is we’ve done it properly with statements, signatures, blood sworn allegiances, and for some of us orthodox and orthoprax lines drawn in the ecclesiastical sand (or the cathedral nave?) and stepped across in one-way traffic.
Why? As I reflect on the Baptist process that starts to look a rather legitimate question, even if it took 66 years to become so. My best answering hypothesis now is our history – a more or less linear progression from post-Constantinian Christian cultural ascendancy, through mediaeval popes and bishops, emerging reformers, into an irreversible Reformation, western Christendom, church-state enmeshments and decouplings, the Enlightenment, scholarship, published and assented confessions of faith. That history package has built an ecclesiology of conformity, and a kind of conformity that in the main seems winsome and godly, at least to me. I like it that when I was ordained 39 years ago (a year for each article in fact) I declared and signed assent to Anglican doctrine and order as set forth in the foundation documents of the Church of England, catholic and reformed, including the 1662 liturgical standard of the Book of Common Prayer. I like it that every ministry licence since granted me has been conditional on my willing oath of ‘canonical’ (conforming with church law) obedience to my bishop. That’s conformity. I like it. And I readily understand it as it’s meant to be understood, that is as a ground of security, freedom and accountability for ministry.
All of that I rejoice in. I can’t really imagine what it would feel like from the inside to be a Baptist by an equivalent weight of conviction. Perhaps not hugely different if hypothetically I were among the NSW/ACT Baptist assembly majority whose vote has prevailed in removing two churches. If it were an Anglican diocese making the same deliberation, it would be ultimately the bishop’s call. And according with my understanding of biblical orthodoxy as an evangelical, episcopal discipline even as far as withdrawal of clergy licenses might seem the right if regrettable one.
But what if I and the congregation I’m a part of had not been formed by the historical trajectory that has created Anglicanism, or for that matter by one of several other post-reformation confessional protestant traditions? What if I and my church were built on an eighteenth century Baptist tradition preferencing conscience, ultimately over conformity? What if, like many (not all) of my Baptist friends there were little or no felt conflict between holding what has been an orthodox theology of sexuality and marriage, built on an evangelical approach to the Bible, and holding sacrosanct other theologies and pastoral practices within the same faith family?
I don’t see myself jumping ship into deep water, nor even close. Anglican is me. Still and lasting. But I do wonder if we might be better together with less blood on the cathedral floor.