By Adelle M. Banks
2008 Religion News Service
ATLANTA — Former President Bill Clinton closed out an historic meeting of Baptists Friday (Feb. 1) with a call to redouble efforts to help the poor and a renewed push to heal ideological splits with more conservative Baptists.
“We have to meet this schism with respectful disagreement,” said Clinton, who was raised Southern Baptist but differs with the denomination’s conservative bent. “We must approach those who disagree with an outstretched hand, not a clenched fist.”
The gathering, called a Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, was spearheaded by former President Jimmy Carter, who left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000 but has worked to bring together Baptists across racial and ideological lines.
Although Southern Baptists were invited and some attended, the denomination was not an official participant and top Southern Baptist leaders stayed away.
Southern Baptist president Frank Page had expressed concern that Carter’s meeting would be a platform for liberal politicians, including Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Republicans were invited but some, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, S.C., and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, withdrew.
Clinton, fresh off the campaign trail for his wife’s presidential bid, said the nearly 30-year breach with more conservative Southern Baptists would not be easily healed.
“I do not think the answer to this dilemma which developed over decades … can be resolved in a day or a week or a year,” said Clinton, who attends a small Methodist church in New York with his wife, Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I think it is a journey. If we want them to take the journey with us, we have to do two things: We have to find things we can do together and we have to treat them with respect and honor and believe that they think they’re right just as strongly as we do.”
The meeting drew about 15,000 Baptists for exuberant worship and sermons that brought them to their feet. The three-day meeting tried to help Baptists find common ground, as well as heal racial and ideological divisions reaching back a hundred years or more.
Carter said people have stopped him in the halls, urging him to keep up the momentum toward forging a new Baptist mission. He said organizers have collected 3,500 e-mail addresses and hundreds of letters with suggestions.
Together, the 20 million Baptists represented at the Atlanta meeting actually outnumber the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention.
“I think that where we go from here will be very important,” said Carter, recalling that people told him, “We don’t want this to be a wasted moment; we want this to be the initiation of a movement.”
Carter plans to reconvene key leaders after Easter to determine the next steps, which could include attempts to tackle the environment or immigration at both the local and national levels.
Jimmy Allen, a former Southern Baptist president who helped coordinate the meeting with Carter, said he initially wasn’t sure if this would be “a moment or a movement” but choked up when he told the Friday evening crowd that people seemed to want something long-lasting.
“We found out we’re moving on,” he said.
When Carter addressed the meeting on the first night, he made a point of asking rhetorical questions about Baptists’ views on homosexuality, the status of women, abortion, capital punishment and other hot-button issues.
“If I had had a show of hands, we would have had very widely varying answers to my questions,” Carter told reporters.
But the focus instead was on issues like salvation and unity.
“All of us, so far as I know, have been completely in unity here,” he said. “We’ve never had a meeting like this before.”
The Rev. William J. Shaw, president of the primarily black National Baptist Convention, USA, said he saw the hand of God at work in the meeting.
“I’d like to believe that this is a result of the move of the spirit of God,” said Shaw, a co-chair of the event. “If all of us congregations come together like this, it’s got to be the Spirit.”
Copyright 2008 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be distributed or reproduced without written permission.
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posted February 4, 2008 at 6:40 pm
The Baptists as well as many other religions can’t get along. As said, it will take more than this meeting to get them to come together on beliefs.
posted February 4, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Carter said the focus was on salvation and unity, and that they had never had such a meeting with such unity before. That’s a good sign that a togetherness was achieved, and when this occurs people should be able to converse about all matters with love guiding them or the Holy Spirit as Rev. Shaw said.
posted February 5, 2008 at 11:15 am
What I have been looking for in the reports on this meeting is whether in spite of all the strongly held doctrinal, biblical and personal beliefs that grace would be offered and received. This remains to be seen.
posted February 5, 2008 at 6:51 pm
That former President Carter has been tirelessly working for years with his church to shed light on problems to usher in needful change and healing is most admirable. I adore former President Carter for his work for peace, foreign and domestic. But, Good Lord, the Clintons aren’t even Baptists by faith and testamony. So, what’s it to them that these members of another denomination of the faith is a house divided?
Hillary’s potential Democratic nomination is hardly likely to resolve all the social divisions that are currently much too common to so many denominations of Christendom. I live with the consolation that Jimmy and Rosalyn have been lifelong members of the Baptist Convention. But, the Clintons are simply lifelong opportunists and wry politicians. The Clintons have no vested interest in the works, heritage, or legacy of the Baptists in America. Consequently, the Clintons really brought nothing remarkably spiritual or edifying to this gathering beyond indelibly etching Hillary’s homely mug on the minds of a few voters.
“I think it is a journey. If we want them to take the journey with us, we have to do two things: We have to find things we can do together and we have to treat them with respect and honor and believe that they think they’re right just as strongly as we do.” -Bill Clinton
That’s actually, well, let me count, find – treat – honor – belive, four things, four patently generic things. The perpetually ignored elephant in our National room is the unaddressed vestige of slavery that still bears the stinch of an inequality not likely to get much play when Hillary is embattled with cleaning up. She can’t take a hit in the polls without tearing up as it is. So, I’m venturing to speculate that she is not going to be able to walk, talk, put out flaminging bags of GOP poo, and address re-empowering the US Justice Department at the same time to start to move us ALL AS ONE NATION forward, regardless of ethnicity, gender, creed, or other personal aesthetic identification, from that wretched place where Junta43 has abandoned America.
Yet, the sanctimonious way the Clintons so smugly patronized “them” whom they coyly cajole to “take the journey with us” is insulting and annoying. These two jokers are a slick pair of natural-born dividers, with all this ‘us and them’ folly that serves more to open wounds than to bind us together under the banner of Faith. America is ONE NATION UNDER GOD, particularly in our Churches where GOD is the single most Authority! Here again, though, the Clintons offered up that heaping helping of political correctitude in the way of this thin, weak plea for unity that poorly cloaks their shameless begging for votes.
Alas, the Clintons weren’t there to back up former President Carter’s efforts to realize real national unity and end bigotry in the pews. Those two probably couldn’t care less about helping to close the great Baptist racial divide. This was a good opportunity to get Hillary some church votes, making the Clintons no better than Rove in their willingness to profanely use the people of God to advance the machinations of the state.