Where there is a humble church, there are new beginnings

|PIC1|This is an important year for Baptists. What’s been running through your mind as you’ve contemplated the last 400 years?

I think a sense of gratitude and really a sense of awe at the courage and the faith, the daring faith of people like Thomas Helwys and John Smyth who couldn’t find in their own land the freedom to worship God according to their conscience and so went to free Amsterdam.

The Amsterdam today we associate with their liberal laws on all sorts of things but 400 years ago it was a liberality that favoured those who wanted to worship God according to their conscience.

Helwys and Smyth are a powerful inspiration for our society today where I believe religious liberty is once again on the agenda. The liberty of the church to follow her Lord is under threat and we have to look now at how we were founded and what it is from our founding mothers and fathers we can take as an inspiration today.

It’s interesting that you mention the issue of religious liberty at a time when many European Christians are complaining of growing secularisation across the continent. Are you optimistic that can change?

I can’t say anything about outcomes because that’s not in my hands, but in terms of a strategy for the church I’m very optimistic. You can’t take God out of the public square or out of the story of Europe. It’s what Libby Purvis once called “the grammar of the culture” – it’s in the paintings, the music, the arts, the history.

I want a public square which is not a naked square where a secular government says ‘we have no God in this square’. That would hurt society. Nor would I want a sacred square where only one faith says ‘we speak and this is the only faith that counts’. I would want a public square where all faiths and no faiths are in dialogue and within that the Christian story is told with clarity and integrity and is not overpowering, rude or insolent.

We only have to look at what’s happened recently in the British Parliament with the MPs’ expenses scandal. Does the Bible have anything to say about truth, honesty, integrity? Most people would say yes.

The Christian church has two thousand years of Christian history and before that, thousands of years of Jewish history. Surely with its ups and downs, its successes and failures, it has something to tell us. The church hasn’t always got it right but if we point to the objective standard of the written record of history there is ample evidence that the Bible has wisdom the world can learn by.

Much has been made of the relationship between Muslims and Christians since the release of the “Common Word” letter by the Muslim clerics. How do you feel about relations between the two faiths?

The dialogue between Christians and Muslims is very important. In a world of six billion people, two billion are Christian and one billion are Muslim. That means 50 per cent of the world’s population would name themselves as Christian or Muslim.
If these two great faiths are not able to come to a greater respect and tolerance of one another, it will be to the detriment of everyone.

As a Christian I will never relinquish the right to share in appropriate ways my faith in Jesus Christ. I don’t want to get to a point where we say ‘ok, there can be only be peace if everyone agrees that we won’t talk about our faith’. There has to be a sense in which we are able to live alongside one another. I also believe in the right to change your cradle faith and sadly in many countries that’s becoming illegal.

Christianity in the West seems to be dwindling as quickly as it is gaining ground in the Global South. Do you think that growth can also bless the struggling churches in the West?

People call the West the graveyard of Christianity but we know that out of graveyards comes new life. That’s the heart of our faith, that Jesus stepped out of the graveyard on Easter Day. Where there is a humble church that repents and says ‘God, we got this wrong’, then there are new beginnings.

The congregation of the Vice President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Kingsley Appiagyei, has planted 14 churches, mostly in London, but also one in Amsterdam and plans for another one in Oslo. Who could have said to Smyth and Helwys 400 years ago that there would then come a man called William Carey with a vision to take the Gospel to the world and here we are 400 years later and the world we took the Gospel to has now come back and is probably doing more effective things than the mother church.

The well founded theory of Philip Jenkins is that the centre of gravity of Christianity has always been moving and the amazing thing is that where people are open to the wind of the Spirit and not just concerned with guarding the “stones” of their faith, then there is the possibility that faith can be revived and refreshed.

Jesus says the Spirit blows where it will and you cannot manage a movement and it is impossible to say that the Christian movement can be managed. I think the church has sometimes got it wrong in terms of who really leads this movement. So I think there is hope for the West.

What role do you see discipleship playing in the growth of the Church?

I think discipleship always has a cost attached to it. You cannot reduce discipleship to one and a half hours on a Sunday morning. And I hold my own hands up. I know there are times I can lapse into something that falls short of true, costly discipleship. But true discipleship has an element of martyrdom to it. It is losing your life in ways like Stephen did.

Saying no to stuff and saying yes to Jesus, I think that principle of putting Jesus over your life and the comfort of life is one of the great things that might come out of this global credit crunch.

For people in many parts of the world, it’s already been a credit crunch for decades. I’ve been to some of these places and seen people who do far more with far less. It might say something to our culture, which may be open at a time when there is so much financial hardship. People might need models demonstrating how you can do far more with far less.

The other thing I learned going to Africa and other parts of the Global South in general is that there is just such vitality. Sometimes with Western congregations you know what they think after you preached but in the Global South, when you preach they tell you how it is going while it is happening. They’re with you, they respond.

As President of the BWA, you must always have your eye on the bigger picture. What’s encouraging you right now within the worldwide Baptist movement?

I think looking over my shoulder and seeing a new generation of leaders emerging to lead the Baptist movement into the next period of its life. There is the saying: If you look over your shoulder and there’s nobody there you’re probably going for a walk in the park!

When I became president I wanted to set up an emerging leaders’ network and that has now been established. We identified around 40 or 50 leaders and we are just passing on the values of the movement to them. How they lead the Baptist movement in the years to come will not be my burden, that will be their, burden, but we have some extremely talented emerging leaders and we have love and respect for each other. That deeply encourages me.

I think the secret of Baptists is that we’ve always said every Baptist is a missionary.
We don’t expect ‘professionals’ alone to spread the faith. We are strong when we are communities of conviction. The local Baptist church has always been central to the movement because we don’t have a Rome and we don’t have a Canterbury. For us the strength and the weakness is the local church and that’s why we lay great emphasis on the training of pastors who will build up these great local churches.

As Baptists we have five core commitments that make up the acronym SMART. They are: standing for unity and fellowship, moving together in mission, acting for justice, responding to human need, and thinking theologically.

We want to be smart Baptists.