Baptist Identity: who is God calling us to be now?

I continue to think about Baptist identity. Not agonise. Not worry. But think, evaluate, indulge in self criticism without indulging in self-denigration. So below I offer the final few paragraphs of my recent paper on Baptist Identity. It isn't the last word on anything, but it is a first word that needs speaking, and hearing, and then more thinking. But at some time the thinking has to become the intellectual and spiritual energy source for theological reconstruction and renewed denominational confidence. And of course I don't mean resurgent and divisive denominationalism – I mean owning and generously sharing our own identity, while encountering and humbly receiving the gift, presence and fellowship of other Christians, all equally faithful to their denominational identities. In that encounter of diversity something of the richly co-ordinated grace of God waits for us to discover – and be discovered. 

"Christian denominational identity of
any kind, implies a particular theological style, a principled standpoint
derived from past and present experience, and reflection on, and reinforcement
of that theological style. The same is true of Baptist identity. Historic
tradition judiciously re-appropriated, and contemporary practice of our living
communities reconnected with core Baptist convictions, will only happen if,
looking forward, we can answer the question – not who were we? – nor who are we? But who is God calling us now to be, in faithfulness to a Baptist understanding
of the Gospel?

  To answer that question,

·       
requires a willingness to explore and live faithfully within those historic
Baptist traditions of radical discipleship that shaped and formed us

·       
means being energised by Baptist
convictions which will be inevitably but creatively disruptive of other evangelical
ecclesiologies rooted in other than radical free church congregational principles

·       
implies ongoing affirmation of the sole and absolute
authority of Christ the head of the Church, and of each local church, and that as a distinctive Baptist witness radically lived out in local
ecclesial community

·       
is to hear and answer Christ's call to a discipleship of
sacrifice, peace-making, reconciliation and imaginative following after Christ,
by those whose baptism is their promise in response to God’s promise, and their dying
with Christ a prerequisite of rising to newness of life.

·       
To answer that question then – who is God calling us
to be in faithfulness to a Baptist understanding of the Gospel – to answer that
question in these ways, is to have begun to repossess that without which we are
existentially disadvantaged – our identity as Baptists.

 But to do this will involve risk –
of being misunderstood, of being thought old fashioned, of not paying attention
and not listening to the wider constituency. The risk of denominational
regression into narrowly conceived peculiarities no longer popularly owned, the
risk of being accused of pushing a Baptist agenda at a time when the need for
the Gospel  was never greater – as if
Baptist identity and Gospel faithfulness were mutually obstructive rather than
spiritually integral.

 Risk. At which stage we are called
to row towards the waterfall, taking the necessary risks. As that maybe Baptist
John Bunyan said, “I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have
seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot.”
Baptist discipleship is simply and only that – being faithful to who Christ has
called us to be, and to follow faithfully after Him, through the waters of
baptism and into newness of life."