By Marv Knox
Published: February 26, 2007 by Associated Baptist Press
http://www.abpnews.com/1775.article
IRVING, Texas (ABP) — A refrain of freedom echoed through a Mainstream Baptist Network convocation in suburban Dallas Feb. 23-24. About 80 participants from across the South gathered for the sixth-annual event.
During the session, seven speakers addressed the theme “Why I am still a Baptist.” They mentioned a broad range of issues, but freedom — and resolve — provided a common denominator.
“Many folks today are scared of being a Baptist, and [they] run off in fear,” Joe Lewis, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Petersburg, Va., said. “I stopped counting the friends who left.”
In the early 1600s, spiritual pioneers John Smyth and Thomas Helwys “began the Baptist movement demanding freedom,” Lewis said. Citing church historian Walter Shurden, Lewis noted that “four fragile freedoms” — Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom and religious freedom — are Baptist hallmarks.
After Lewis spoke, Tyrone Pitts recalled that his appreciation for religious freedom and its corollary, the separation of church and state, grew as he worked with other faith groups like the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.
“Others in the ecumenical movement do not have this quality,” Pitts said. He is the general secretary of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, one of four predominantly American-African Baptist bodies.
“We are unified around soul freedom and liberty,” he said. “It was no accident that Martin Luther King was a Baptist, just as it was no accident that other key civil-rights leaders were Baptist ministers.” Continue reading ‘Mainstream Baptist leaders credit ‘freedom’ for keeping them Baptist’
