December 8, 1999
Chicago religious leaders don't
want SBC evangelism blitz there
___CHICAGO (ABP)--Religious leaders in Chicago have asked Southern Baptists to back off plans to send 100,000 volunteers to evangelize in the city next summer, saying the effort could unintentionally incite religious hatred.
___The Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago wrote a letter asking Southern Baptist Convention President Paige Patterson to reconsider plans to make Chicago the first stop in a highly publicized initiative called Strategic Focus Cities.
___The council--a group of 40 top leaders of the area's Roman Catholic, Jewish, Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant communities--warned the effort could disrupt peaceful interfaith relations in the city and unwittingly provoke hate crimes by fomenting religious differences.
___The Strategic Focus Cities strategy, coordinated by the SBC North American Mission Board, calls for focusing prayer, evangelism and church-planting efforts in two major metropolitan areas each year, starting with Chicago and Phoenix in 2000.
___The effort is seeking to enlist 100,000 volunteers to come to Chicago July 8 to share the gospel with a million people who do not know Christ, according to material on the website of Celebrate Jesus 2000, an umbrella organization coordinating outreach among evangelical churches.
___The protest by Chicago's interfaith community follows recent publicity over SBC pamphlets targeting Jews, Hindus and Muslims for conversion. Leaders of those faith groups criticized those efforts, timed to coincide with major religious holidays, as offensive and disrespectful. Southern Baptist leaders defended those initiatives, saying the Bible requires Christians to preach the gospel to everyone.
___The letter said Chicago's religious leaders recognize that seeking converts is a tenet of Southern Baptist belief and a constitutional right but such initiatives should be "sensitive to local realities" and "neither attack nor target specific faiths or religious groups."
___A promotional video calling for "an army of believers to converge on Chicago," the council said, "evokes images of a crusade." The leaders said they were particularly concerned about Muslims and Jews, "the two groups who appear to be among your primary targets," in light of religiously motivated hate crimes in the city during the last six months.
___In May, vandals hurled stones through plate-glass windows at a suburban mosque. In July, Benjamin Smith shot six Jews as they left Sabbath services before launching on a three-day shooting spree.
___"While we are confident that your volunteers would come entirely with peaceful intentions, a campaign of the nature and scope you envision could contribute to a climate conducive to hate crimes," the Chicago religious leaders said. "This would assuredly not be your intent, but it could be a disastrous consequence."
___The letter suggested Southern Baptist plans might be better received if volunteers were doing service projects such as helping the poor.
___The council said member communions would work with Southern Baptists in those kinds of efforts and invited SBC leaders to "enter into discussion with us and reconsider your plans regarding this matter."
___In responses to media reports about the letter, Southern Baptist leaders minimized concerns about religiously motivated violence and offered no indication they intend to change their plans.
___In a letter copied to several media outlets, Patterson responded by criticizing the Chicago religious leaders for releasing their letter to the media before he received it. He charged those types of communications are usually designed to intimidate rather than negotiate.
___Patterson said Southern Baptists are more likely to be targets of hate crimes than to cause them. "You appear to desire religious liberty for Bible-believing evangelicals as long as they agree not to exercise that freedom," he said.
___"It is but one small step from alleging that the bearing of witness for Jesus results in 'hate crimes' to the allegation that such a witness is a 'hate crime,'" he said. "When the sad day arrives when that last small step is introduced, America will have forfeited that sacred conviction of liberty of conscience that motivated the founders of this nation."
___Other SBC leaders said some Chicago religious leaders apparently misunderstand the denomination's outreach programs.
___"We are sharing Jesus' message, not a Southern Baptist message," said Jim Queen, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association. "Our message is one of love, not hate."
___NAMB President Robert Reccord said despite recent publicity to the contrary, Southern Baptists do not single out particular groups such as Jews or Hindus for evangelism. "Our purpose is life transformation through Jesus Christ, not proselytizing for a denomination," he said.
___Reccord said Southern Baptists believe Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, and it is "our biblical responsibility to share this good news in a loving, non-compulsive way and leave the results in God's hands and their own conscience."
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