June 24, 2002
2000 Baptist Faith & Message
meets some resistance overseas
___By John Pierce
___Baptists Today
___MACON, Ga.--Southern Baptist missionaries who affirm and work in accordance with the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message--as International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin has asked them to do--will encounter cultural resistance on the field, according to some Baptists with cross-cultural experience.
___The more narrowly defined doctrinal statement limits women's leadership roles at church and home, among other changes to the broader document previously adopted in 1963. Enforcing this revised statement on Baptist work in other cultures is a type of "doctrinal imperialism" according to one mission veteran.
___"It is a wrong mission approach," said Earl Martin, who spent 25 years as a Baptist missionary in Africa and later taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Insisting that missionaries impose the document-- even on those Baptists in other nations who might agree with the faith statement--is improper, he said.
___"There is a certain attitude or arrogance in trying to impose it on others," Martin insisted. "That's wrong-headed and wrong-hearted."
___African Baptist leader Douglas Waruta, a member of the first class of the Baptist Seminary of East Africa in Tanzania that Martin and other Southern Baptist missionaries started in 1962, recently expressed his disfavor with the new Baptist Faith & Message in an e-mail message to Martin.
___"I think it is a sad document for any group of Baptists," wrote Waruta, now a professor in his native Kenya. "As Africans, we are very disappointed at the retrogressive direction some Baptists in the U.S. have taken. Worse still, they expect the rest of the world to 'learn' from them."
___While sympathizing with SBC missionaries who must "choose between obeying their consciences and losing their livelihoods," Waruta said most African Baptists will live their faith freely, regardless of "packaged-truth bearers."
___"Some of us became Baptists because of the freedom to serve Christ and to obey the word of God without a controlling authority," he said.
___Martin, who now lives in Dandridge, Tenn., interviewed Waruta and others for a forthcoming book, "Stand With Christ: Why Missionaries Can't Sign the Baptist Faith & Message," to be released by Smyth & Helwys Publishing later this summer.
___Edited by veteran missionary journalist Robert O'Brien, contributing writers include Keith Parks, Charles Wade, Walter Shurden, Russell Dilday, James Dunn and Catherine Allen.
___Additional resistance to the faith statement from Baptist nationals overseas occurred May 22 when letters from the Japan Baptist Convention and the Fellowship of JBC Women Pastors and Ministers were presented to Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt of Snellville, Ga., during a visit to Tokyo.
___The Japanese women's group described the SBC as their convention's "spiritual mother" in the letter to Merritt. Signed by 46 Japanese Baptist leaders, the letter expressed "sincere gratitude and appreciation to (Southern Baptists) for all the missionary works in Japan for more than 110 years."
___However, the women described themselves as "pastors and ministers in the Japan Baptist Convention whose lives have been touched and changed by Christ through the works of those faithful SBC missionaries, women missionaries in particular."
___"For us Japanese Baptists, these women missionaries have been the wonderful role models of serving the Lord," the letter continued, "and the living examples of women responding to the calls of God. It is through their models and examples that many of us have been inspired to give our lives to Christ's service."
___With 330 affiliated churches--many led by women--the Japan Baptist Convention is one of the largest Protestant groups in the highly non-Christian nation.
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