Whites participate quietly in African-American Baptist body

Posted: 10/19/07

Whites participate quietly
in African-American Baptist body

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

AUSTIN (ABP)—Pastor Larry Bethune, an Anglo from Austin, recently became president of a mainly African-American Baptist group, and it didn’t make news, because it was nothing new.

Perhaps what is news to many Baptists is that the American Baptist Churches of the South has, since its beginning, included both white and black Baptists in its leadership and gone quietly about its business. Bethune is only the latest of several white pastors of Southern Baptist heritage who have served the majority African-American group.

“When I go to regional meetings, I’m the chip in the cookie. And it’s been remarkably good for me to be part of a predominantly African-American fellowship,” said Bethune, pastor of University Baptist Church in Austin.

“It’s interesting to experience that, because—being a white male who’s accustomed to being the majority in most settings—there are ways in which experiencing being a minority has … raised my consciousness to the ways we in the majority exclude people in the minority without even being conscious of it.”

The group Bethune was elected to lead is one of 32 regional bodies affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. It includes American Baptist congregations located in the former states of the Confederacy, as well as Oklahoma, West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. While the ABC is historically a white, Northern denomination, it now has an increasingly sizable minority of African-American congregations—including many in the South.

Meanwhile, a handful of historically Anglo congregations have been affiliated with the region since its founding more than 30 years ago.

In recent years, however, increasing numbers of historically white churches that have left the Southern Baptist Convention have affiliated with American Baptists and the regional body.

“African-Americans have come to the American Baptist Churches, first of all to learn their system, to learn their agenda. And as we become more populous, as we become large, we now have an opportunity to help set the agenda. The same thing is true with Euro-Americans” who have joined the American Baptist regional body, said Ivan George, the group’s minister for missions development.

“You first come and learn of the culture and adapt yourself to the culture, and then within that culture, you can find your own self.”

Since University Baptist joined the American Baptists in 1993, Bethune said, he felt “welcomed into the fellowship” immediately and that his congregation received “nothing but support” from regional officials. Bethune has participated in leadership positions in the regional group for several years, serving as an officer and as chair of its ministers’ council.

That’s more welcomed than his church felt while involved in white Baptist life, Bethune said.

In the 1990s, the Austin Baptist Association withdrew fellowship from the congregation for ordaining a gay deacon and taking a “welcoming and affirming” position toward homosexuals. The Baptist General Convention of Texas responded by refusing to accept contributions from the church—essentially cutting off its official relationship with the congregation.

University Baptist was expelled from the Austin association once before, in the 1940s, for accepting African-Americans into membership decades before other Southern Baptist churches thought about doing so.