Going to Keep the Mud a While Longer

Last night I finally finished unpacking my bags from our mission trip to the community of El Socorro among the coffee plantations of Nicaragua.  I have my accumulated email count down to double digits, and most of the laundry is done.  My mud-covered boots still sit in the corner untouched.

 The challenges that the poor of Nicaragua face lend an immediacy to their lives.  Survival is a daily task.  Getting your children to adulthood is not an endeavor that always succeeds.  People suffer accidents while doing the rigorous work on coffee plantations, and the injuries often go without proper treatment.  There is no safety net insulating families from disaster. 

Everything is a struggle.  Children walk more than an hour up and down the sides of mountains to get to school.  Women arise at 4:00 am to begin preparing meals from basic foodstuffs cooked over wood fires.  There is no power or labor-saving devices.  Everything must be wrestled into usefulness by human effort.  The stakes are high for poor communities in Nicaragua. 

 During my tenure among them, this sense of urgency leavened my spirit.  We arose in the morning in a shelter with dirt floors and light coming through the walls.  We stepped out into the morning and ate in the open air. We bathed by pouring cold water over our bodies. It was all inconvenient in comparison to life in middle class North America.  There was an unmediated physicality to it all; you know you are alive.

My time there was quite brief.  I always knew I was just passing through.  My experience of life in that community was in no way comparable to the lives of the people who were born there, live there, and will someday die there.  I am not sentimentalizing poverty and a life of grinding physical labor.  I am saying that I learned something from the good people among whom I briefly lived.  They live interdependent lives; they rely upon and care for one another.  They enter into cooperative endeavors. They must; alone and isolated from one another, they would not survive.

It seems to me our churches could learn something from these communities about resourcefulness in the face of challenge.  Our churches become transformative places when we live into cooperative community, where we care for one another.  This not a bad image for our Region: a cooperative community of churches who know that together they are better equipped to embrace the opportunities and challenges that lie before them

I am not quite ready to knock the mud off my boots yet, to sever that physical connection with a place that taught some good lessons.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister ABC/NYS

 

The Choices of Holy Week

The Palm branches have been waved; the hosannas have been sung; the customary sermon has been preached.  Now we are into Holy Week.  Throughout the Gospel narrative, the tension between Jesus and his detractors has been thickening, the shadow of their threatening desperation growing more ominous.  Although we call it Palm Sunday, Jesus diminished the importance of the palms and brought to center stage the lethal plot waiting in the wings as he enters Jerusalem and the future that plot would yield:

As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, "If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace--but now it is hidden from your eyes.  The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment  against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.  They will dash you to the ground, you and your children within your walls.  They will not leave one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you [Luke 19:41-44]."

 

It is, perhaps, better called Passion Sunday.

Holy Week is a week of stark choices for the city that will lead to both tragic and transformative consequences.  Holy Week is an appropriate time for us to think about our choices.  They don’t usually seem as stark as those that stood before Jerusalem, but they nonetheless are building a certain future for us and those around us.

A young pastor received a call in the middle of the night.  The woman said in a hushed tone:  “Pastor, I need you.  John is on a rampage.”  The pastor rose and dressed and drove through streets of darkened windows.  When he arrived at the house where the woman lived, every light was on.  He went to front door and knocked; the door was unlatched and opened slightly under the force of his knocking.  He heard angry voices in the back of the house.  He walked through the house toward the voices.  As he turned into the family room, he saw the woman sitting on the couch with a bloodied mouth.  Her husband was standing by the sliding glass door with a hunting rifle in his hands.

The young pastor stood for a moment and thought through his seminary training.  He could not remember ever receiving any guidance on how to deal with a desperate man holding a gun; it just never came up in class.  After a moment, he asked the man, whose name he fortunately remembered from the phone call:  John, what type of future are you building for yourself?  The question so surprised the man that he put down his rifle and began to talk.  He had come home that night to find his wife involved in an affair.  This discovery so devastated his life, so stripped him if all his securities, that he felt he had no future.  He saw no place beyond that moment; his life was over.  The realization that he still had a choice about his future stunned him.  The chance that some life worth living could lie beyond this moment woke him from his darkness.

Holy Week is a week where we remember the poor choices Jerusalem made, the terrified choices the disciples made, and the faithful choices some followers made as they stood at the cross.  We are reminded that our choices matter; we are always building a future of one sort or another.

We endure the weight of our power to choose with the hope that on Sunday God will turn these people’s choices inside out and raise new, unprecedented possibilities.  The glimmer of Easter lightens our load, knowing God can redeem even our worst choices.  But during Holy Week, it is good for us to bear for a few days the awesome weight of our freedom.  Day by day we are choosing.  What type of future are we building for ourselves, our families, and our world?

Holy Week 2015

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister-The American Baptist Churches of New York State

Mary of Nazareth, King Henry VI, and a Hijacked Chapel

Mary of Nazareth, King Henry VI, and a Hijacked Chapel

Luke 1:26--55

The Beginning of Mary’s Story  
“He will be called great…Son of the Most High…inherit the throne of his father David…reign over the house of Jacob…his kingdom will have no end…holy offspring called the Son of God.”  Can you imagine receiving a birth announcement like that through the mail?  The wording itself would seem pretentious; coming from Mary it would seem ridiculous.  Mary is a young, unmarried, Jewish peasant girl living in an insignificant village in a backwater region of the Roman Empire.  Something is happening here that cannot be captured on your standard piece of stationary.   It would take a book to unpack this news.

Henry VI and His Hijacked Chapel
I spent Christmas Eve of 1987 in Cambridge, England.  At the center of that university town’s celebration of Advent and Christmas stands Kings College Chapel.  It is a massive stone structure.  On overcast days, its spires are buried in the clouds.  Its vaulted ceilings are chiseled like ivory.  The organ pipes from on high fill the space with sound as if they will drive out the air itself.   Its stone columns appear to be able to carry the weight of the whole creation and not collapse.

It took five kings to build the place.  Henry VI began construction of the chapel to honor Mary, that unmarried peasant girl from that village who got that awkward birth announcement.  Henry’s vision was that her chapel would be a place of prayer.  His inspiration was Mary’s song in verses 46 to 55 where she sings of her humble estate and wonders at the great reversal God is engineering:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:46-53)

Things did not turn out as Henry had planned.  Those builders who followed him got deterred and forgot all about the girl from Nazareth who was so taken by God’s regard for the unregarded of the world. 

A close inspection of the building tells the story.  Among the religious symbols and stained glass windows portraying the stories of faith are carvings of royal symbols and swords, knights on horses attired for battle.  Mary’s chapel is littered with the emblems of empire and conquest, war and wealth.  The fingerprints of patriarchy are unmistakable.  Henry’s chapel honoring a humble peasant girl became a monument to the kings who funded it, each king outdoing his predecessor.  The irony is palpable.  This chapel dedicated to a powerless teenage girl who courageously gave herself to God’s will became a shrine to the bloodletting and arrogance of monarchy.  The place came to honor Kings who held in contempt all that Mary stood for.

The irony goes even deeper, in 1987 the chapel was the possession of a male-dominated church.  That Christmas Eve all the clergy and choir were male.  For much of the history of the chapel, Mary would have been compelled to sit silently behind the organ screen bisecting the building.  I suspect that Mary would have been very self-conscious in her own chapel.  She likely would have been drawn to a simple parish church in the countryside with a thatched roof and roughly-hewn pews at the end of an unpaved road.

Why did God Choose a Young Woman Who Was So Easily Forgotten by the Powerful?  
 Mary was the type of person who finds no place in the history books; her voice is rarely heard.  She was a Hebrew, a race thought to be crude, untrustworthy, and clannish by the broader world.  As a young woman she would not even have had a voice in her own family about her own life; she was facing an arranged marriage.  She represents all those people whose lives are carried along by the whims of others, her days shaped by the convenience of the powerful.

At the word of the angel, Mary is troubled.  People like Mary spend a lot of their lives in apprehension.  They try to go through life unnoticed because they are usually on the losing end of most interactions; they walk quickly and don’t make eye contact.   Most of the news they receive is bad news.  The angel, however, cautions Mary not to be afraid; this is some good news for people like Mary.  The favor of God rests upon her, says the angel.  Then the other shoe drops:  “You are going to have a baby.”  Mary probably knew enough Jewish history to know that wearing the favor of God is not always easy.  It is often disruptive, inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous. It can come as a crown or as a cross; one never really knows.  Being an unwed peasant girl in a very traditional society will be no cakewalk for her.

What is Mary’s response to this disruptive piece of news?  “I am the Lord’s servant.  May it be to me as you have said,” she responds.  People like Mary are more prone to trust in God because they have found the world to be, for them, such an untrustworthy place. Her song of praise betrays what she believes about God:  God looks with favor on the lowly; scatters the proud; dethrones the powerful; lifts up the humble; fills the hungry; and sends the rich away hungry.  In a world that is stacked against people like Mary, she gives herself to a God who is clearly for her.  In this God, mercy and power are wed; justice and love join forces.  Mary cannot say no to a God like this.

Don’t Get the Wrong Idea
We might want to idealize Mary, put a halo on her head and wrap her in glowing garments.  In this way we can distance ourselves from her.  What if she were not so special?  What if she were a bit like the rest of us?  Then we would hear a challenge in her words: “I am the Lord’s servant.  May it be to me as you have said.”  If Mary is not a haloed saint, then we too are capable of saying things like that.  When Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth does not call Mary extraordinary or fantastic.  Rather Elizabeth calls her blessed.  Blessing is not something you earn or deserve; it is all gift all the time.  Mary was receiving a gift.

Maybe the real power of this story lies not in Mary’s extraordinary character but in her ordinariness.  This would mean that we are not so different from Mary.  God can work through us; Jesus can, in a way, still be born in us.  And it all comes as gift to those who can’t resist a God like this.  Who among us cannot do that?  Maybe Mary is not so special, but the God who gives to her this gift is the one who is so special.  Mary had the good sense to recognize this.

Back to the Chapel
I sat in that chapel full of contradictions on Christmas Eve.  I contemplated the two stories writ large there, Mary’s story being overwritten by the royal story.  The space was lit by candles masking the details of both stories.  Mary’s song of praise was read loud and clear.  Hers was the only voice in the place.  In that moment I realized the enduring quality of people like Mary.  The Kings who scribbled their vanity on the walls are mostly forgotten, their feats buried in history books somewhere.  Yet the song of this peasant girl, first heard only by God and Elizabeth, is still being sung.  It echoed off the walls that night:  “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me as you have said.”  Christmas belongs to people like Mary, and someday her story will have the last triumphant word.

May Christ be born anew in us this Christmas.  May our stories come to sound a bit like her story.
Jim Kelsey
Advent 2014

Listening, Civil Order, and Grand Juries

Democracies characterized by freedom and order exist by voluntary compliance on the part of the citizenry.  It is a fragile arrangement, and this compliance must be continually monitored and maintained.  I lived in a country once where there was little reliance upon income taxes as a source of revenue for running the country.  Indeed, there were a myriad of laws on the books; but practically no one voluntarily obeyed them.   People did not trust the government, writing it off as corrupt and ineffectual.  Thus, many needs within the country went unmet in a way that undermined the quality of life in that place.

The widespread public outcry over two recent grand jury decisions concerning the death of two black men at the hands of the police has gotten me thinking about the importance of trust in a community.  Without overwhelming trust in our institutions and in those who serve on our behalf as public servants, we as a nation cannot be effectively governed and at the same time live as free people.  It is all really that fragile.

How do we as believers move ahead in a healthy way?  Jesus might provide for us a clue.  Jesus is going from Judea to Galilee, and he takes a shortcut through Samaria.  Most Jews would have gone around Samaria.  The Jews and the Samaritans did not like or trust one another and avoided each other.  The woman Jesus meets at the well inasmuch says that:  Jews do not associate with Samaritans (John 4:9).  Their isolated patterns of living led to antipathy and mistrust.  Jesus breaks through those barriers by actually spending some time with the woman.

Reforming the grand jury system when dealing with law enforcement and modifying policing policies is a bit beyond my area of expertise.  (But for the wellbeing of our national community, I think this needs to be quickly addressed.) I would, however, make a related observation.  At our Board of Mission meeting last Saturday, we had guided conversations about the recent deaths and grand jury decisions during our lunch.  Afterward we shared as a large group about our conversations.  I was sitting among a group of people who want good things for all Americans regardless of race.  They want America to be a place of fairness and opportunity, a place where everyone is valued and treated well.  As I sat there, I asked myself why then have issues of race been such a persistent struggle for us.  I think we are a bit like the Jews and the Samaritans; we live parallel but not mutually engaged lives.    

We are people of sympathy.  We acknowledge and care about the hardships of others.  We want to provide support and comfort, but we are untouched by the challenges faced by people who have been formed by a different set of experiences.  We need to work to become people of empathy. Empathy is born of exposure, of hearing the unmediated stories of others.  Empathy comes from living lives engaged with others, from being affected by what affects them.  Perhaps we stand at the threshold of empathy yet remain in the land of sympathy because the journey into empathy can be uncomfortable.

 I was recently at a meeting of ministerial leaders, and we were discussing racial diversity.  An African American man in his sixties told us of an experience he had as a 14 year old boy in St. Louis.  He was walking home one night, and a police officer stopped his car in the street and pulled his gun on the boy.  He took the young man to the police station and began to question him.  The officer demanded that the boy confess to something.  When he refused, the officer began to beat him with a rolled up phone book.  Still the young man refused.  So two officers drove him out to a vacant lot and told him to get out of the car.  He refused to get out; he thought to himself:  “If they shoot me, they will have to do it in the back of this cruiser and leave a bloody mess.”  He shared that, in that day, St. Louis police officers routinely shot young black men without any consequences; he knew he would likely not survive the night.  One officer pulled him out of the cruiser and onto the ground and told the other officer to drive away.  The officer pulled his gun and said “run.”  The young man knew if he ran he would be killed within a few steps.  So he confessed to everything he could think of and lived to tell this story.

When the man finished his story there was an awkward silence around the table, and then the prior conversation was resumed.  The man had just shared a harrowing story about nearly being killed before he was old enough to drive, and no one at the table seemed to acknowledge the gravity and terror of his experience.  He was pushing us from the land of sympathy into the land of empathy, but it was too uncomfortable a journey to make. The man who had nearly lost his life that night didn’t seem surprised that there was little interest in continuing the conversation.  When I read the news these days, I think of that man and the decades he has invested in building Christ’s church.  He hears the same news filtered through a different lens. 

The American Baptist Churches of New York State is a diverse family of churches.  We and our congregations have been shaped by a variety of experiences; we tell different stories around the table.  How can we create spaces where honest, and therefore sometimes uncomfortable, conversations can take place?  We need to be talking and listening and understanding and acting.  What I hear many of our fellow Americans saying through the public outcry these days is:  “We are finding it hard to breathe.”  We as Christians must hear that; we are caretakers of neighbors. Who is our neighbor?  Someone put that to Jesus and he told a story (Luke 10:30 to 37); it is for us at this moment a timely story.  Our obedience to the Gospel lies not with sympathy but with empathy, and empathy comes through casting our lots together in community.

We as a family of churches gathering each Sunday in the name of Christ are a great place to have those uncomfortable conversations that can lead to change in our nation.  Each and every one of us has the life-giving breath of God within us (Genesis 2:7).  When some of us are having are hard time breathing, the rest of us should start listening.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

 

Fecundity and Transitions

I have always loved the word “fecund:” productive, generative, creative, flourishing, inventive, and imaginative.  The word calls to my mind the image of God’s original creation, that lush garden for which we all were created and someday will inhabit when God deems it is time.  Because God continues to create within our lives and congregations even as we await the consummation of the kingdom, there are fecund moments in our lives.  These are times when opportunity stands before us, when a choice can inaugurate some new and good thing in us, our family, or our congregation.

Loren Mead, church consultant and founder of the Alban Institute, was asked what he had learned in his 20 years at the helm of the institute.  At one point he commented: 

We learned that every congregation went through crises, and those crises were when they were open to change.  Probably the major crisis that happens to any congregation is the change of pastors.  Every time a pastor changes, a congregation has an opportunity to change.  We came to see it as a critical point in the life of a congregation.

We see the arrival of a new pastor as the inauguration point of change, but Mead observes that the biggest changes in a congregation have already happened by the time the new pastor arrives.  The congregation has already faced the loss of a previous pastor and has made some decisions about where they want to go.  In many ways, the congregation has cast their future before the new leader is on the scene, whether the congregation realizes it or not.  Many congregations see the interim period as something simply to get through before they can call a pastor.  They see it as wasted time, like the wait in an airport before the plane leaves.  They do not take advantage of the fecundity of the time.  Some of the most creative moments in a church’s life take place between pastors when the congregation must ask:  “Who are we without Pastor Jane?”  It can be a time of self-discovery and learning new skills.  Lay people take on new responsibilities and uncover gifts they did not know they had.

 If the period between pastors is well done, the congregation is ready to go in some new directions with their new pastor.  An interim pastor is someone who works with a church to accomplish a set of clear developmental tasks that will prepare the church for a new day and a new leader and a renewed vision of what God is calling them to do.

I hope your journey with your present pastor is long and the partnership you share rich.  If, however, you should ever find yourself in a time of pastoral transition, use it well.  God is always in the change, challenging us, equipping us, holding us.  Times of changes, all types of changes, can be fecund times when we trust ourselves and future to God and listen to what God has to teach us.

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey

Why I Am an American Baptist Part Two:  A Missiology That Has Kept Me in the Family

As I shared in part 1, I have not always been an American Baptist.  My first experience of ministry shaped by a clear set of denominational values and practices came as a summer student missionary between my sophomore and junior years in college. I worked with a local Baptist church in Michigan, who was attempting to plant a church in a nearby community.  I was told not to contact any other church in that small community because they were not “Word churches.”  Only our brand of Baptists had it right.  It dawned on me that part of our work was to supplant ministry already being done in the area by other churches.  I felt uncomfortable; this was not a missiology that resonated with my developing (at that point two-year-old) faith.

Later, among American Baptists I found a missiology that was humble and recognized the value and authenticity in the work of people from other Christian groups born of different histories and places.  I delighted in the way American Baptists celebrated the particular cultures and practices of the places where they minister, be it in “Little Italy” of South Philadelphia or the villages of Congo or the cities of Europe.  American Baptists, when we are at our best, have respect for the diversity of the human family and, in particular, respect for the ongoing ministries of believers who have lived there faithfully long before we arrived.

My church in Ohio went on a mission trip to Mexico, where we worked with ABC-USA missionary Tim Long at the seminary in Mexicali.  I was impressed by the gentle but determined way Tim taught us to respect the ways of the locals and to follow their lead.  He made it clear that local believers knew more about ministry (and construction) in that place than we ever would.  We realized that we were guests in someone else’s homeland; we had come to partner with an ongoing ministry.

The following year my church went on a mission trip to an ABC-USA Christian Community Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, run by former ABC-USA Home Missionary Sharon Buttry.  Forty-one percent of the residents in that community were foreign born, coming from the Middle East, south Asia, and southeastern Europe.  The collection of languages being spoken and the variety of restaurants that lined the streets were mesmerizing.  Sharon’s sensitivity to the diversity of the community and her appreciation of the cultures represented in the neighborhood was obvious.  We realized that we were guests in someone else’s community; we had come to partner with an ongoing ministry.

My wife Debbie and I spent 10 years as American Baptist missionaries in Europe.  We tried to model what we had learned from other American Baptists.  ABC-USA missionaries are almost always invited in by national partners to come alongside them and strengthen their ongoing ministries.  The national partner sets the agenda and determines the priorities.  There is respect for their traditions, history and values.  American Baptists recognize that the best wisdom for ministry in a particular place is found among those folks who have been ministering there for generations.  They work with a spirit of humility, seeking to be helpful where they can, and leaving as small a footprint as possible.

Too often North American missionaries enter a place of ministry with the mindset of a benefactor who already knows what people need and distributes benefits as a patron handing out Christmas hams.  In some cases we met missionaries who worked in the land as a type of occupying force, with little regard for what the local believers were doing or thought was important.  In some instances, they refused to work with any national group and even tried to stay “under the radar” of local Christian groups.  Some had a subversive mentality; unfortunately, they were subverting the efforts of local Christians who had worked and sacrificed for decades in that place.

American Baptists, whether in a foreign land, an American city, or their own community, have a listening, appreciating cooperative missiology leavened with humility.  This is why I have remained an American Baptist and always will be.  We have always been a people on mission.  I like the way we travel through the world.

Why are you an American Baptist?  Share your journey with me, and I’ll share it with the larger Regional family.  Email me at jkelsey@abc-nys.org.

Might I suggest that you make November American Baptist Identity Month in your church?  You can find resources to assist you at http://www.abc-usa.org/inspired/resources-for-churches/ and brief video clips at http://www.abc-usa.org/inspired/video-archive/.  I suggest the following videos:  Jimmy Carter talks about American Baptists’ work on behalf of the equality of women in church and society; Suzan Johnson Cook speaks to the importance of preparing the next generation of church leaders; Tony Compolo reminds us of American Baptists pioneering and ongoing work in cross-cultural missions; and Luis Cortes Jr. raises up the biblical mandate for practical ministry in the community.  Let us celebrate our American Baptist family next month (or any other month you choose.)

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister                                                                                                                                               

 

 

 

Why I Am American Baptist: Part 1

How did I become an American Baptist?  By the providence of God.  That is the short answer; there is a longer one, and here it is:

My family attended a different brand of Baptist church while I was growing up.  I learned about the love of God in Christ among those people.  I memorized the books of the Bible; I still have the red-letter King James Version Bible I received upon the mastering of that list.  It was a good and nurturing place for me.  Perhaps for others, everything they needed for Christian formation was present; but, even as a child, I sensed something that I needed was missing.

The Seeds of an American Baptist:  Integrity Between Life and Faith
One hot summer night an evangelist came to our church and preached about the evils of television and asserted that all houses should be purged of this menace.  People all over were saying “amen.”  Yet I knew that nearly everyone in this suburban middle-class church owned a television and suspected that all those televisions would remain in those homes long after this evangelist had moved on to another city.  As a child, I found this confusing.  I wondered about the connection between what was said in church and how folks lived their lives.

Several years later, in the early morning hours of September 1, 1966, a thirty-nine-year-old African American named Lester Mitchell was shot to death while sweeping the sidewalk in front of his house.  The shotgun blast that killed him came from a pickup truck with three white men in it.  Mitchell lived in west Dayton, a community that was 96% black at the time and mired in poverty.  The civil unrest that gripped the city following this killing filled the news.  I remember the paranoia that spread throughout the metropolitan region.  I assumed that this would be the main topic of discussion at church on Sunday.  Yet not a word was said; it was as if none of this were happening.  Again, I wondered about the connection between what happens in church and what happens in the broader world.

I was attracted to American Baptist life because, when we are at our best, we make connections between what we say we believe and what is happening in the world around us.  In other words, there is an organic link between religious conviction and discipleship when we are honoring our denominational family values.  American Baptists believe that being used by God to make whole what is broken in our society and in our lives is central to our calling as disciples.  In our denominational brochure 10 Facts You Should Know About American Baptists it says:  “American Baptists have been called to be witnesses for justice and wholeness within a broken society.’  This value of integrity between the faith we talk about in church and the lives we lead in the broader community attracted me to the American Baptist family.

This particular family value can create tensions within our ABC family because we do not always agree on how to apply the teachings of scripture to some of the events around us, but we do agree that making that application is very important.  We agree that there should be room within our churches and broader religious community to talk about things in an appreciative and listening way.  Each of us must then exercise our responsibility under God to form our convictions and live them out in the broader world.    In 10 Facts You Should Know About American Baptists it says that we have “rejected creeds or statements that might compromise each believer’s obligation to interpret scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and within the community of faith.”  In our document We Are American Baptists, it says that we are a redeemed people “who honor the priesthood of all believers; and who live their faith as visible saints.” We work to balance the twin values of our freedom in Christ and our responsibility as disciples, relying upon the Holy Spirit to guide us.  This is one of our principle strengths as American Baptists.


The Seeds Sprout and Take Form:  Humility of Spirit
I became a committed follower of Jesus Christ during my freshman year in college and immediately became involved in the campus Baptist Student Union.  These fellow students became my first formative community of faith.  Although we were the “Baptist Student Union,” we Baptists were in the minority.  There were Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Christian Missionary Alliance, and even a lone Episcopalian.    Here I learned that the Christian church was much larger than my own Baptist family.  We were very earnest in our theological debates, arguing the minutia of the faith with great stamina; the word sophomoric comes to mind.  I found that I could learn from people shaped by different traditions and experiences.  This helped me to better understand and commit to my own convictions and practices.  (We Baptists did, however, forcibly immerse the Methodists and Presbyterians in the Little Miami River on our annual canoe trip by tipping their canoes; but being ecumenically inclined Baptists, we helped them get the water out afterward.)

I was attracted to the ABC family because American Baptists realize that we are not the only ones out there doing good ministry in the name of Christ.  American Baptists have the humility to appreciate the value of what others are doing and learn some valuable things from it.  We are willing to work with others when we find affinities of purpose and opportunity.  American Baptists, when we are to our best, see the magnificence and wonder of God’s character in the breadth of God’s family and the many ways that God works through the various limbs of Christ’s body.  It was the humility of American Baptists that drew me to them.

Diversity:  Celebration of Our Creator God
As I lived in different places and came to know a variety of people, I came to appreciate the wonderful diversity of the human family.  American Baptists are the most racially and ethnically diverse Protestant denomination in the country, and we celebrate this diversity as a strength and do not simply accommodate it as a problem.  This gives us a richness and a resiliency that is not found anywhere else.  For me, this cinched the deal.

Decision Time:  American Baptist by Choice
I deliberately chose to become an American Baptist in 1990 and went to my first ABC pastorate in Philadelphia in 1992.  In my next article I will talk about the missiology of American Baptists and how that has kept me in the family.  Why are you an American Baptist by choice?  Share your journey with me, and I’ll share it with the larger Regional family.  Email me at jkelsey@abc-nys.org.

Might I suggest that you make November American Baptist Identity Month in your church?  You can find resources to assist you at http://www.abc-usa.org/inspired/resources-for-churches/ and brief video clips at http://www.abc-usa.org/inspired/video-archive/.  I suggest the following videos:  Jimmy Carter talks about American Baptists’ work on behalf of the equality of women in church and society; Suzan Johnson Cook speaks to the importance of preparing the next generation of church leaders; Tony Compolo reminds us of American Baptists pioneering and ongoing work in cross-cultural missions; and Luis Cortes Jr. raises up the biblical mandate for practical ministry in the community.  Let us celebrate our American Baptist family next month (or any other month you choose.)

Blessings,
Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister ABC/NYS