Why Am I a Baptist with Rev. Cristina Adams and Rev. Dr. Matthew Sturtevant

This morning, Pastor Cristina preached her “Why I Am a Baptist” sermon during the children’s sermon time. There’s no text for this part, so please watch the worship video to hear it. Pastor Matt’s sermon text is below.

Pastor Matt’s sermon

“Why Am I a Baptist?”

I want to begin this morning with a clarification, specifically what we are NOT trying to do in our current series. This is not meant to be a thing where we say that being Baptist is the only way to be Christian, or even the best way to be Christian. It is not to say that we are the only denomination that does what we do, or emphasizes what we emphasize. It isn’t a commercial about our “brand” or our “distinctives.” I would instead liken it to a family getting together and telling stories. “Remember when your uncle did that thing? Before you were born this happened… Every year we have done this tradition… These are the things that we are proud of….” We want the series to be like getting together and telling family stories. “This is what has been important to our family, how our family has operated, for 400 years….”

Which is a good transition to my first point. “Why am I a Baptist?” I am a Baptist because I was raised to be a Baptist. I am a Baptist because Joel Sturtevant, my father, was a Southern Baptist pastor in Illinois, and is currently a Baptist chaplain endorsed by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I am a Baptist because my uncle, Wade Rowatt, was a longtime professor in pastoral counseling at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. I am a Baptist because my Mammaw, Freda Brock, was the Education Director at two Baptist churches, including the First Baptist Church of Fairfield, Illinois, at a time and place where she would not likely have been considered for ordination, but did much of the same work that an associate pastor might do today. I am Baptist because it is my family story!

So perhaps the question that I will spend the bulk of the sermon on today is “Why Have I Remained a Baptist?” Even though I was raised to be Baptist, it doesn’t mean that I had to stay Baptist. Over the years, I have made that decision to remain a Baptist over and over again. In fact, I want to tell you a bit about that journey, with what I might call The Story of Three Rogers. The first Roger in our story is a man named Roger Prather (picture). He  was a man from the first church I remember attending: Calvary Baptist Church in Monticello, Illinois. Roger was a member of the church, and one of the congregational leaders. He was not an ordained pastor, or a counselor, or even the Education Director. Roger worked at the John Deere dealer behind our house, and was a longtime member at the Baptist church. He was a Deacon, in a denomination where that meant something more like a member of our Spiritual Leadership Team. He also taught a Men’s Sunday school class, and helped with some of the building needs at the church.

I have several memories of Roger, but I share just one today. Every Christmas, we would collect a denominational missions offering named after missionary Lottie Moon, and our church had a goal to reach a certain dollar amount for missions that season. We weren’t quite there, but the deadline had arrived. I clearly remember Roger stepping up, and offering to cover the rest of what it would take to get to that goal. I don’t remember how much it was, but it felt like a million dollars. He and that church cared about people that they had never met, and it made an impression on me. Roger Prather preached a sermon that day.

Which is really the thing that I want to say about Roger Prather in a sermon on what it means to be Baptist. Baptists have always put incredible emphasis on the role of lay leaders. People like Roger who make the church run. During the 1800’s Baptists pioneered the lay pastor movement, when Baptist congregations lifted up members of the congregation as leaders and preachers and shepherds. It wasn’t a denominational body ordaining someone, but the church itself saying “this person has the gifts of leadership,” and we will follow. Last week, Cheryl talked about the “priesthood of all believers,” which is actually a quote by Luther, but has been championed by Baptists. Our authority comes from Scripture and our power comes from the Spirit. When we do things like the Two-Way, where any member of the congregation shows up to basically help write the sermon for the next week… When we do things like the 838 worship, where we preach together in a shared homiletic experience…. When we do things like the Life After Debt conversations, where we ask members of the congregation to show up to tell us what we want our mission and vision and future budget to look like…that is because we know that we are a church full of Roger Prathers who don’t need a theology degree to be priests to one another. In the vocabulary of Baptist author Carlyle Marney, we have a “priest at the elbow.”  In Paul’s vocabulary, I am here to “equip the saints.” We are here to equip one another in our saintliness, in our priestliness, in our Roger Prather-ness.

A second Roger was a tad more famous: the founder of the First Baptist Church in America, and the colony of Rhode Island: Roger Williams. He is kind of a big deal in our denomination. And our church…we named the whole north side of the church building after him, after all! And for good reason. The congregation chose to name our gym and community center after Roger Williams because he is perhaps one of the most famous Baptists in American history.

Roger Williams’s claim to fame was in the arena of religious liberty. During a time when each one of the American colonies were deeply connected to one religious background or another—Massachusetts was tied to the Puritans, Maryland tied to the Catholics, Virginia tied to the Anglicans—the Baptist Roger Williams said that Rhode Island would have no official state religion. They would instead be founded on the principle of religious freedom. All faiths—or those with no faith—would be welcomed: Muslims, Jews, Catholics, American Indians, and atheists. In an era when most founding fathers actually wanted a representative republic and not a democracy, Roger Wliiams was a minority, arguing for a democracy where all voices to be included. Williams was one of the first voices to proclaim the need for a separation between church and state, suggesting that soul freedom required the ability for individuals and congregations to worship in ways that they saw fit, not what the government required.

Over the years, I have chosen to stay a Baptist because of issues such as these. Again, Baptists are not the only Christians, or the only people, who believe in the separation of church and state. There are Methodists who believe in religious freedom. There are Presbyterians who believe in religious freedom. But this has always been a part of our Baptist story. We have followed the legacy of Roger Williams, and even earlier British Baptists like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, who insisted that the King couldn’t tell them how to believe. And later Baptists like John Leland, who had the ear of James Madison and insisted on religious liberty in the Bill of Rights. On Capitol Hill today, there is an organization called the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, that continues to fight for issues like these. The whole idea of religious liberty is a bit muddled today, as it has become a code word for “I want to deny your civil rights and call it my religious freedom. I want to call myself a religious victim because you won’t let me tell you how to live. I want to protect my ability to have majority status and oppress you and your freedoms.” None of that is religious liberty. A lot of it is religious nationalism, trying to claim victim status under the guise of religious freedom. But the BJC calls them out on it, day after day. As the BJC likes to say, “The separation of church and state is good for both.”

For this Roger, the one we named our community center after, part of the responsibility of following Jesus was to say that every child of God has the freedom to practice their own faith. And it is our responsibility to fight for their right, even if we don’t share their faith. That is an “equipping the saints” way of being. That is a Baptist way of being.

OK, so two Rogers have helped explain why I have chosen to remain Baptist. I have seen lay leadership as the center of Baptist practice. I have seen religious liberty as the cornerstone of Baptist history. But I want to share with you a third Roger (picture.) This is Pastor Roger Romero, from the Baptist church in El Ayote, Nicaragua. This summer, our team met Pastor Roger, and his wife, and his son who plays the heck out of the drums in the church worship service. One of the names for their church, translated from Spanish is Oasis of Hope Baptist Church. And it was. Pastor Roger pastored a congregation that on one of the rainiest nights of the rainy season, showed up to welcome us. Who on a Thursday noon, broke the bank to slaughter a pig for a barbeque dinner that cost them more than we can imagine. I want to be a Baptist like Pastor Roger is a Baptist. An Oasis of Hope, in the midst of a country with a million challenges.

Pastor Roger helps me to be thankful for the American Baptist way to do missions. I have been a Baptist for my whole life, but one of the reasons why I have stayed a Baptist is because I found the value of how American Baptists share the work of Jesus with the world. Through history, Missions has often been a very colonial thing: “I will show up in your country and tell you how to follow Jesus.” But American Baptists have done missions very differently: they show up and ask “what do you need and how can we help?” Standing in the front of this picture is Christy Lafferty, an American Baptist missionary who works with AMOS, and asks that question again and again. When we began preparing for the trip, it was not with the assumption that we would or could be the white saviors. Instead, we embraced the acrostic of LEAF. We were going to Learn from our hosts…not as experts who know better than them how God might be at work. We were going to Encourage…to tell them that we shared their excitement for how God was working and wanted to see for ourselves. We were going to Assist…asking what we might do to be helpful. We were going to Fellowship…to enjoy spending time with new friends. In a nutshell, that is the way that American Baptists have chosen to do missions.

It is akin to a denomination that says that lay leaders are as much priests as those educated and hired to do ministry. It is akin to a denomination that insists on freedom for individuals and congregations to worship in ways that they feel called. It is akin to Paul realizing that we might equip the saints, but not tell them how to live their faith. That is up to God. That is the work of the Spirit. That is the Baptist way.