Why Are We Here?
By William L. Turner, Adjunct Professor
Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, Lexington, KY

Note: This keynote address was delivered at the Inaugural Convocation of the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky on March 9, 2003. In January 2005, Dr. Turner was named Nunnelly Distinguished Minister-in-Residence for the Practice of Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry Program at Lexington Theological Seminary.

A certain divinity school dean made it his practice to welcome new students to the campus by urging them to give themselves seriously and with discipline to their studies while in school. He told them it was likely to be their last chance for an extended period to read, think, and try to puzzle out the nature of the faith they would seek to communicate in their vocations. “You need to know,” he said, “that when you get out of here and take up your vocations, no matter what you say, some people will believe you!”

Those of us who’ve been around divinity schools and seminaries very much would concur in that assessment. The call of God to vocational ministry can be daunting if not a terrifying thing. That call needs a period to “puzzle out the nature of the faith” which we are called on to articulate.

The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky exists to provide such a period, and we’re here today to celebrate this new educational dream and the reality which it is now becoming.

We’re here because of the faithfulness of Baptist leaders who pointed the way . . . because of Baptist prayers which have sought the Spirit’s guidance . . . because of grassroots support from men and women across our state (and elsewhere) who believe in this dream . . . and because of the empowering grace of a God who goes on calling people forward into the knowing and doing of God’s purposes in our time.

And I would urge us, even at this early hour in our journey together, to remember often that confession of faith found in a wonderful African-American song:

I don’t feel no ways tired.
I’ve come too far from where I started from.
Nobody told me the road would be easy.
I don’t believe God brought me this far to leave me.
But I would also urge us to recall some other things which brought us this far—two or three convictional incentives which helped to birth this dream and now help to sustain it.

For example, we’re here Because Of A History Worth Remembering. Bill Moyers calls the digital clock one of the signs of our time—no view of any past or future hours or minutes, just the present moment. But someone has wisely noted that we ought to learn from the past and from other people . . . since life’s too short to make all the mistakes ourselves!

As spotty and uneven as it may be, Baptist history at its best contains a bedrock conviction about the priesthood of all believers. It grows directly out of New Testament teaching and practice. All believers in Christ are included in the salvation and service of the Gospel. And when, in some of the latest New Testament writings, some distinctions between clergy and laity begin to emerge, they are clearly distinctions of function and not of status. All of God’s people are called to be servant-priests.

The Protestant reformers and other voices of dissent in the sixteenth century recovered that concept of an all-inclusive faith and practice. Clergy? Yes—as preachers and teachers of the Word, set aside for specific pastoral ministry within the Body of Christ. But all believers are to serve the cause of Christ, and no vocation is less or more important than another.

The Anabaptists (in many ways, our spiritual forebears) went even further. Theirs was a “people’s church” movement with the basic assumption that the members themselves were indeed the major carriers, teachers, and preachers of the Christian faith. Some historians have said that it wasn’t that the Anabaptists had no clergy; actually, they had no laity. Every believer a minister!

My Phoenix friend, Dan Yeary, told me about a high school which needed a new basketball gym. They raised some money, got started, but soon realized that they didn’t have sufficient funding for a building as large as their original plan. They couldn’t shorten the court itself, nor did they want to reduce the number of seats and bleachers. So they shortened the building behind each of the goals. Thus, when you walked into the gym through one of those end-zone doors, you were in the game—or felt like it! Folks, that’s pretty good Anabaptist theology . . . when you join the church, you’re in the game!

So, when we Baptists got to America, most of our churches were lay-led. Our preachers were farmers, tailors, weavers, soap-makers, tinkers, and leather smiths. But as Rufus Jones, the Quaker scholar, said, these early Baptist preachers did in their time what “herdsmen and vinedressers did in the early days of Hebrew prophecy, what tax collectors and fishermen did in the primitive days of the Church.” They put the power and responsibility for being God’s people into the hands of those very people.

Sometimes that’s been messy and unsatisfying. Our preachers weren’t as well educated as others in those early days. Pastors and lay leaders got crossed up with each other in church fights and splits (you may recall the saying that Baptists get along best in small groups—(preferably of one person each !). But freedom has been worth the risk. And today, even with quality theological education for our clergy, in a church full of priests and ministers, it is still servant leadership to which we are called (Texas native James Dunn calls a “ruling pastor” an oxymoron, and says that any pastor who thinks otherwise is an ordinary moron.). Our history ought to warn us against any authoritarian models of leadership. It was, after all, the authoritarian churches and governments in our past which trampled conscience and brought Baptists into being.

The autocratic, CEO, lord-and-master-pastor model which would now clergify our churches and place power in the hands of a pastoral elite may well be a quicker way to build a statistically and financially successful organization than by the slower, uneven path of participatory democracy. But the Church is not called to make the Fortune 500 list. We are called to be the body of a Servant Lord at work in the world. And we cannot greatly value those to whom we witness and minister on the outside of our churches at the same time that we belittle the role of lay believers on the inside.

The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky knows about inclusive priesthood and servant ministry. It’s a convictional incentive which springs from our history—a history worth remembering.

We are here also Because Of A Heritage Worth Preserving. We now live in what most pundits are calling a “post-denominational” age. The brand-name loyalties of earlier days don’t seem to matter as much. It’s a spiritual smorgasbord these days, and people are shopping in more places than ever. Nearly 7% of our national population is into some form of New Age experience. Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion. I saw a cartoon where one guy asks his buddy, “Have you explored the mysteries of an Eastern religions?” His friend replied, “Yes, I was a Methodist once in Philadelphia.” I recently heard a United Church of Christ professor talk about teaching at Pittsburgh Seminary where he was surrounded by Presbyterians. He concluded that Presbyterians were more dense in Pittsburgh than any place else.

Baptist triumphalism (“God’s Last and Only Hope”) was never a good thing, and it now seems more arrogant and irrelevant than ever . . . especially when you recall recent Southern Baptist history. So when one denominational leader asked a few years back, “Where would God be without Baptist?” I’m ready to laugh and say, “In many cases, probably a lot better off!”

Still, we do all right at times. On a Sunday afternoon down in Houston, several of us from South Main attended the ordination service for Robert Moore, new pastor of Christ the KingLutheranChurch. Robert is an ex-South Mainer, Midwestern Seminary graduate, and PhD. Graduate of Rice University. Cathy, his wife, had been Ken Chafin’s secretary, and Robert had served on the pulpit committee which helped call me to South Main. Given the Southern Baptist climate for prospective pastors and teachers at the time, we’d “lost” Robert to the Lutherans. We rejoiced, however, in his new pastorate, and we looked forward to this special worship experience. We stood up, sat down, kneeled, sang hymns we didn’t know very well, and bowed our heads—on cue and nearly at the proper times. Later, some of us went to the communion rail to receive from Robert’s freshly-blessed hands the bread of communion. Still, we Baptists were somewhat tentative. But when I walked through the fellowship hall after the service, and the cake was cut, there wasn’t a Baptist there who didn’t know what to do! We do all right at times!

Down in Chillicothe, Texas, they like to say that the Baptist church is where you can always hang your hat . . . and somebody will take it down and pass it! We do all right at times!

The kingdom of God, however, extends far beyond all of our denominational borders. Hopefully, we Baptists understand how to be people of integrity without becoming people of isolation. I love Helen Harrington’s poem about persons who are different, yet:

Sometimes they meet,
And face each other over grief
Or hope or charity or belief
And know that they are kindred who
By different trails sought something true.

So when the Baptist World Alliance met in its first congress in 1906, Alexander Maclaren insisted that the first official action be for those present to stand and recite the Apostles’ Creed—affirming Baptist ties to the great, historic faith of the larger Church.

I’m affirming here that our contribution to the larger Body of Christ is not insignificant. Though not unique to us in every particular, we do have a heritage worthy of preservation—precisely because of its ongoing relevance in a post-denominational time.

It is a heritage of soul competency and the freedom to make spiritual choices like a personal profession of faith, intercessory prayer, and personal accountability in spiritual gifts for ministry in the church and to the world. We believe in no coerced conscience; faith must be freely chosen and expressed, or it cannot be faith.

Ours is a heritage that affirms the authority of scripture, alongside the obligation to be responsible interpreters.

Our heritage includes local church autonomy and the mandate to do mission and ministry in the immediate context as well as to the “uttermost part of the earth.” And every Baptist congregation is free to ordain any and all of those it deems called by God to provide leadership in such work.

Ours is a heritage of religious freedom and church-state separation. Since we were birthed in dissent from state churches and compulsory religion, we Baptist know well the necessity for freedom of or from religion in a pluralistic society. We fully understand that words like “faith” and “forced” don’t belong in the same sentence.

Our pastoral secretary at South Main for several years was Linda Gardner. She recounted to me and others some of the stories of religious intolerance from her Czechoslovakian grandparents. They were evangelicals who loved the Bible, and when the state authorities would come unannounced to search their home and seize their Bible, they would often hide the precious book inside large, round loaves of bread. Needless to say, her family still owns and cherishes one of those “baked Bibles.”

Maeyken Wens, an Anabaptist woman of the sixteenth century, was arrested for preaching the Gospel as she understood it from her own study of scripture. She was imprisoned and tortured and, refusing to recant, was sentenced to death by burning. Part of her sentence by the court was that her tongue be screwed to the roof of her mouth so that she might not preach on the way to her execution. Her teenage son took his younger brother to the execution and, when it was over, they searched the ashes to find the screw with which their mother’s tongue had been silenced. It was a precious symbol of an unfettered conscience!

And in the middle of the next century, British Baptist John Bunyan was put in Bedford jail for his refusal to attend state church worship . . . as well as for preaching without a license. He stayed there for twelve long year, preaching through prison bars and declaring that he would remain in jail for the rest of his life before he would submit to the butchery of his conscience.

We’re here today, then, because of a heritage which is worth preserving. Roger Williams of Rhode Island was right: “Having bought truth so dear, we must not sell it cheap.”

Still, there’s another convictional incentive which brings us here, namely, A Task Worth Doing. Hear this from our mission statement: The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky will provide Christian theological education committed to spiritual depth, intellectual honesty and moral integrity. This has never been more urgent.

We’re at this historic moment in Baptist theological education because of denominational leaders who, nearly twenty-five years ago, spoke of wanting parity. Their focus, however, turned quickly to talk of purity . . . and to the tasks of purging and control. When Southern Baptists wrote their first confession of faith in 1925, historian W. W. Barnes warned us that there might come a time when such confessions could become weapons to be used in the name of orthodoxy. What a prophet he turned out to be! We have watched a cadre of “godly men” strive to turn theological education into indoctrination . . . to make robots and shibboleth-sayers of our brightest young women and men . . . to turn wonderful teachers and scholars into intellectual handmaidens or eunuchs (or to force them from our faculties and out of our schools).

Thank God for a place like the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky where academic freedom lives, so that intellectual curiosity and spiritual integrity might thrive as well!

This new educational dream, simply put, is to foster and maintain such a climate in which to train those whom God is calling to do the work of vocational ministry. A look at our curriculum will tell you that here we have scholarship balanced with spirituality. Here is introspection balanced with witness. Here is the quest both to understand and to apply the meaning of holy scripture to daily life. Ours is a faculty committed to learning Christ, sharing Christ, and doing the ministry of Christ in a spiritually-hungry cultural context.

And it is a time of spiritual hunger in our culture.

The ravages of the human journey alone will create a search for faith. What was it that Joseph Parker said? Preach to hurting people and you will always have a congregation. But these days I hear other voices as well:

“Can you show me a faith that’s able to connect the dots of life and death and meaning?”

“Now that the scientific and technological saviors of modernism have come up short, is there a way to tap into something deeper?”

“All the food and drink I can consume, all the dollars I can make, all the influence I can wield, all of it together forces me to ask if there’s not something I haven’t found. Is there something more . . . something of spirit . . . of God?”

Such yearnings recall Thomas Merton’s comment that every now and then the Church ought to ask itself, “What do we have to offer the world that the world doesn’t have too much of already?”

Our educational dream here is to train women and men to keep asking and answering that question, so that believers in Christ may become disciples and not just converts. Because scattered across the landscape of institutional Christianity are a lot of people with do-it-yourself religion, a collage of god-scraps gathered from all over—about “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

There are yet others, very religious folks, who are so narrow they can look through a keyhole with both eyes at the same time. Their take on Christian truth is “my way or the highway.” And there are many who gush with energy and enthusiasm for everything but hard questions and serious thought. They’re spiritually brain-dead, except for the sounds of pious clichés and breezy god-talk.

Surely we can love the Lord our God with all our hearts and minds better than this! It will help if we have trained and committed leaders, taught in places like the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky.

Years ago, when he was teaching homiletics at Princeton, Tom Long would often take Sunday morning pulpit supply assignments. I heard him tell about a morning when he was standing at the church’s back door, greeting members at the end of the worship service. A woman approached, gripped his hand firmly, and said, “You teach preaching, don’t you?” Tom flinched and thought, “I’m about to get clobbered.” She  held on, however, and he gamely said, “Yes, I do.” “Then please,” she said earnestly, “please take me seriously.”

Ours is a task worth doing, and we will take that task seriously . . . along with those persons and churches which it encompasses.

One other thing, please. This dream will be realized best in A Community Worth Gathering. As a brand new school, our start-up numbers are modest . . . but we do have numbers! A community is gathering to learn and worship and grow together. That fact is not to be overlooked or under-valued. Here’s what I mean. That fact is not to be overlooked or under-valued. Here’s what I mean.

Long before there was a canonized Bible, there were churches, faith communities. In fact, the New Testament was written largely to provide those early congregations with documentation and instruction. So the Church is the bridge over which the Bible has come to us. Thus, today, it is in a gathered faith community that our conversations with scripture and all of Christian theology will be most useful. Hear me, I do not mean to minimize personal understanding, but what a help it is to have believers who will give feedback . . . provide fresh information . . . think different thoughts . . . ask different questions . . . and bring diverse ideas to the table. In an earlier time (and before the use of inclusive language) it was cogently said that “a wise person makes up his mind for himself, but only a fool makes up his mind by himself.” The learning of faith and faithful leadership is too important for us to be victims of our own untested assumptions, superstitions, or ignorance. We need each other for clarity and focus.

Already in these early months of this fresh, new dream we have a gathering community of faculty and students where Christian commitment and intellectual ferment hold exciting promise for the kingdom of God . . . and especially for the Baptist manifestation of that kingdom.

One of the friendships I made in Texas was with Winfred Moore, now on the Baylor University staff. Winfred spent half a lifetime in the Texas panhandle at First Baptist Church, Amarillo. He speaks fondly of the people with whom he’s shared so much of his life. He describes them as hardy stock, pioneer types who braved the chilly, windswept plains. A favorite saying was that there was nothing between them and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence! Winfred says that these are also people of resilient faith, and he recalls two main qualities of these determined survivors. They had a will to leave behind . . . and a will to go on.

Today, I’ve talked about a few things not to be left behind as we pursue this new educational dram. I would urge us, however, to turn loose and leave behind other things—like our grief, our anger, and (most of all) our despair and hopelessness. Let them go! God is obviously doing new things in our time, and God welcomes partners. Let us go on—with deep, deep trust and great, great joy!

Updated Monday, October 24, 2005