From the General Secretary
EBF Council
Valpré, Lyon, France, 28-30 September 2006
General Secretary's Address to the Council
Brothers and sisters in Christ
I want to say, first of all, that in my visits to our member Unions over this past year there have been so many encouragements. Out of many, let me just mention a four of them.
- Just three weeks ago Keith Jones and myself were in Macedonia to graduate and ordain Marko Grozdanov as pastor of the Baptist Church in Skopje. Marko is the first trained pastor there and received his theological education in Osiek and at IBTS in Prague. Together with his wife Tina, who has also studied theology, Marko represents real hope for the development and growth of Macedonian Baptist life, which at present consists of just two churches. He is exactly the kind of young leader we in the EBF should identify, train and encourage.
- Earlier in July our President and myself attended the Russian Baptist Congress held near Bryansk. Here they were breaking new ground by holding it as a camp for three thousand delegates with an average age of 43 so there were many families and young people. And the Feeding of the Three Thousand took place every day by means of military camp kitchens. The whole atmosphere was lively, relaxed but with a real sense that God was present with his people and leading them forward.
- In June was the Conference on Ethnic Churches, jointly hosted by EBF Mission and Evangelism Division and IBTS. Here 40 mission leaders concentrated on one of the biggest challenges in our region – the movement of peoples across Europe and in to Europe form other parts of the world, and the varieties of church life and worship which they bring. We had "experts" to guide us as we thought about the issue biblically and sociologically, but perhaps most important was the sharing of stories of how our unions are facing up this mission challenge. All the papers and the stories have been gathered in to a book which will be available in a few weeks and you will have more information about how to order it at this Council.
- Also in June I visited the Bucharest Baptist Association in Romania. As the EBF we congratulate them and the Romanian Baptist Union on this year's celebration of 150 years since Gerhard Oncken sent a German Baptist to Bucharest to begin the Baptist work. But especially encouraging was to preach at the Graduation of the Baptist Faculty at the University of Bucharest. Here young men and women are being education and discipled to go as Christians in to teaching or social work or other professions, to be slat and light and yeast in their society which is undergoing so much change. They too represent real hope for the future Christian witness. We are delighted that the Dean of the Faculty, Otniel Bunaciu is with at this Council and will deliver our keynote address on theological education tomorrow morning.
- And a final encouragement was to attend for the first time the Council of the European Baptist mission in Budapest in May. We are glad to have all our mission partners, but we have a special relationship with EBM which was born as a child of the EBF. And EBM like all mission agencies is facing up to the challenge of a changing world and changing ways of communicating the Gospel to it. So this Council saw the middle of a major review of how EBM operates in Europe, Africa and Latin America. What encouraged me was to see delegates form all three continents sitting around the discussion table seeking the mind of Christ as equal partners, and the Review itself was chaired by the General Secretary of the South Africa Baptist Convention.
As the Writer to the Hebrews would say, time fails me to tell you of many more encouraging things happening in the EBF. For instance, my colleague Daniel Trusiewicz will tell you later about the continuing growth of the Indigenous Mission project, and Keith Jones and Emmanuel Wieser will say many encouraging things about our Seminary in Prague.
Gifted younger leader, new ways of gathering together, working together on the missionary challenges facing our Region, seeing the results of Baptist theological education and hearing the results of a mission agency being open to change. These are just some of the many encouragements where we believe we have seen God at work among us and in which we should rejoice in as we gather together in our Council.
Of course, this year we have not only rejoiced with those who rejoice" but "wept with those who have "wept". This is especially true of the conflict between Lebanon and Israel. This afternoon we will have the opportunity to hear form our Lebanese and Israeli brothers.
And we have continued to be very concerned about issues of human rights and religious freedom. As a result of the discriminatory law passed by the Serbian governments in April, Baptists Methodists and Adventists have been denied the status of "traditional" churches and left without proper status before the law, and also subject to a large taxation. On the other side, we learned just days ago that the Law on Religious in Kosova had been revised to make the small evangelical community there (including the Baptists), a "named and recognised" religious community in the eyes of the law and we are glad about that.
Brothers and sisters, for the rest of what I saw I want to focus on what I consider to be perhaps our greatest challenge which is to follow the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians to strive to keep the Unity which the Spirit Gives in the bond of Peace." (Eph 4:3)
This is not a new challenge for the EBF. Over the nearly 60 years of our existence we had had to face it from time to time when differences amongst us have threatened our Unity. And each time, by God's grace, the realisation has come that what unites us is far more and far more important than what divides.
The fact that at this Council are over three quarters of our member Unions show that there is something about this Baptist family in Europe and the Middles East which is just that: a family which despite our differences draws us together with a shared identity and understanding of the Gospel.
Such unity is a gift of the Spirit of God and it need to be encouraged and practised because it can be fragile. It can be threatened by factors outside the churches and issues within the churches and Unions.
The factors outside can included nationalism and cultural issues. Every one of us is a disciple of Jesus Christ but we are also products of our upbringing, our culture and our nationality. There are ethnic tensions in Europe and the Middle East which can so easily become part of the way we relate to one another as Christian believers.
On way of focusing on this was to hold our conference on the challenge of ethnic churches in our region today. But the EBF should also be prepared to be a reconciler and mediator when these national and cultural issues threaten the relationship of two or more of our member bodies. One such example has come up recently and I hope that we will be able to be helpful to work towards the picture given earlier in Ephesians of national and cultural barriers falling before the Cross of Christ. Again, in the past we have been able to do this in the EBF, where two or more of our Unions have come before the Lord to ask for a healing of their collective memories or those of their countries which has got in the way of their unity as brothers and sisters in Christ.
But perhaps more significant this year has been the questioning of our unity as churches and Unions which has come from some Baptists in Central Asia. It was not such a happy to experience for the President and myself together with Denton Lotz to travel to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan to learn of decisions already taken for the withdrawal of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Baptist Unions form the EBF and BWA.
We had friendly and open discussion with our brothers from all five Central Asian Baptist Unions and we visited and preached in several Kyrgyz Baptist churches. The Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were concerned about issues such as a the recognition of women pastors in other EBF Unions, a perception that some among us did not accept the authority of the Bible, an opposition to the charismatic movement which they perceived to be far more widespread among us than it actually is. And a concern about the way in which different unions handle ethical issues such as abortion and homosexuality. On many of these points there were specific allegations made which we tried to assure them were just not true, and probably reflect the distance of Middle Asia from the rest of Europe and the fact that the Kazakh and Kyrgyz representatives have not attended our Council for some years.
It was clear to us that minds had been made up and were not going to be changed and both unions confirmed their withdrawal soon afterwards, the Kyrgyz Union citing specifically the issues of women pastors.
In the EBF and the BWA we are saddened that groups whose religious freedom we campaigned for so many years now no longer feel at home among us. We will keep contact with them, we will continue to include them in our prayers, and hope that one day they will return. We have both Kazakh and Kyrgyz students currently studying at our Seminary in Prague.
But I think that this situation of presents the EBF with three challenges.
- The first is how we should perhaps make more effort to include and support unions who are a long way form us geographically and/or in their particular experience of being Baptists. We hope that an EBF delegation will travel to Tajikistan next February, and we are in contact with the Baptists of Uzbekistan and even Turkmenistan where there are great problems with religious freedom.
The second challenge is the nature of the EBF itself. In our conversations in Central Asia it became clear that some Unions there wanted the EBF to be a kind of super-Union which could decide doctrine and policy for all its member Unions and then ask those to leave who did not agree.
Let me remind of a clause in the very first Constitution of the EBF which was agreed here in France in 1950: The EBF "is not a super-Union with powers above the national Baptist Unions, but a federation for co-operation between the various Baptist Unions, the Federation fully respects the independence of national Unions and of local churches".
It is important that we maintain this difference between a Union and Federation of Unions. To the Union belongs the deciding of questions of doctrine and who may be ordained. Our Federation is a coming together of a diversity of Baptist Unions to co-operate together for worship and fellowship in our Council, in projects of mission and evangelism such as IMP, in campaigning for religious freedom, in supporting one another in theological education and in channelling humanitarian aid to places like Lebanon when it is needed. Over and above that it is our Baptist family in the region and we sometimes accept that your family members are not necessarily your closest friends.
So to take one example the EBF does not take an official policy position on the ordination of women. We welcome to our Council and our life together those Unions which do have women pastors and those who do not. We recognise the strength of conviction in each position. We hope that the EBF can perhaps be a forum to discuss the issues of men and women in ministry, but meanwhile we respect one another's position and we do not see it as an issue which should divide us.
So in the EBF we need to reaffirm once again that we have diversity among us, which would not make us divide from one another, but to focus on what unites us in Baptist identity and conviction and on the basis of unity we find in Ephesians … words I found written on the wall of the historic Baptist Church in Budapest: "One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism".
Someone much wiser than me wrote about how we should handle issues of unity and diversity as Christian disciples:
- In essentials, unity
- In non-essentials, liberty
- In all things, charity (or love)
-
But that leads me to the third challenge to the EBF. What is the basis of our unity together? What are the "essentials" round which we unite? We have no formal doctrinal basis because each of our Unions has a doctrinal basis which they show to us when the join the EBF.
In 1992 a Statement "What are Baptists" was published by the EBF. At a time of rapid change especially in Central and Eastern Europe its main purpose was to explain to those who were not Baptists, especially in governments and State Churches as to just who Baptists are. It continues to have useful things to say to us to remind us of our identity.
But last year at the BWA Congress in Birmingham, England all the Unions present agreed to a Congress Message as perhaps a more accessible Statement of Baptist identity in the new millennium. There was significant European input in to the drawing up of this Statement, not least because the drafting group was chaired by our IBTS Rector, Keith Jones.
The Executive believes that at a time when our unity is being questioned this is a good statement for us as EBF to adopt, not as detailed doctrinal basis, but as a useful statement which defines our identity for the present time. Tomorrow the Resolutions Group will ask you to adopt it in this way. We are not going to change any of it because it has already been agreed in the BWA, so we have to decided to adopt it as it is or not. But we hope that this Message, which will then appear on our website, will describe the committed core of what it means to be a Baptist today, whilst still allowing for diversity of opinion and conviction about other issues.
When I studied for the Baptist Ministry at Regent's Park College in Oxford I was fortunate to have as Principal Dr Barrie White. Barrie White was and is a great scholar of Baptist history, a man of deep spirituality; but nevertheless after the most complex lecture he would say to us that he was at heart "a simple bible-believing Christian".
On this issue I would say the same. Let's us follow the Bible in our vision of unity among us a "One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism", the motto of the Baptist World Alliance. Let us take very seriously the call of the Apostle in that same chapter to bear with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
And we should find this unity with all believers in whom we discern the activity of God's spirit, including those of other Christian churches and traditions. That is why the EBF is an Associate Member of the Conference of European Churches, why we will report on conversations on baptism with the Protestant Churches in Europe, and why I met recently with the General Secretary of the European Evangelical Alliance to talk about areas of common concerns and co-operation. Because in all these groups we find those fellow-believers with whom we can co-operate to see God's Kingdom come in Europe.
There is no doubt, and our own history tells us this, where there is disunity among us, our witness to the world suffers and our passion for the gospel can become blunted because we are taken up with less important issues.
But for 60 years the EBF has united around the things that do matter and has played a key role in reaching out to the many who have never hear the good news of Jesus Christ and in planting new communities of faith which will nurture them. As well as defending their religious freedom and their human rights.
Brothers and sisters, let us continue to make every effort to preserve such unity among us … that we may be one … that the world may believe.
Tony Peck
29 September 2006