The Future of the Convention                                        

                                                                                                                                           Vol. XIII, No. 2, February 2000

[The second excerpt from SBC President Paige Patterson's convention sermon of last June.]

On Jan. 5, 1527, as snow lightly fell across the city of Zurich, a man walked passed throngs of the curious who lined the banks of the Limmat River. Felix Manz was placed in a boat and taken to the middle of the river. He was asked to recant his view. Because he did not, he was bound hand and foot in a fetal position and dropped into the black waters of the Limmat.

On May 21, 1527, a suffering figure was carried by cart through the streets of the city of Rottenburg while portions of his flesh were torn away with white-hot iron tongs. Reaching the chosen location and having failed to receive a recantation, Michael Sattler was burned at the stake by churchmen. As Sattler caught fire, he prayed, "Almighty, eternal God, You are the way and the truth; since no one has been able to prove this as error, I shall with your help on this day testify to the truth and seal it with my blood."(1)

On March 10, 1528, a man who in two years time had baptized more than 6,000 converts in Nicholsburg, Moravia, was literally pulled apart on the rack in Vienna, Austria. Failing to illicit the recantation anticipated he was tied to a stake and burned by clergy in the heart of Vienna. Thus ended the life of Dr. Balthasar Hubmaier, the most erudite of our Anabaptist forefathers.

And what was the crime of which each of them was guilty? The crime of Felix Manz, Michael Sattler, and Balthasar Hubmaier was that they believed and preached the necessity of a believer's church, witnessed by believer's baptism. They did not choose the name they were given -- Anabaptists or Rebaptizers. They accepted it as a designation, but as soon as possible the "ana" was dropped since they insisted that they were not rebaptizing but only scripturally baptizing since only born-again believers should be baptized. Franklin Littell, a Methodist, properly identified in his book The Anabaptist View of the Church, the essence of Anabaptism as an insistence upon a believer's church, witnessed by baptism, and disciplined according to the principles of the New Testament.

Brothers and sisters, this is no time to succumb to ecumenical sirens of popular religion, the inevitable shipwreck of such alliances, and the diluting of the blood of our martyrs who knew so very well the dangers of popular religious faith. I do not herewith propose a revival of denominational isolationism. Neither do I argue for the overconfident, self-appointed righteousness of some of the old Landmarkism that sometimes suggested God as working among Baptists and Baptists alone. To the contrary, Baptists must as never before recognize evangelical believers in churches operating behind diverse names, worship styles and approaches, attempting with hearts like our own to find God and please Him in all things. These fellow believers we must not merely recognize, but we also must cooperate with them as much as possible in efforts to get the saving gospel of Christ to every person and to struggle alongside them in the great social issues for which evangelical Christians alone hold the keys of love, reciprocity, and gentle persuasion.

But having so said, let it also be reaffirmed that there will ever be a place for a fellowship that insists its membership consist only of people who bear witness to an experience of having literally been born again through the blood of Christ and who have given a faith-witness testimony to that faith through believer's baptism by immersion and who by the grace of God will recover not merely church discipline but specifically New Testament church discipline in the pursuit of holy living commensurate with the new birth experience. I do not see a day when there will not be a place for a convention of churches that not only graces those ideas but also takes as its highest order of worship of the eternal God the responsibility to carry His gospel which He sent incarnate in His only begotten Son to the ends of the earth everywhere making disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever He has commanded.

Consequently, I pray God that we shall always recognize that we are first and foremost the disciples of Jesus and that we bear our particular unique and much needed witness to the world under the name of Southern Baptists. In that way we are known today as we have been known in eras past as a people of the Book whose faith and practice arises not out of society but out of the pages of God's eternal word. Here we have stood in days gone by, and here we stand now, and here we must stand until Jesus comes.

1. John Allen Moore, Anabaptist Portraits (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984), 119.