Scottish Baptist College

What Baptists Stand For: Baptist shaped community

Adjectives are a good thing. But not when they're overused. If that happens, instead of clarifying they get in the way of clear meaning. Intended to qualify the meaning of a noun they are sometimes used to retread tired metaphors, or enhance meaning by piling up compliments or criticisms, or are added in to define more precisely what is already clear. But chosen and used with care, adjectives are important in conveying significant nuance, constructing and construing a more textured statement of what is meant.

The word Baptist can be noun or adjective. In the phrase "Baptist-shaped community" the word "Baptist" is an adjective,  constructing and construing a more textured statement of what is meant when we use the word "community". The adjective qualifies the noun. Baptist qualifies the shape of what is envisaged as community in a Baptist church. So when we use the phrase "Baptist-shaped community" as a value woven through our approach to College life and to theological education as formation for ministry, that word "Baptist" is expected to carry considerable freight.

The reason for that is simple. The word community is in danger of becoming a lazy cliche, a marshmallow word that is soft, sweet and squeezeable into most any shape that suits us. Community in itself isn't necessarily good - communities can be oppressive, introverted, selfish, hierarchical, exclusive. So as Baptists we qualify what we mean by community, and indicate the shape it must take, by bringing it under the cosntraint of Baptist convictions. So what are these convictions, and how do they make a difference to a community so that it is a different kind of community best described as Baptist?

A fellowship of believers, a gathered community of people of faith in Jesus Christ, who have covenanted together to follow faithfully after Christ

That covenant is centred on the person of Jesus Christ, grounded in a relationship of trust and promise, and expressed in baptism as an act of confession, witness and proclamation

Baptist shaped community grows out of the simple but radical conviction that where two or three gather together in Christ's name, there is a true church of Christ and there the risen Christ is in their midst

The church meeting then becomes an encounter where the members meet under Christ to discern his mind, with open Bible, in prayer and conversation, under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, listening to God, to each other and to God through each other

Such community tries to embody the priesthood of all believers, expresses trust in the Headship of Christ in His church, and in the celebration of the Lord's Supper takes again the bread and wine that proclaim the incarnation, death, resurrection and coming again of Christ

Baptist shaped community, with all its limitations, embarrassments and failed aspirations, nevertheless looks to the life of the Triune God of love, and the mutual self-giving and harmony of purpose that outflow in the mission of love that flows out to the creation in mercy, peace and reconciling grace.

Baptist shaped community, then, is both ideal and reality, the reality at times falling short of the ideal. The ideal being no less urgent and attractive for all that.

In the life and teaching, the learning and sharing, the challenge and joys of our life together, in church and in College, such an ideal, and such a reality, make sense only because first and foremost we covenant together to live, by the grace of God,  towards a Christ centred faithfulness. Those convictions are themselves embedded in a deep loyalty to the Bible and lived out in a spirituality that is unabashedly Evangelical.

Jim Gordon.

What Baptists Stand For: Christ-centred faithfulness

Years ago a book on Baptist principles took as its title the mildly assertive title, What Baptists Stand For. It's still a good reasonable introduction to what it is that makes the Baptist way of being a Christian distinctive. But times change. And traditions like our own have to change too. Jaroslav Pelikan famously  said, "Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living; tradition is the living faith of the dead". Baptists have been impatient with tradition, jumpy about any concessions being made to that manipulative plea, 'the way it's always been done'. But we are a Christian tradition whether we like it or not. And I like it. 

At the same time a tradition must be living, organic, able to adapt and grow into new situations, changed by, yet also able to change, circumstances. A living transformative Christian tradition is a changing continuity, a growing and maturing way of being Christian, distinctive, with its own integrity and its own inner dynamic urging and impelling towards that faithfulness that answers the call of Christ to be who we are.

We've decided this blog could do with a bit more action. News about the College community. Comment about stuff that pushes our justice and righteousness buttons. Argument, or at least discussion about what us Baptists stand for. Theological upstarting in a constructive way about the things we won't stand for!

So for starters. We are currently working on the next College Development Plan, and while much of that remains open and discussable, there are some fixed points for us. Amongst these are the four values and convictions that lie at the heart of our College, because they energise the core of our College life and inform the content of a Baptist theological education. They are what we stand for.

Christ-centred faithfulness

Baptist shaped community

Biblically grounded theology

Evangelical spirituality

In one sense these are self-evident to us. But it is also true that they remain carefully chosen descriptors with no effective purchase on our lives unless they are lived, embodied, practiced; unless they represent habits of the heart, values in our thinking and acting, virtues of a Christlike character formed and transformed by encounter with the Living Lord.

So what do they mean, in practice? What do people look like who claim to make these core values the energising and directing principles of Christian discipleship?

This blog is now one of the places where we face up to those questions. And also where we persistently and honestly ask other questions, share conversation, compare insight and experience, argue with passion and courtesy, entrust our deepest convictions to each other so that we are mutually enriched. Or at least, so I hope. And in doing so we will try to live within our own commitments to Christ centred faithfulness; to Baptist shaped community; to Biblically grounded theology; to Evangelical spirituality. And these are not meant to be hard edged exclusion zones, but affirmations around which we express our lives in the freedom of Christ and in the power of the Spirit.

Jim Gordon, 5 November, 2009

Dr Ted Herbert : For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.....

Yesterday I attended the Thanksgiving service for the life of Dr Ted Herbert, Vice Principal of International Christian College. The service expressed some of the deepest realities of Christian faith - hope through Jesus Christ, gratitude for a life so fully and fruitfully lived, celebration of a life given to the service of Christ and His Church, and a recognition of the loss and sorrow that inevitably accompanies the death of someone so deeply loved and widely held in high esteem.

We learned much about this loveable and energetic man. His friend from student days spoke of Ted's integrity, ability to bring people together, unpretentious enthusiasm for learning and his obvious but never ostentatious intellectual gifts. Dr Tony Sargent described Ted as a cedar of Lebanon - tall, straight, and life enhancing and life giving. The personal relationship between himself and Ted was shared movingly and with a great sense of affection and of the co-operative partnership they had shared in the work of ICC and in wider theological education.

While the service affirmed the hope of the Gospel and something of the deep gratitude to God Ted had himself expressed during the weeks of his illness, the service nevertheless held the important balance between gratitude and hope filled faith, and the personal sense of loss that follows Ted's death, particularly for his family and colleagues. Glory tinged with sadness, and sadness suffused with the hope of glory.

On discovering the seriousness of his illness, Ted made it clear from the outset that he would live his final weeks as he had lived his life, - trusting in God for strength, depending on the grace that is sufficient, living gratefully and joyfully out of the faith that so animated and vitalised him. An email from him, responding to my own sent to him after his illness was announced, carried his usual friendly and open interest, and was a brief reassurance to those like myself who were concerned at the news. His testimony given recently to the College students, and to his own church community at Bearsden Baptist, can be heard here on Youtube.

This is one of the most remarkable testimonies I have ever heard, as Ted talks with humble confidence, with an unmistakable tone of peaceable and restful trust, and with unqualified gratitude to God for his life. No complaints or questions, just a sustained note of gratitude for what has been. When someone facing a terminal illness says he is in a win win situation because if God heals him God is glorified, and if not he will be himself in glory, it is hard not to wonder at the grace that enables such courage.

The many tributes paid by students and former students, by friends and those who owe much in their own spiritual experience to Ted's witness and friendship have been gathered on the ICC website here. My own comment I have copied below, because it says much that we want to express as a College to Diana, Joy and David, to our colleagues in Christ at ICC, and to the students and countless others who give thanks to God for Ted's life.

As a brother in Christ and as a colleague in the work of Christian training, I quickly came to appreciate Ted's spiritual, personal, intellectual and adminsitrative gifts. Over the years his pivotal and guiding role in ICC has been both highly significant and very fruitful in the work of God's Kingdom, seeing the College become a leading training resource within and beyond the UK. I pass on the condolences of the staff, students and others in the Scottish Baptist College community, assuring Diana and Ted's family of our prayers that they will continue to know the strength of which Ted so movingly spoke in his testimony. Our prayers too for the Principal and all the staff and students at ICC as you go through a period of major readjustment. The sovereign love of God keep and guide Ted's family, and sustain the wider family with whom he worked in the service of Christ. And may the peace of Christ strengthen our faith and hope, and enable us to give thanks for a life in Christ, faithfully lived.

Posted By Jim Gordon