We use and defend the King James Bible

Bible for Today Baptist Church
Collingswood, New Jersey
September 16, 2007

This church has an interesting ad in the yellow pages. It proclaims “We use and defend the King James Bible.” Well, I thought, who doesn’t? I mean, most churches use a more modern translation of the Bible, but everyone loves the King James Version (KJV). That’s the one with the gorgeous language, the one that has influenced English literature so profoundly. As it turned out, I was about to discover a kind of church I had never heard of before, the King James-only church.

The ad contains other slogans about the church: “Fundamental; separated; Bible Believing”; “Verse by Verse Exposition and Teaching”; “Internet Church Broadcast – Live and On Demand Streaming 24/7”; and “The difference is worth the distance.” So I gathered that the church was using lots of modern technology; they weren’t Luddites, just strong believers in the KJV. I checked out their website.

It’s an incredibly colorful website, was my first thought. Ouch, my eyes! They have a webstore, news updates, a system for making online donations. Was this some kind of big local church I had somehow completely overlooked while driving around the area?

I clicked on a side link, BFT Baptist Church, and scrolled down a bit to find a photo of the pastor, Dr. D.A. Waite (a nice-looking older gentleman), and more information about the church itself. They describe themselves thus: “The Bible For Today Baptist Church is a unique church. We hold to all of the doctrines taught in the Bible that Baptists have always believed. We are a fundamental, independent, unaffiliated, pre-millennial, separated, Bible-believing Baptist church.”

I also discovered that BFT does not meet in a church building, but in the home of Dr. Waite, which is probably why I had never noticed it. According to the website, people drive from over an hour away to come and have “sweet family fellowship” at BFT. In addition, I learned that: “Our pianist, Mr. Dick Carroll, is one of the most accomplished musicians in the United States of America.” (Pretty big claim there – I’ll see about that.) The church uses the Defined King James Bible, a version I’ve never heard of before. This sounds interesting.

Wait a minute, preacher, part 2

First Baptist Church of Haddonfield, built in the 1800s, has a marvelous interior – high white ceilings with pale blue beams, pews arranged in a half-circle around the central pulpit and altar area, lovely stained glass. It is spacious, airy, and altogether welcoming. A large gold cross is affixed to the wall behind the pulpit, and the impressively large pipe organ sits off to the side, as do the choir stalls.

A woman welcomes me and shakes my hand as I enter, and two other people shake my hand when I enter the sanctuary. I estimate the church could seat about 400-500, and there seem to be about a hundred or so people (plus a choir of 17) here for the 11:00 service, which is the only Sunday morning service today.

The pastor is not here. (I realize suddenly that I’ve now been to six churches, but I’ve seen the senior pastor at only two of them.) I learn later that the senior pastor at Haddonfield Baptist is picking up a child from college, and his wife is touring the Galapagos Islands (there must be a Darwin joke here somewhere, but I can’t think of it).

The guest preacher today is Rev. Terrence S. Keeling, the Pastor of Evangelism and Social Concerns at Calvary Baptist Church in Paterson, and he is black (most of the churchgoers here are white). When the service officiants progress, I am surprised to see that the guest pastor is wearing a long white robe and a black stole with gold edging– I had for some reason assumed that Baptist preachers don’t wear robes. Before taking his seat on the dais he kneels in prayer for a minute or two.

The Minister of Christian Education, Erin (I recognize her from the website), is a young women sporting a fairly prominent tattoo above her ankle. (Maybe people at Oral Roberts and Liberty University are not as conservative as I had assumed.) She greets everyone with “Good morning,” and begins the announcements. She asks visitors to fill out the visitors’ card, which I do. Then everyone greets each other. I shake hands with several friendly people.

Some people are dressed extremely casually, and others, mostly people who seem to be above the age of seventy, are dressed rather formally -- suit and tie for the men, suits, nylons, and heels for the women. I notice again, as I often do in churches, how terrific older women with white hair look in those pretty pastel suits – pink, blue, yellow. They are gorgeous! I might mention here that very few people have been “dressed up” in any of the churches I’ve visited so far. Casual dress seems to be the custom in most churches these days, and I don’t mean business casual. I mean you would find folks wearing blue jeans and tee shirts in most churches these days.

The children’s choir (three girls and two boys) does a song, accompanied by adults on piano and guitar. They have the soft, feathery voices of most children’s choirs. The choir does a nice job, accompanying the congregation with a descant on the last verse of the first hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

The sermon text is Genesis 3, the story of the fall from Eden, and the title of the sermon is “Finding Your Way Back to Eden.” Rev. Keeling opens by explaining to everyone that he comes from a church with a call-and-response tradition: if he makes a point you think is really good, call out “Amen!” (We practice.)

If he makes a point you think someone else in the congregation needs to sit up and pay attention to (his exact words are, “If I’m getting into someone else’s kitchen”), call out “Welllllll . . . . ." (We practice.)

If he makes a point that makes you uncomfortable, that seems to be stepping on your own toes rather than your neighbors’, call out a warning: “Wait a minute, preacher.” He encourages us to practice this one, but gets a pretty lukewarm response. Not surprising - it’s pretty hard to get white congregations to shout out anything in church, especially anything longer than one word.

The sermon is about the two mistakes Adam makes: he is self-indulgent and self-reliant. We can return to Eden by reversing these mistakes -- curbing our self-indulgence and relying upon Jesus rather than upon ourselves. The sermon is about 30 minutes long, and builds to an impassioned exhortation to give your life to Jesus, and an altar call (although no one comes forward). Rev. Keeling is a very good preacher, and the sermon is excellent in structure, message, and delivery. The congregation tries rather gamely to go along with the call-and-response scheme, although we are plainly not comfortable with it.

Communion is celebrated. This church uses ordinary white bread, cut up into little cubes, and grape juice. Communion is served to us at our seats in the pews. I like this style of taking communion, passing the elements to your neighbors in the pews. One aspect of the theology behind it is that all believers are ministers to each other, and another aspect is that this way of taking the Lord’s supper emphasizes its origin in an actual meal, where people pass food and drink to their companions.

After the service I walk in the direction most everyone else seem to be heading, which turns out to be a large, handsome parlor. A woman introduces herself, and quickly ascertains that I am a first-time visitor. She attempts to find some visitors’ packets, but cannot locate them. She pours me a cup of juice and asks how long I’ve lived in the area. The cookies and other treats on the table look pretty good, but she steers me away from the calories before I can get my hands on anything. She asks the Minister of Christian Education, Erin, if she can find a visitors’ packet, and Erin goes off in search of the missing materials. At this point I notice that someone I know from work is here! Hey, Linda! We chat for a while. Erin returns to report that she can’t locate a visitors’ packet, and I assure everyone that this is fine with me, which is quite true.

When I try to retrace my steps back to the street, I discover that the front doors have been locked. I try another set of doors, and they are locked also. I ask someone how to get out of the building, and she points me to a rear exit, which leads to the parking lot behind the building. It seems church members park behind the church, and do not often use the front doors, especially after the service. This is the third time this has happened to me so far – having trouble either getting into or out of a church building.

A couple weeks after my visit, the woman I had spoken with called me to let me know that summer hours would be starting soon. Then, on July 3, she called again to ask if she could bring over some cake. Since I was at work, that was impossible, but certainly a friendly gesture.

A few weeks later I received the church newsletter in the mail. I continued to receive the newsletters every month, so I was able to follow news at First Baptist throughout the next year.
I was interested to see that on the front page of the newsletter for March of 2008 the pastor called for a day of repentance for the actions of the United States in Iraq. He stated, “We are mired in a failed strategy that opens the bloody scenario of sectarian warfare with no end in sight.” He ends the letter with, “I understand that Christians of good conscience will have many different opinions on this matter. In all cases I ask that we may pray for a just peace in Iraq.”

Reading this, I wonder again if I will hear much about politics in the year that lies ahead. My understanding of the separation of church and state doctrine is that it’s all right for pastors and churches to take a stand on issues, but not to endorse particular candidates or political parties. However, it’s often pretty easy to deduce from a person’s stand on issues which candidate he or she supports -- so the line of separation here is not as bright or clear as some people might hope. For example, in taking his stand on the war in Iraq, the pastor at First Baptist is clearly being quite critical of President Bush, whether he mentions him by name or not. So some people would probably prefer that he not take a stand. And yet how can a pastor, called to proclaim positions on issues of morality and truth and justice, not take a stand on something as big as a war?

Wait a minute, preacher. I need to think on this.

Wait a minute, preacher, part 1

First Baptist Church of Haddonfield
Haddonfield, New Jersey
June 3, 2007

Baptists confuse me. There seem to be so many different types of them, and I’m not always sure which Baptist is which. I know that the one doctrine that all Baptists have in common is believer’s baptism – the idea that baptism is something that should occur after a person accepts Jesus Christ as his or her savior, not something that is done to or for an infant. Also, Baptists believe that baptism should be accomplished via immersion, not via sprinkling or ladling a relatively small amount of water onto someone’s head.

Neil and I were both baptized twice, as babies and then again as adults. The Walnut Street Baptist Church in Carbondale, Illinois had a very kind and longsuffering pastor in the early seventies, who allowed a group of enthusiastic young Jesus people to set up a coffeehouse in the church basement and use its baptistery to immerse converts.

My most vivid memory of my second baptism, unfortunately, is my realization, upon seeing one of the sisters come up out of the water, that we should have put more thought into what to wear. I had a blinding flash of insight, not into spiritual things, but rather into the rationale behind wet tee-shirt contests.

Well, you live and learn. What else do I know about Baptists? I know that Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was a Baptist, and that Baptists have congregational-style, rather than hierarchical, church government. But beyond that I’m hazy. I needed to do some studying.
Back to Wikipedia, where I learned that Baptists are the largest group of Protestants, with a world population of about 90 million (47 million in the United States). (Since Baptists count only baptized members in their totals, the numbers would be higher if you included children, as lots of other churches do. The varying ways churches count up membership makes it a little difficult to compare numbers with precision. If you included children and other unbaptized attendees, Baptist churches might have something closer to 120 million members worldwide.)

Wikipedia also gets right to the point about why a person might have trouble distinguishing one Baptist from another: “Baptist churches do not have a central governing authority. Therefore, beliefs are not totally consistent from one Baptist church to another.” Of course, you can say that about lots of other churches, even the kind that seem to have fairly strict hierarchical governance, but it seems to be more true of Baptists.

Next, I discover something I’ve never heard of – Landmarkism. It seems a few Baptists have a doctrine known as “the perpetuity viewpoint,” the central idea of which is that Baptists (not all of them, just a certain type) represent the oldest church, predating Catholicism. According to Landmarkism, Baptist churches have existed since the days of Christ and the apostles (John the Baptist being the first Baptist, of course), and there has been direct succession from one legitimate Baptist church to the next since those days. There is a variant type of perpetuity doctrine, which claims that Baptist churches have existed since the days of the early church, but have sprung up more or less independently of each other.

Interesting. A natural corollary of this doctrine (and in this they are like all church groups who think they have a hold on the only true and valid expression of the faith) is that all other churches are illegitimate. Landmarkers call other churches religious societies, which is similar to the way Roman Catholics call non-RC churches ecclesial bodies. Neither group will say that the other one is, technically, a real church. And some Landmark Baptist churches won’t allow members of other churches, even other Baptist churches, to take communion with them.

I couldn’t figure out how many Landmark Baptist churches are in the country, partly because they don’t have a centralized form of government that might keep track of membership numbers. There’s no such thing as a Landmark Baptist Church denomination, just Baptist churches that hold to Landmarkism.

Well, that was an interesting bypath in my attempt to learn more about Baptists. There are certainly other points of view, though. One is that Baptists arose among the sixteenth-century reformers. Some people think that Baptists are related to the sixteenth-century radicals known as Anabaptists. Some claim the Baptists arose among the seventeenth-century English Separatists, who broke from the Church of England.

I learned that some groups of Baptists are Arminian, and some are Calvinists. Baptists who side with Calvin on the free will question are sometimes known as Particular Baptists, and Particular Baptists are further subdivided into Strict Baptists and Reformed Baptists (and the two terms are not mutually exclusive).

Also, some Baptists do not want to be called Baptists. They prefer to be known as Christians who attend Baptist churches. (Lots of people in lots of denominations say something along the same lines, actually.) Some do not want to be known as Protestants because, as explained earlier, they believe that their church predates those Roman Catholic newcomers, and thus they never had anything to protest against. Some object to being known as a denomination, because they think that the word denomination implies that they belong to some sort of hierarchical system, whereas they believe in local church governance with only very loose ties to any kind of larger church body. Some do not want to be known as evangelical, because they think evangelicals are too liberal.

All denominations have a convoluted history, so I don’t mean to be picking on the Baptists here, but I think this brief overview does give an indication of why I sometimes feel confused by Baptists.

Looking at the Wikipedia list of famous Baptists, there’s quite an interesting group, including Billy Graham; Moishe Rosen (the founder of Jews for Jesus); Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich; John D. Rockefeller and JC Penney; Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, and Buddy Holly; John Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress), Rick Warren (The Purpose-Driven Church) and Tim LaHaye (the Left Behind books); and Frank and Jesse James (their father was a Baptist minister; this seems to be one of the more extreme examples of preachers’ kids going bad).

I see one of my personal favorites, Adoniram Judson. He’s not as famous as some of the others, but I have fond memories of reading a biography of him, To the Golden Shore. He was the first Protestant missionary to Burma from North America, and he labored and suffered (and I do mean suffered) there for more than 40 years, in the early to mid-1800s. I’ve been an Adoniram Judson fan for years.

Well, now I need to find out which kind of Baptists the folks at First Baptist of Haddonfield are.
I study their website, and learn that they are affiliated with the American Baptist Churches of New Jersey. The senior pastor has a master’s degree in literature and a doctorate in Communication, in addition to his Master of Divinity, and has been a Peace Corps volunteer. So when I read that I’m thinking the church might be one of the more liberal Baptist churches.

But then I read about the Minister of Christian Education and Youth. She’s a recent graduate of Oral Roberts University, and is enrolled in a Master of Divinity program at Liberty University (affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s church) – whoa, that says fundamentalist to me, but in a confusing way, because many fundamentalists do not believe in the ordination of women.
Well, I’ll just show up and worship with them.