Don't fear the youth guy

New Horizons Community Church
Voorhees, NJ
November 18, 2007

In my prior post in the Visiting Churches series, I told the tale of visiting Discovery Church on November 11, 2007 by accident. I had originally planned to visit New Horizons, but it didn’t work out. Here’s why.

I had been visiting churches for seven months at that point, and had not yet been to a Southern Baptist church. Since Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the country, this seemed like quite an oversight. I was determined to remedy the situation.

However, only one SBC church was listed in the yellow pages, New Horizons. Apparently the Southern Baptists are not all that popular in New Jersey.

New Horizons had an impressive website, with the slogan “A purpose-driven church changing lives on purpose.”

Aha – a purpose-driven church! I was aware of the huge popularity of Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose-Driven Church, and of the tremendous success of his megachurch, Saddleback. (Non-churchgoers might even be aware of it, since it was the site of the August 2008 Presidential debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain.)

Lots of churches and church leaders have participated in seminars to learn how to use the materials and methods espoused by the purpose-driven movement. Lots of others are quite critical of Warren’s theology and methods. Although most people think of him as very conservative, he has taken quite a bit of criticism from the other side, for being too liberal. He was the only evangelical leader to sign the Global Warming Pact, and he has done lots of work with AIDS in Africa. (On the other hand, he has also taken a lot of criticism for not opposing homophobia in Africa, too. Not sure where he is on this issue right now.)

I looked up some information about Baptists. They were early immigrants to northern America, usually fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Unfortunately, they ran into quite a bit of religious persecution when they got to the colonies. In spite of that, Baptist congregations grew and spread rapidly, especially in the south. By the mid-1800s there were three main groups of Baptists in the US: the Triennial Convention, the Home Mission Society, and Southern Baptists.

All three groups had a big problem with slavery. Southern Baptists believed that slavery was Biblical, and they affirmed the rights of ministers to own slaves. Baptists in the north were opposed to slavery, and by 1845 differences were so pronounced that the Southern Baptists withdrew from all national organizations, officially forming the Southern Baptist Convention, mainly to defend the principle of slavery. Not, to put it mildly, an auspicious beginning.

This pro-slavery start had very long-lasting consequences for the denomination. As late as 1968 only 11% of Southern Baptist churches would allow African-Americans to join their churches. It was not until 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery.

It would seem to most people that this apology took way too long, but on the other hand, they did it. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy thing to do. Plenty of other institutions with racism in their past have not formally apologized to this day.

The New Horizons website informed me that this church began in the mid-1960s, first meeting in the Moorestown Holiday Inn. By 1970 they were able to begin building at their current site. The original name was Emmanuel Baptist Church, but they changed the name in 1999 “to better impact [the] community and reach out to unchurched people.” (Many churches were trying to downplay denominational names during those years, believing that words like Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian discouraged people from visiting – which may be true or not.)

The pastor, J. David Hoke, was chaplain for the Philadelphia Eagles for twelve seasons. According to the website, he was working on a PhD in Theology in 2007, is certified as a Consultant in Church Conflict Resolution, and has two children and six beautiful grandchildren.
So all right - I was prepared to attend a big Southern Baptist, purpose-driven church service, possibly filled with Eagles fans!