sermons, writings, etc
From Baptist to Baptist
By Frank Kendall
A Chapter in Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War
Edited by Carl L. KellI grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama during the 1940s and 1950s. Although religion was not significant in my life, I joined First Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa when I was about thirteen years old and always attended Sunday school. I learned the stories but never understood the real message they conveyed.
I had a number of experiences during that period regarding black people that were shaping my life even though I did not realize it then. When I was 10 years old, my mother told me that I could no longer play with my black friend who lived in the alley behind our apartment building. It seemed wrong but I accepted it because “that’s the way it was.” When I was twelve, I sold two tickets to an Alabama football game to Mr. Abe, the shoeshine “boy” who worked in the barbershop across the street. My father told me I had to get them back from him because he was black and the tickets were in the whites only section. It seemed wrong but I accepted it because “that’s the way it was.” I watched black children in Livingston, Alabama walking several miles to their school while white children could just go to a neighborhood school. It seemed wrong but I accepted it because “that’s the way it was.”
After college, Patsy (my wife), our two daughters and I moved to Baytown, Texas where we joined First Baptist Church. When I began studying the Gospel of Mark in Bob Norris’ Sunday school class, I found things I never knew existed - things that brought to me a sense of excitement and commitment, things that convinced me that much of what I had been taught at home in Tuscaloosa was a lie. Ironically, my knowledge and understanding of the Bible expanded greatly during that time, as I went home after church each week to study the biblical text for that Sunday. I often found that my understanding of the text was quite different from what had been preached from the pulpit.
In the summer of 1962, the Married Young People’s Department of First Baptist of Baytown held a retreat at LaNell Stuart’s bay house. The speaker was a young black minister from Houston named Bill Lawson. As people arrived, they were introduced to Reverend Lawson, shook his hand, and talked to him. Having just moved from Alabama and a lifetime of being taught that blacks were inferior people, I could not bring myself to meet him and shake his hand. I had never been in a place with blacks unless they were in a subservient role. That night I heard an articulate, intelligent, and inspiring person speak of things that were new and enlightening to me. After he finished speaking, I finally worked up the courage to go up to him and shake his hand. Such an insignificant act, but such a monumental step in my journey.
I became convinced that, at that particular time in history (1963), God was calling His people to do something about segregation. I realized that segregation seemed wrong and I could no longer accept something that seemed wrong simply because “that’s the way it was.” I became active in the civil rights struggle, including working to bring about open housing in Baytown, serving on the Board of the Harris County Poverty Program, and striving to make quality, public education available to all children.
I did not see Southern Baptists answering, or even hearing, God’s call. Instead, I saw them opposing it. To me, it was reminiscent of the basic reason the Southern Baptist Convention was originally formed: to support the continuation of slavery.
During that period, a white, young couple asked to join our church. They had been baptized in a denomination for the exact same reason and in the exact same method (immersion) as were Baptists. They were told that they would have to be rebaptized by a Baptist preacher. I could not abide such an action and led a campaign to eliminate the requirement that the hands of a Baptist preacher must baptize all members. It was an interesting fight in which we compiled two pages of scriptures that did not support this narrow Baptist interpretation. The opposition basically responded, “If we change this one part of church polity, where will it end.” On the Wednesday night when the church voted, 268 people attended (several times the normal attendance), many of whom I had never heard and one of whom arrived in an ambulance to “defend the faith” by voting against the motion.
Needless to say, the proposed change was resoundly defeated, although the 82 people who supported it represented the spiritual leadership of the church. I was aware of other Baptist practices that disenfranchised people, such as not allowing women to serve as either deacons or ordained ministers. I decided that if something as insignificant and as scripturally clear as the baptism issue would not be accepted by Southern Baptists, then nothing of real consequence, such as civil rights, would be accepted either.
So we left that church for one in Houston that was dually aligned with Southern Baptists and the United Church of Christ. The local Southern Baptist group later kicked that church out of their fellowship after Patsy and two other women were elected as the first female deacons in a Texas Baptist church. (I thank God that many Texas Baptist churches have progressed greatly since then.)
Upon moving to Summit, New Jersey and then to Greensboro, North Carolina, we belonged to (and were active in) churches of other denominations. Imagine our surprise when, 28 years after saying we would never again belong to a Southern Baptist church, we joined a group of people in a Southern Baptist church in Greensboro who, we felt, were true to the original precepts of Baptists. You will not be surprised that this church was in the process of withdrawing from the Southern Baptist Convention, which had turned even further toward the far-right fringe beginning in 1979. Our new church, College Park Baptist Church, has women deacons, women ministers, members of every color and kind whose commonality is to confess Jesus as Lord, serious study of the Bible with nondogmatic interpretations of it, and the conviction that our response to God’s unfathomable love and grace is to try to further the Kingdom of God - right here and now.
Maybe College Park will someday drop the name Baptist, which carries with it so much negative baggage. For now, however, Patsy and I marvel at the irony of our pilgrimage, which has led us from Baptist to Baptist.