“Usually preoccupied with issuing anti-Israel bromides or apologizing to dictators for America’s sins, Carter is once again rallying liberal Baptists.

Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church, located in the Buckhead area of Atlanta, is the location for a conference of Baptists from various denominations who are seeking a new, liberal association which focuses on social and justice ministries.

The meeting will run from Thursday through Saturday. In order to allow a greater involvement, live streaming video of the meetings are being sent through the Internet, as well as satellite uplinks in a number of separate locations throughout the county, including Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Antonio, Seattle, and Washington, DC,

The New Baptist Covenant is the brainchild of arguably the world’s most famous Baptist, former President Jimmy Carter. It is a loose-knit, grassroots effort to unite Baptists in North America around the mandate from the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. In that passage, Jesus declared his ministry was to “bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

With more than 33 million adherents, scattered in about 70 denominations, Baptists are the largest Protestant group in the United States. One key objective of the New Baptist Covenant is to unite the disparate Baptist groups around a covenant of social and justice ministries, providing an alternative voice to more strident Baptist voices.The New Baptist Covenant, which had its first meeting in 2008, is “an informal alliance of more than 30 racially, geographically, and theologically diverse Baptist organizations from throughout North America that claim more than 20 million members,” according to its web site.

Among the speakers is former spiritual advisor to President Bill Clinton and Evangelical Left figure Tony Campolo and welfare state champion Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund.

On Friday, the President of the Institute of Religion and Democracy, Mark Tooely, sent out a press release concerning this, stating:

“Usually preoccupied with issuing anti-Israel bromides or apologizing to dictators for America’s sins, Carter is once again rallying liberal Baptists.

“While New Baptist Covenant claims to unite Baptists around shared values, the primary call seems to be animus towards the more conservative Southern Baptist Convention.
“This Carter-led effort seems to want Baptists to become like liberal Episcopalians or the United Church of Christ. But churches that follow that disastrous path of substituting liberal politics for the Gospel always spiral in membership and vitality. Churches are always healthier when they remain faithful to their historic beliefs and an exercise caution in their political pronouncements, not presuming always to know God’s will on specific legislation and policies.

“Hopefully most Baptists will not be seduced into this rehash of the old-time Social Gospel.”

Sources
IRD
NBCII

[Editor’s note: Original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]