A Visit to a Southern Baptist Church in the South

Warning to the reader: if you have never laughed as John Stewart made fun of something you hold dear, then this post is not for you.  What follows below is a critique in satire and not a scholarly engagement.  You have been warned.


























            One of the great perks of being an educator is that I get a vacation at Christmas every year.  The business of the week prior to Christmas break is a small price to pay for two weeks of vacation.  As a student, I took Christmas break for a time of reading (usually Tolkien).  As a teacher, I am still drawn to reading as a Christmas break past time.  This Christmas was no different.

            Over the Christmas break I went south for a vacation with my family.  In keeping with my reading emphasis at Christmas, I was reading through Saint Simeon the New Theologian’s Ethical Discourses.  On Sunday morning, I arose, said my prayers, read some of Saint Simeon and accompanied my family to a little Baptist Church.  The differences between what I was reading in my book and what I observed in that church were quite stark.

            I had just read Saint Simeon’s detailed explanation of Ephesians 5 in which he treated the entire passage as an allegory of Christ and the Church (which is what the Biblical author actually said it was).  Instead of merely as a discussion of how husbands and wives ought to relate to each other.  Saint Simeon’s interpretation of Ephesians 5 is now book-marked in my mind as the best interpretation I have read of Ephesians 5.  I move from a mystical explanation of a spiritual reality to visit a Baptist church. 

            I confess that it has been a couple of years since I have been to a Sunday service at a Baptist church.  To be fair, I have visited (and been a member of) many Baptist churches over the years.  This was perhaps the friendliest greetings I have received as a visitor at a church.  Despite the warm welcome, the church had a lonely feel to it.  Perhaps it is simply part and parcel of Baptist aesthetics; you enter in into a place with no visual reminder of the history of the faith and find that it is just you, a pew, and some strangers.  It is a noticeable bareness.  It is an entrance into an empty place where beauty has been banished from sight at the supposed bequest of truth and goodness.  This setting for “worship” has no small bearing upon the experience of the worshippers.  I sensed that I was in a friendly place, but not a holistic place let alone a holy place.

            I am still not certain who was being worshipped, or how they would have defined worship.  The sermon was solidly non-heretical.  The same could not be said of the songs which were chosen to be sung (to be honest this was largely the fault of the "Christmas" songs).  I had to go silent on several portions of the singing for the sake of my conscience (which probably improved the overall auditory experience).  If the worship was defined by the songs, then they are embracing multiple and mutual contradictory Christological heresies.  If you add the sermon into the mix, then the worship is really a mishmash of competing Christologies followed by a potluck.

            Ah, the potluck, that ancient and second most important sacrament in Baptist churches.  This church followed the ancient traditions I witnessed in my grandparents’ church back in California during the 1980’s.  It was complete with the “special music” and everything.  There was no badly done rock show or power-point presentation.  They maintained that great Baptist sacrament called “potluck” afterwards and have not succumbed to the newer tradition which replaced the potluck with the sacrament of small groups.  They might not have presented a clear Christology, but they knew their fresh fruit and cookies.