Baptist factions try unity

30 branches might do joint projects

ATLANTA -- Former President Jimmy Carter said people around the world know Christians for their divisions rather than their unity, a painful legacy he tried to correct Wednesday by bringing together 30 Baptist groups under one roof.

The Celebration of the New Baptist Covenant, a historic gathering of African-American Baptists and moderate to liberal white Baptists gathered at the Georgia World Congress Center to sing, pray and consider common ministries.

Looking out at more than 10,000 people, the former president choked up and called the meeting "the most momentous event in my religious life."

It was, indeed, a rare religious gathering that included a rousing gospel choir and a folksy, guitar-playing pastor from Raleigh, black women with fancy hats, and white women in plain, comfortable shoes.

"He's tired of hearing the word," the Rev. David Forbes of Christian Faith Baptist Church in Raleigh said of Carter. "He wants to see it done. He's earned the right with his years and experience to challenge us."

But along with Carter, it was the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that hung over the meeting.

Mercer University President William Underwood, one of the event's organizers, said it was the legacy of King's "I Have a Dream" speech that led the effort.

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood," King said in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

For others, it was not so much the reunion of black and white churches that brought them, as the nearly three decades-old theological fight that followed the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention beginning in 1979.

"For too long we've found things that separate us," said the Rev. Tom Womble of Fuquay-Varina. "Now we need to find things that bring us together."

The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention were not invited to the gathering, though individuals were welcome to attend.

The Rev. Jimmy Allen, a former president of the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention, said the Atlanta gathering included only those groups that maintain membership in the North American Baptist Fellowship -- a loose umbrella group.

But in a news conference, and later at the meeting, Carter said he did not want to exclude any Christian who wants to join the cause.

Former Vice President Al Gore will speak about environmental concerns today and former President Clinton will speak Friday.

Black and white Baptists parted company before the Civil War when they could not agree on whether missionaries could own slaves.

After the war, many blacks, particularly in the South, left mostly white churches, where they often sat in the slave gallery or balcony, to form their own churches.

At the event Wednesday, the Rev. William Shaw, the president of the National Baptist Convention USA, the largest black Baptist denomination in the United States, gave the evening's sermon. He challenged those assembled to look beyond false identities and begin the work to which Jesus had called them.

For Wallis Baxter, a Duke Divinity School student, the message was long overdue.

"It's always puzzled me why there are so many different Baptist denominations when there should be one," said Baxter, 24, a Baptist. "This conference is doing something monumental."