Beeson Podcast, Episode 400
Dr. Mark DeVine
July 10, 2018

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School, on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Well, today I have the opportunity of speaking with a person I've known for a long time. He was my student at another seminary years ago when he was just beginning theological studies. He's now my colleague here at Beeson Divinity School. He teaches history and doctrine in our curriculum, Dr. Mark DeVine. Mark, welcome to the Beeson podcast.
Mark DeVine:	Thank you, Dean George. I'm so glad to have this opportunity.
Timothy George:	Now, tell people just a little bit about yourself. I know you're from South Carolina. You sort of sound funny. What's wrong with you?
Mark DeVine:	Well, I grew up in South Carolina, blue-collar. I was Southern Baptist before I became a Christian, and I grew up there. Eventually, I was always in church, but eventually I started experimenting with drugs. I became an intravenous drug user, but at the age of 16 and a half, I had a Damascus Road turnaround. I found myself back in the Baptist church. I went on to earn a degree in electrical engineering as an attempt to not go into the ministry that failed.
Timothy George:	This was at Clemson?
Mark DeVine:	Clemson University. Since God thinks He has to have His way on everything, I eventually submitted to His call, made my way to Southern Seminary, served as a missionary with my wife who I met at Southern Seminary. She was also your student, and we served in Thailand, Bangkok, Thailand, eventually coming back to the states and began to teach at Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City, then accepted your invitation to come to Beeson Divinity School. In the meantime, though, I've become a serial interim pastor, so I help congregations who are without their pastors and help them move through that transition period.
Timothy George:	That leads us into what we really want to talk about today, and that's an area of research that you have and are developing in the world of, what we call for lack of a better term, nondenominational Baptist, as you say, churches. Now, those terms don't seem to go together. Nondenominational, that means you don't have a denomination. Baptist, that means you are in a denomination, yet you have kind of squeezed them together into a new formation. What are you trying to say about this?
Mark DeVine:	Well, if you Google “what is the largest-growing stream of Christianity in North America?” you're going to discover that it will be called the nondenominational stream, and it's a big stream. Lots of Christians today are moving into congregations that are not affiliated with a denomination. Some of those are Baptistic in their thinking and in their doctrine and in their practice of doing church. We tend to associate Baptists with denominations, not least because the two largest protestant denominations in America are Southern Baptist and, I think, the National Baptist [Convention] of African Americans. 
	Those became such juggernauts in America, culture-shapers, that we think of Baptist and denomination as two sides of one coin, but it's not so. Baptist churches practice local church autonomy so, for Baptists, going back 400 years, the irreducible unit of the thing called church is the local body of believers, any affiliation, partnership, including the denominational affiliation for Baptists is ultimately voluntary, utilitarian, and severable, and their Baptistness is not in any attenuated or impaired by that. In fact, it's an assertion of their Baptistness if they don't want to be part of a denomination.
Timothy George:	You're talking about, I guess, what are called sometimes 'community churches' or churches that don't have any particular name, like the Church on the Rock or the Church in the Air or whatever it is, but they are Baptistic in their formation and their polity and their ethos. Is that what you're saying?
Mark DeVine:	Yes, in 2005, I found myself drawn into an odyssey of the replanting of a city church in Kansas City. We ended up looking, in order to be revitalized and to not just decline into oblivion, we formed a partnership with a church across the state, 250 miles to the East in St. Louis where a former student of mine was pastor of one of these churches. It didn't have Baptist in the name, but I knew he was a Baptist. He was raised a Baptist. His spiritual formation and theological education took place in Baptist churches and Baptist institutions but, if you went to the website, it said nondenominational. 
	I found out a couple of years later that they were actually affiliated with the local association in St. Louis and with the national convention, but were not associated with the Missouri Baptist Convention. The nondenominational phenomenon is a diverse and complex mosaic. Some of these folks who say they're nondenominational really aren't affiliated with a denomination. Others are nondenominationally postured. They don't have the name Baptist but, if you know the right people or dig long enough into their websites, you'll catch them being affiliated with a named Baptist entity, like the Southern Baptist Convention.
Timothy George:	I want to dig down with you a little deeper into this very interesting ecclesial reality. Maybe we could call it that. First of all, this dropping the name Baptist, what's going on there?
Mark DeVine:	The problem with names is the problem of history. Names accumulate baggage because the people who associate themselves with a name, even your own name, your last name or the name of a company and the name of a church, once the history begins to accumulate, the problem is people are sinners and they do wrong. Now, all of a sudden, that name is potentially odious in the popular mind because people who bore that name have done some bad things, and now you feel answerable to it. That has happened to the Baptist name. 
	The Baptist history is 400 years old. Baptists have done a lot of bad stuff so now, if you call yourself a Baptist, well, does that mean you have to answer for what the Westboro Baptist Church does when they castigate Jews and homosexuals, and now you have to answer for that. This attempt to run from the name is an attempt to sort of have a new start so that, when we try to reach people for Christ in these churches, we don't lead with putting bad things in the minds of people that may have to do with crimes we feel we didn't commit. 
Timothy George:	Okay, but when you drop the name Baptist, is anything distinctive or important lost? Does it matter?
Mark DeVine:	All of us, by the design of creation, are physically embodied and historically embedded. It's part of the good creation that we are historical. We were made to make promises. We were made to have memory. Saint Augustine says in one section of his Confessions that, "My memory is really me." If someone gets dementia or has Alzheimer's, one of the ways psychiatrists describe the effects of that is the erasure of the person, so our God made us as human beings who are historically embedded. 
	We actually are the inheritors of, not just the whole of history, but we are disproportionately the inheritors of distinctive histories that have shaped who we are. Those of us who believe in the meticulous providence of God, it would behoove us to reflect on, "Why did I come through that history? How does that change my calling, my responsibility, the benefits that I might have to offer the church before God. When we begin to run from names, we don't mean to, but we're running from ourselves. 
	A distinctive thing about this that happens to show the futility, ultimately, of running from names is that nondenominationalism is so influential and widespread today that if someone asks you what kind of church you're in and you say, "Well, it's a nondenominational church," they will associate various features of being churched by some large influential nondenominational church that they know about that will be inaccurate with regard to your church. Names matter because God has made them matter, and running from them doesn't achieve what those who want it to achieve often wish that it would.
Timothy George:	Here in Birmingham, we have a number of new church starts, church plants I guess you'd say, that don't wear the label Baptist. They are mostly, anyway, Baptistic in terms of their practice of baptism and things like that. One thing I've found interesting about these churches, they're fairly new, I would say within the last five or seven years. They have somewhat different tenor and tones to their worship, but almost every one does things that are surprising in a way if you're thinking about the model of Baptist churches that existed 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. 
	For example, they use creeds, things like the Apostles' Creed. I've visited these churches, and they'll be saying the Apostles' Creed or the Lord's Supper, the way they serve the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper. They have folks come forward to receive it, more like you'd find in an Anglican kind of setting. Talk about that strange coincidence of disparities.
Mark DeVine:	On the one hand, it's so wonderful what they're doing. They're making my point for me. They're laying claim to more of the history of the church than they feel that being a Baptist, or whatever their spiritual formation was, they want to lay claim to more of it. As Christians, they say, "We do believe in the Trinity. We do believe in the orthodox understanding of the person of Christ. We do affirm the solas of the Reformation, so we want to take our place in the membership of a wider body of Christ. We're grateful for what was achieved by those who went before, who defended the faith once delivered to the saints against heretics like Arius or Pelagius.” This is wonderful. 
	Now, I have them right where I want them because, now, I want to shine the light on them and show how many of the things that they also value greatly and are not prepared to give up, like believer baptism, is something ... Those are gifts that were handed to them. Those were drawn from wells that they did not dig, so their recoil against the Baptist name, I really like that. They want to remove unnecessary stumbling blocks to the gospel. What is not a movement in the direction of authenticity and identity that they value so much, it's not a move in that way to try to dismiss the unique bequeathment they have received as Baptists and somehow become all things to all people who are not Baptists.
	Many of the values that they have in practice, including this desire to remove unnecessary stumbling blocks to the gospel is very, very Baptist. One of the great gifts Baptists have to offer to other streams is that they just can't have a good conscience about their churches not growing. Now, that can be an Achilles heel but, buddy, I'd rather have it than not.
Timothy George:	Say more what you mean by that, not a good conscience about their churches not growing?
Mark DeVine:	Well, I mean I think that when Baptists kind of cotton to the Great Awakenings in disproportionate ways compared to some other streams of the church. Baptists kind of exhibit those elements of evangelicalism that were identified by David Bebbington and Alister McGrath. One of those was conversionism. Another one of those was activism, and Baptists exhibit those disproportionately greater than some other traditions, so when they don't see people converting, when they don't see people converting and growing in the faith, they will scramble around to do something about it. 
	That's where they will make their errors, as well, because that's their strength and then it's their weakness. They might latch onto the seeker movement or the church growth movement and begin to not talk about hell or repentance in their Sunday morning services, even though Jesus brought it up all time. I think they eventually stopped having him to the barbecues. They say, "Well, is he in a healing mood or a wine-making mood. We'll have him over but, if he's going to teach some more, we've had enough of that," so they might go off the scale there and do that. 
	What's good about it is, this new stream of nondenominational reformed Baptistic way of doing church, they've seen that mistake that was made by the seeker movement, and they are more willing to say, "Here's a stand we have to take, even though it's not politically correct and some people won't like it," but they do want to remove every possible stumbling block to the faith. 
	The name Baptist is viewed as a very, very difficult hurdle to overcome. I'm not sure that they should all take on the name Baptist, but I am sure that the elders and teachers at these congregations should learn very well that they are part of the Baptist movement and that has shaped who they are in ways that are bad and good, and I would say more good than bad.
Timothy George:	Now, you're a theologian. One of the things I've noticed in these new nondenominational Baptistic churches, they have an interest in the Trinity. We've always believed the Trinity. We sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” sometimes when we sing hymns at all anymore. It's in our hymnal if we have a hymnal. 
	The Trinity has always been there, but it's been kind of marginalized. It's been delegated to insignificance. Even the Fundamentals, that great statement at the early part of the 20th Century resisting modernism and liberalism and all of that, left out the Trinity! Had a lot of other good stuff in there, but no Trinity. There seems to be a retrieval, or recovery, of things like the doctrine of the Trinity. That's a good thing, isn't it?
Mark DeVine:	It's a very good thing, and it provides an opportunity to illumine a pattern that we ought to encourage in the current climate of doing church in America today, and that is an openness. This nondenominationalism sometimes means retreat from a name that has baggage that you don't want to have to explain, but it also has to do with a new openness to, "Well, what is Christianity? What has it been? We want to receive gifts that we might have to gain from other streams of the faith."
	When I was raised in the church in South Carolina, we sang the “Doxology” every Sunday. There was never a question at the church where I was raised whether we believed in the Trinity, and yet we didn't reflect much on it. We didn't theologize on it, but the fact that we sang the “Doxology” and we sang “Holy, Holy, Holy,” it was hymn number one in the Baptist Hymnal. This shaped us to be receptive in ways we might not have been when this new retrieval of the Trinity came along, so you can see the beauty of how our God is working through these traditions to show how we belong to each other, have a bond in the faith, but also how we're different. 
	We may have to part ways or we may find gifts from these various streams that we would like to see supplement and enrich our tradition. Here again, knowing what the streams are, the ones that have been influential and have long histories helps in this openness and gift exchange. It's not helped by imagining yourself to be out there sitting under a tree, opening the New Testament, and it's you, the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit, and we're starting from scratch and imagining and doing that we're getting a more pure product. It ain't so.
Timothy George:	You focused on churches that are Baptistic largely and you're saying they're Baptist by some other name really. If you scratch them deeply enough, you'll find a Baptist bleeding there, but is this phenomenon that you've identified also happening in other streams, in the Methodist world, in the Presbyterian world, even maybe the Lutheran world? Is that going on there, too, in some way?
Mark DeVine:	The direction, momentum, and inertia of Christianity worldwide is towards local church autonomy. It is not towards any pattern that cedes authority outside the local church nor that outsources, functions that the local church feels that it ought to embrace. There are two very large streams of nondenominationalism, and the first one is the Pentecostal/charismatic, all the way to very mild charismatic stream of nondenominationalism. 
	There's one other very large stream, substream within the nondenominational stream, and it's the Baptistic one. The others fade in terms of numbers, but the worldwide church is oriented now to ways in which the Baptist stream is more experienced historically at handling. That is, having local church autonomy and not outsourcing.
Timothy George:	When I think about a Baptist church historically, one of the things that marks a Baptist church in a distinctive way is the use of a church covenant. In fact, that's how a Baptist church is usually formed historically. A group of Christians come together, and they enter into covenant with themselves and with the Lord, and they see this as a kind of supernatural work of grace bringing into existence a new organism, spiritual organism, the church. What about church covenants in this new nondenominational world? Are they even using them? How would you describe them?
Mark DeVine:	They're using them, and very few of them know what the source of it is, and they tend to imagine themselves as doing things because some people recently realized from reading the Scriptures that they ought to do it, but it's not the case. It goes back over 400 years. It comes out of congregationalism. Baptists came out of congregationalism and kept it and made it their own, and it is a very interesting thing also because it's a very traditioned thing. You can't go to the Bible and find something like a church covenant there, yet they're doing it, so it kind of outs them as unwitting, happy inheritors from the tradition. I want to shine a light on that.
	Church covenants are distinctive in that they're not expressing what we believe. They're expressing what we ought to do, how we ought to treat each other, their ethical counterparts, to confessions of faith. Now, why would that grow up on congregational soil? I think one reason might be what I mentioned earlier. When you practice local church autonomy and also when you practice congregational governance, there's a sense of heightened congregational privilege and responsibility that does not outsource, but it also expresses, coming out of the Great Awakening, that the atonement won for us on the cross involves a claim of our Lord and a promise from our Lord related to the whole of life, not just what we believe, but what we practice and do. 
	These churches are using the covenants but, generally speaking, their covenants are not as deep, not as rich, not as insightful into the motives of human behavior as many of the old ones. If they neglect their tradition and spend all their time looking to what the Lutherans can tell us and what the Church of England can tell us, then they won't have as good a church covenants because those folks can't help them but, if they look to their own tradition, they're going to find a great resource for something they've already said is important to who they are as the people of God on earth.
Timothy George:	As I've read some of the things you've written about this, you several times have referred to the work of Jaroslav Pelikan. He was a great church historian, very important mentor for me in my early work. Talk about Pelikan. What does he have to say to this kind of reality?
Mark DeVine:	Pelikan shows us that our identity, the reality of who we are, period, and who we are in the Lord is deeply shaped by our inheritance from the past, by a tradition that, regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not, and he shows that in powerful ways. In many ways, I'm trying to expose a reality more than I'm saying, "Here's a program." Reckon with this reality. I am a blue collar and a DeVine. I was shaped by that tradition so, as a blue collar person, I have different experiences that shape who I am, even though I'm not blue collar now. I can hardly pick up a box that's more than 40 pounds, but I have insights and, therefore, different kind of usefulness to other people because of my blue collar past.
	A similar thing goes on according to the spiritual inheritance that you have, and that has opened a window into something else that I think is a theological basis for encouraging people to reflect upon the inheritance, the unique inheritance that they've received. It's that our Lord has been keeping his promises since the canon closed, and that promise-keeping has resulted in the denominations. People always think of denominations as only a reflection of disunity that our Lord opposed, and it does do that, but it also reflects the way in which God has used to help us communicate to each other and has blessed us. 
	If we neglect the inheritance we have, we neglect the areas of gratitude that we have to each other and others in the past, and we attenuate and pair down the worship our Lord has offered that that gratitude should generate, and we lose sight of the fact that we're not just living for today either. We need to be cognizant that, whether we like it or not, we're going to bequeath sometimes, and we are helped to think about that when we recognize ourselves as deep spiritual inheritors ourselves.
Timothy George:	My guest today on the Beeson podcast has been Dr. Mark DeVine. He is Associate Professor of History and Doctrine here at Beeson Divinity School. He's the author of a number of books, Replant: How a Dying Church Can Grow Again, Bonhoeffer Speaks Today. He's written numerous articles and essays. He's very much interested, as we've heard today, on this nondenominational Baptistic church reality, working on a book on that. Thank you, Mark, for this conversation today.
Mark DeVine:	Thank you so much for having me, Dr. George.
Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.