Roy Medley, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches in the USA, heard voices and had a vision. Because of his listening ear and keen insight, Medley invited other Baptists to engage in an open-ended conversation with Muslims in the United States.
Similarly, Sayyid Syeed, national interfaith director for the Islamic Society of North America, heard voices and had a vision. Because of his unflagging hope for a better day in relations between Muslims and Christians in his adopted land, he gladly accepted the Baptists’ invitation to put together the framework for such a conversation.
Thus was created the Baptist/Muslim Dialogue Task Force, a group consisting of an equal number of participants from both bodies, and which labored for more than a year before the first fruits of the conversation were harvested.
The initial results of this potentially historic partnership were realized last month in a gathering of 80 Muslim and Baptist scholars and others at the Boston Islamic Center and Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre, MA.
But first, back to the voices and visions.
Medley’s initiative with fellow Baptists came after hearing pleas from Baptist leaders in Lebanon and the Republic of Georgia in 2007 that “the Baptists of North America create a relationship with the Muslim community (in the United States) that will be a blessing to the whole world.”
So upon returning Medley asked leaders of the Alliance of Baptists, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Society, North American Baptist Fellowship (regional unit of the Baptist World Alliance), and Progressive National Baptist Convention, to join him in praying about the matter and reaching out to a potential Muslim partner in the U.S.
For his part, Syeed, one of the most beloved and respected Islamic leaders in the country, was hearing other Baptist voices. The first of these, he related on the opening night of the Boston gathering, was that of former Southern Baptist Convention President Jerry Vines of Jacksonville, FL, who during the 2002 annual meeting of the SBC called the Prophet Muhammad “a demon-possessed pedophile.”
His reaction, he reported to laughter, was to ask himself, “What do we do with the Baptists? They are not a quiet people.” Thus, he said, despite the fact that the Islamic Society of North America already has ongoing conversations with Jews, Roman Catholics, the National Council of Churches, and other religious bodies in the U.S., he immediately perceived the imperative for a similar dialogue with Baptists.
In Boston Syeed delivered a brilliant, extemporaneous review of Baptist beginnings in colonial New England and of the denomination’s pivotal role in securing the guarantees of the free exercise of religion and the institutional separation of church and state in the new nation’s Constitution. “It was the Baptists,” he declared during the opening session at the Boston Islamic Center, who said, ‘No, we do not want to force people into Christianity. That was not the teaching of Jesus Christ.’”
He said further, “We (Muslims) need your help. We need to understand how you were able to define the role of religion in a democracy…. There should be no compulsion in religion. We want to share that. We want to strengthen that. And we want to take that message to the Muslim world because in many parts of the Muslim world there is so much of madness, so much of fanaticism in the name of Islam.”
In remarks delivered following Syeed’s, Medley pointed out that religious liberty “is a two-edged sword, and we live on the edge of that sword all the time as Baptists.” The very freedom the Constitution grants to religious minorities including Muslims to exercise their religion also makes it possible for some Baptists to say and write things that are hurtful. And, he acknowledged, “for some Baptists, this (conversation) is a little bit on the scary side,” in that many Baptists don’t know how to engage Muslims constructively.
“We’re also mindful that big doors move on small hinges,” he added. “We pray that this may be a small hinge to bless the movement of a new way, (so) that Baptist-Christians and Muslims will be able to live in friendship with one another.”
As one of the 80 privileged participants in this first public event sponsored by the Baptist/Muslim Dialogue Task Force, I ask for the personal privilege of reminding Alliance people of the important place given by others of those present in Boston to the Alliance’s own ground-breaking Statement on Muslim-Christian Relations, adopted during the 2003 annual meeting. That statement’s introductory paragraph reads:
“As Christians in the Baptist tradition, we are the inheritors and the transmitters of a theology which largely ignores fifteen centuries of Muslim development by viewing contemporary Muslims from a monolithic perspective. This perspective belies the vibrant diversity found within the larger umbrella of the Islamic family. We have held to a theology which has valued conversion over dialogue, invective over understanding, and prejudice over knowledge – a theology which does not acknowledge the vibrancy, vitality, and differences within Islam.”
The Alliance has helped lay the foundation for better days in Christian-Muslim relations. Among our ranks and in the larger worlds of Baptists and Muslims are young and old, women and men, distinguished academics and ordinary people, who are hearing voices, dreaming dreams and leading the way to a better day.
RSS feed: RSS is a web feed format used to publish frequently-updated content. Use this feed in an RSS reader or browser (Safari 2, Firefox 2, or Internet Explorer 7 and higher)
ICS file: Use this feature to download an ICS file to use to import the calendar's event(s) into another program, such as Outlook, iCal, or Google Calendar.
ICS Feed: This is a live feed in the iCalendar format. To use this feed, you will need a program capable of subscrbing to a life iCalendar feed. Some examples include Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook 2007 or higher, or Windows Calendar in Vista.
