Why am I active in the Alliance? The short answer is easy. The Baptist principle of "Soul Liberty" to me is less a matter of defending my own conscience than a matter of protecting everyone's freedom to interact. I take a lot of pleasure in that interaction; it's like a dance. The dance of people's beliefs, opinions and dreams sometimes gets a bit sloppy. It also can be a joyful and refreshing way to understand our self and others better.

Yes, I also support the Alliance for the same reasons many others do.  I appreciate the Alliance for the enthusiasm of the community. I respect it for reaffirming the Baptist commitment to the individual's responsible conscience. I affirm it for its commitment to listening as a spiritual practice and for its practice of "partnership," not dominance, in its relationship to its ministries, missions and ecumenism. Selfishly, I also love it for affirming my daughter and her wife.

My affirmations did not emerge suddenly. I was raised sitting every Sunday next to my father—in a little suit and tie—in the packed pews of an American Baptist Church in Indiana. As a teenager, I rebelled. (Of course.)  In college, I joined a group of Christians who relied upon strict doctrine and charismatic leaders to keep our ideas in check.

I continue to affirm my ABC loyalty. From those roots my own "Soul Liberty" reasserted itself, first, through the reading of Scripture. Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor, because the kingdom of God is yours." I remember walking down the street saying that verse with a question mark at the end, because I saw little evidence of it. "Love your enemies; do good to those hating you; bless those who curse you; and pray for the ones insulting you." I hummed that verse to myself, but it was pure dissonance, cognitive and otherwise. I resisted changes Jesus expected as surely as I recited and was drawn toward them.

I needed the dance of interaction. Many of them. One of countless interactions happened with an elderly monk in the desert of Palestine. He led a handful of us through a wadi, pointing out tiny flowers and trickles of water common at the end of the rainy season. He showed us the homes of hermits, inhabited for centuries and perched high on the caves and ridges of the cliff face. Periodically, he stopped to read a Scripture passage about spirituality and the desert. As he knelt, the sinews on his calves made me confident that we would tire before he did. However, near the end of our hike, I noticed him falling behind. A minute later, he looked exhausted and parched. I was young. I went back to him, threw my arm under his and gave him the remainder of my canteen. He gulped it quickly. As we walked on, the monk confessed his own "hubris." "Next time," he said, "I'm going to practice before taking a hike and bring my own water." Slowly it danced into my brain that different faith traditions do well to learn from and lean on each other.

As a seminarian, pastor, husband, parent and grad student, I tried to expand my dance steadily, if unevenly. The better I became at listening to my parishioners, the larger I found the world to be and, unexpectedly, the more blessed I was. I found that for me the primary purpose of a preaching robe was to help me forget how my clothes looked. I discovered that my knack for preaching was a gift of God. Amidst all else, I found that God spoke and blessed me more as a husband and father than in any other way. Apparently, that was how I was created:  a creature of endless interactions slowly learning endless lessons.

One unfortunate day I was launched into a deep, long illness that has never released me. It pried me away from my daily pastoral and scholarly work, which were my passions. Today, I live into this new life looking for its lessons. I also rejoice even more in freely dancing with my friends in the Alliance, who are willing to freely dance with me.