A Name That You Are Alive — and the Wall They Would Not Build
A plumb line measures a wall. But what does it measure when a builder draws the true line himself, in his own hand, and then sets down the tool and walks away without ever laying it against the stones? The line is right. The wall leans anyway. And no one can say a rule was broken, because the rule was never enforced.
This is the seventh and final denomination examined in Measured and Found Wanting, the Virginia Christian Alliance series laying God’s Word against the record of the mainline churches. We have walked the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Church of Christ, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Six bodies that voted to change what they had received. The American Baptist Churches USA is the seventh, and it is unlike all six — because it never voted to change anything at all.
Three things govern what follows:
- In 1992 the American Baptist Churches USA declared that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. That declaration has never been reversed. It stands today.
- In the same identity statement that affirms the teaching, the denomination also declares that it accepts no confession or creed as binding. The paper unbinds itself.
- The conservative churches that left did not leave because the teaching fell. They left because the denomination would not enforce a teaching it still held.
The Church That Said the Right Thing
We must begin by giving this denomination its due, because it earned something none of the other six did. It said the right thing, plainly, and it never took the words back.
In October 1992 the General Board of the American Baptist Churches adopted, by mail vote, a one-sentence resolution: We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. That is not ambiguous. It is not hedged. It is the historic position of the Christian church, stated in a single line, and it passed.
Thirteen years later, in November 2005, the denomination went further than the mainline was going. It amended its identity statement, “We Are American Baptists,” to add that its churches submit to the teaching of Scripture that God’s design for sexual intimacy places it within the context of marriage between one man and one woman.
Read where they filed that sentence. It appears under the heading “A Biblical People,” directly after the clauses affirming the centrality of Scripture and the study of God’s inspired Word. They did not classify the marriage teaching as a social concern or a cultural preference. They filed it under biblical fidelity, where it belongs.
So the wall was drawn true. On this issue, at the level of what the denomination officially confesses, the American Baptists were right where the other six were wrong. We say that without reservation, because it is the necessary starting point for understanding what went wrong anyway.
The Sentence That Unbuilt the Wall
The same document that affirms the marriage teaching contains, four paragraphs above it, this:
Although Baptists have produced numerous confessions to express our common understandings of Christian faith, we hold the Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, as our final authority. We accept no humanly devised confession or creed as binding.
Read the two statements together, because they sit in the same adopted text. On one page: the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Biblical teaching. On another page: we accept no humanly devised confession or creed as binding.
The statement declares the teaching, and in the same breath declares that statements like it bind no one.
This is the whole of what happened to the American Baptists, and it happened in a single document, on purpose. We do not have to reconstruct a paper-versus-practice split from outside evidence. The paper performs the split itself. It draws the line and, on the facing page, announces that no line is binding.
Eight months after the 1992 resolution, the same General Board had already supplied the solvent. In June 1993 it adopted a second resolution declaring that there exists a variety of understandings throughout the denomination on issues of human sexuality, and urging members to seek unity and avoid divisiveness. Not a reversal — the 1992 statement was left standing. A dissolving agent, poured over the teaching, leaving the words intact while draining them of force.
Soul Liberty, Turned Against Itself
Every denomination in this series found a device to license the drift. The Methodists deleted their language. The Lutherans divided conscience. The United Church of Christ appealed to a still-speaking God. The Disciples relocated the Spirit’s voice into the gathered congregation. The American Baptists reached for something older and more honorable than any of these — and that is what makes their case the most sobering of the seven.
They reached for soul liberty.
Soul liberty is a genuine Baptist treasure. It is the conviction that God alone is Lord of the conscience, that no bishop or synod or state may stand between a believer and God, that the local congregation is autonomous under Christ. Baptists shed blood for this principle. It is not a modern invention or a convenient dodge. It is one of the truest things the Baptist tradition has ever taught.
And it was turned into the instrument that made the 1992 teaching unenforceable. If God alone is sovereign over the individual conscience, the argument ran, and if each local church determines God’s calling for its own community, then no national body may compel a congregation to hold the teaching, however clearly the teaching is stated. The denomination could affirm. It could not require.
Where the Argument Fails
Here is the steel of it, and we will not blunt it: they were right about liberty. Scripture does teach that the conscience answers to God. The error was not in prizing freedom. The error was in what they let freedom license.
For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. — Galatians 5:13, ESV
Paul grants the freedom in the same sentence that guards it. Christian liberty is real, and it is freedom from sin unto obedience — never freedom to name the sin good. Peter says it more sharply still: live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil (1 Peter 2:16). And Jude warns of those who pervert the grace of God into sensuality. The freedom is holy. What the American Baptists permitted it to shelter was not.
The American Baptist Wall That Was Never Enforced
A teaching that binds no one is a teaching a region may ignore, and regions did.
The denomination’s structure gave each region authority over its own churches, and the regions went opposite directions. Some moved to discipline. In 1996 the American Baptist Churches of the West dismissed four congregations for affiliating with the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists; in 1999 the General Board denied the appeals of four California churches. But other regions welcomed and affirmed openly, and the national body did not stop them, because under soul liberty it had built itself no mechanism to.
Then, in 2002, it built the opposite mechanism. New standing rules provided that a church dismissed by its own region could ask to remain in the denomination and had eighteen months to find another region willing to take it. A congregation at odds with its region’s discipline could simply transfer to a friendlier one and stay. The escape hatch was written into the rules.
And the enforcement step — the one that would have given the teaching teeth — was deliberately not taken. When the 2005 identity statement added the marriage language, its proponents had originally sought to amend the Common Criteria that define a Cooperating Church, which would have made the teaching a genuine condition of membership. That amendment required ratification by the regions. It was never pursued. The stronger language went into the identity statement, which describes American Baptists, and never into the criteria, which qualify them.
They wrote the true line in their own hand. They set down the tool. They never laid it against the stones.
The Departures Ran Both Ways
In every other denomination in this series, the conservatives left because the body abandoned the teaching. Here, the largest conservative departure happened because the body would not enforce a teaching it still officially held.
In the spring of 2006, the American Baptist Churches of the Pacific Southwest — a region of roughly three hundred churches across Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Hawaii — voted to withdraw from the denomination. The delegate vote recommending withdrawal was 1,125 to 209. The regional board affirmed it unanimously on May 11. Their stated reason was the national leadership’s failure to implement the 1992 resolution. The region renamed itself Transformation Ministries.
Honesty requires precision about what followed, because the clean version overstates it. The region withdrew as an entity, but its congregations then chose individually. By the account of the region that remained, of some two hundred eighty churches, roughly a hundred conservative ones left with the new body while the rest reorganized and stayed. So a substantial bloc departed — not the whole three hundred. We write it that way because the smaller true number is still the largest single exit in the denomination’s modern history, and because a reader who checks will find the qualification and trust everything else.
Medley’s Paradox
And the bleeding runs both directions at once. The same denomination dismissed the four California churches for being too affirming and lost the Pacific Southwest for being too permissive. It bled from both ends while the paper held, untouched, in the middle. The general secretary at the time, A. Roy Medley, told delegates he remained traditional on sexuality and did not wish to be separated from those who differed in Christian conscience. When the Pacific Southwest left, he said God’s heart is broken when brothers and sisters in Christ divide over matters of scriptural interpretation.
Hear what that sentence does. It reframes a departure over the authority of Scripture as a tragedy of interpretation — as though the only thing at stake were a difference of reading, rather than whether the church would keep what it had confessed. That is the paradox spoken aloud by the man at the top: he would hold the teaching and hold the people who rejected it, and call the result unity.
What Scripture Says to Sardis
There is a church in the book of Revelation that received the exact word the American Baptists need to hear, and it is worth reading slowly.
And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: “The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent.” — Revelation 3:1–3, ESV
A Name That You Are Alive
Christ does not accuse Sardis of heresy. He does not say they have denied the faith or rewritten the creed. Their confession is intact. Their reputation is for life. And He tells them they are dead.
The charge against Sardis is not that its teaching was false. It is that its works were not complete — that the life had drained out of a body whose paper was still orthodox. And the remedy is precise: remember what you received. Keep it. Not adopt something new. Not draft a better statement. Keep the thing already delivered — which is exactly what a denomination fails to do when it affirms a teaching and declines to live by it.
A confession you will not enforce is a confession you have half-abandoned already. You have kept the words and surrendered the substance. That is the sin of Sardis, and it is a quieter sin than the one the other six committed, which is precisely why it is more dangerous. The church that rewrites its doctrine at least knows it has changed. The church that keeps its doctrine and empties it of force can tell itself, for a very long time, that nothing is wrong.
The Cost Was Not Collapse
Here the American Baptists differ from every denomination we have examined, and the difference is instructive.
They did not collapse. Measured from its 1982 peak of roughly 1,637,000 members, the denomination declined to about 1,308,000 by 2010 — a loss near twenty percent over twenty-eight years. By the standards of this series that is remarkably mild. The Disciples of Christ lost more than half their people; the United Church of Christ lost two-thirds from its height. The American Baptists lost a fifth.
We could not build a collapse story here if we wanted to, and we will not pretend to. The numbers refuse it.
But that is the finding, not an obstacle to it. The denomination that kept its teaching on paper and would not enforce it did not empty out the way the ones that abandoned their teaching did. Its membership is, by the measures available, the most traditional of any mainline body — in the 2014 Pew survey, only about fifteen percent strongly favored redefining marriage, the most conservative figure among the seven. The people in the pews never wanted the drift. That is precisely why the fight was over enforcement and not over the teaching itself, and precisely why the losses stayed modest. The body held together because most of it agreed with the confession it would not defend.
So the cost here is not attendance. It is integrity. A church can keep its numbers and lose the thing the numbers were meant to serve. You may keep a full building and a true confession and still be told, by the One who holds the seven stars, that you have a name that you are alive, and are dead.
A Word to Those Still Inside
Some who read this are American Baptists who believe every word of the 1992 resolution and have watched their denomination decline to stand behind it. You have seen churches in your own region ordain and affirm what your confession calls incompatible with Scripture, and you have seen the national body call the resulting division a matter of interpretation.
Scripture speaks to you, and its first word is not “leave.” Its first word is the word to Sardis: strengthen what remains. There is a great deal that remains among the American Baptists — a true confession, a traditional people, congregations that have never wavered. The call to Sardis was not first to flee but to wake.
Yet Scripture also names a limit. Where a church will not keep what it received, and the drift hardens past strengthening, the Word is plain:
Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you. — 2 Corinthians 6:17, ESV
That summons is a grief, and we do not issue it lightly. But we set it beside the word to Sardis, because for this denomination both are true at once: strengthen what remains, and if it cannot be strengthened, come out. Which of the two applies is a matter for prayer and for the leading of the Spirit in each congregation, and it is not ours to decide from outside.
The Door Is Still Open
We have brought no charge here that the American Baptist Churches USA has not published over its own name. The teaching is theirs. The unbinding sentence is theirs, in the same document. The refusal to enforce is written into their own rules, and the record of who left, and why, sits in their own annual reports.
And we close this denomination, and this series, the way we have closed every study in it — not on the argument, but on the only thing that has ever raised a dead church. Sardis was told it was dead. It was also told to wake. The One who wrote that letter did not write it to bury the church but to raise it, and He has not yet removed the lampstand from its place.
What is affirmed on paper can be kept in practice. A denomination that would enforce what it confesses would not need a new statement; it would need only to mean the one it has. There is no confession so long neglected that repentance cannot breathe life back into it. The words are still true. The God who breathed them is still able to make a people keep them.
No report has ever converted a soul. No argument, however sound, has raised the dead. The Holy Spirit alone draws a church back to obedience — and He speaks through the Word already delivered, the Word this denomination still, on paper, confesses. We have laid out the record because we are commanded to watch and to warn. Now we ask Him to wake what is sleeping, in that denomination, and in our own.
This concludes the denominational studies in “Measured and Found Wanting.” A closing reflection on the whole series will follow.
For Further Study
- “American Baptist Churches USA: Responses/Actions Pertaining to Homosexuality” — the denomination’s own chronology of every resolution and action from 1987 forward, including the 1992 resolution and the 2005 identity-statement amendment.
- “We Are American Baptists” — the American Baptist Identity Statement adopted by the General Board in November 2005, containing both the marriage clause and the declaration that no confession or creed is binding.
- American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., group profile, Association of Religion Data Archives — the membership series (from the National Council of Churches’ Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches) and the 2014 Pew survey data cited above.
- Religion News Service and Baptist News Global, May 2006 — reporting on the withdrawal of the American Baptist Churches of the Pacific Southwest and its reorganization as Transformation Ministries.
- Prior installments: series introduction · United Church of Christ · Disciples of Christ, Part One · Disciples of Christ, Part Two
