Former President Jimmy Carter addressed the Midwest Regional Meeting of the New Baptist Covenant.
“I’m a 7th generation Baptist, and I accepted Christ as my savior when I was a child,” Carter said. “As a child my school teacher taught me a valuable lesson that has stuck with me as a governor, as a president and as a Christian. She said, ‘We must accommodate changing times while we cling to unchanging principles’.”
Carter said it is the debate over those unchanging principles of Christianity is the reason he helped create the New Baptist Covenant with the help of Baptist churches nationwide in 2007, and why came to talk to members attending the religious event Friday. “I come to you today to speak to you as a deacon, a Sunday school teacher, a fellow believer and a peanut farmer,” he said.
“Our church is strong around the world, but because we have lost sight of these principles,” Carter said. “It’s not the missionaries or the wonderful preaching of great men like Billy Graham who shape the opinion of Christianity in the world. Don’t get me wrong, these men are very effective and eloquent in their service to the Lord, but what is shaping the view of Christianity around the world is that they see Christians struggling for authority, having petty disputes and the church appears in capable of coming together.”
He said the effectiveness of the Christian church depends on the church working together rather than feuds created over policy in the Bible over social issues.
“Our arguments between each other is a cancer in the body of Christ, and it perverts the image of the one who we claim to worship,” Carter said. “We all have the great temptation to redefine the gospel. Growing up, I can remember growing up and hearing Bible verses being used to encourage blacks and whites not to be together.”
Carter reminded people of the struggles of the early Christian church in which disputes on policy arose, and then reminded people not focus on petty differences but the ministry of Jesus.
“He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed,” Carter said as he read Bible verses from Luke 4:18-19.
Cater then asked his audience to find a priority in which church policies are going to make a difference in the world as opposed to what was going to turn people away and divide the church.
“Are we going to allow women to serve the Lord to the best of their ability as deacons and missionaries and pastors, or are we going to focus on telling a wife to be submissive to her husband,” Carter said. “Are we going to forever dispute whether the earth was created in 4,004 B.C., or are we going to finally see that God created the universe 13 million years ago through science and evolution? And are we finally going to recognize the vision of Thomas Jefferson by having total separation of church and state in this country? Elected leaders do not need to be interpreting scripture for the rest of us.”
At the end of his speech, Carter reminded the audience of what he saw as true Christian faith and even asked the audience to proclaim it with him as a group.
“We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ,” Carter said.
In attendance was also Gov. Brad Henry who shared his faith and introduced former President Carter.
“Giving my testimony and sharing my faith is not easy for me,” Henry said. “My faith is a very personal thing to me, and [it] has sustained me in good times and in times of tremendous tragedy.”
Henry talked about his fourth daughter Lindsey who died as a baby from a rare neurological disease.
“Were it not for our church family, pastors and my relationship with God, I don’t think [my marriage] would have survived this tragedy,” he said. “It is because of my personal experiences with my faith is why it concerns me to see far too often public officials wear their religion on their sleeve and use it to judge others.”
Henry said Carter was a mentor to him on how faith, peace and justice work together.
“There have been few people in my life who have been as inspirational as Jimmy Carter,” he said.
The Midwest Regional Meeting of the New Baptist Covenant is a two-day convention of Baptist Churches that took place at the Norman Embassy Suites Hotel and Convention Center that offered attendees workshops, congregational singing and sermons about changing the world for Jesus Christ and his teaching.
The Oklahoma Daily is pleased to provide you the opportunity to share your thoughts about this article. We encourage lively debate on the issues of the day, but we ask you refrain from using profanity or other offensive speech, engaging in personal attacks or name-calling, posting advertising, or straying from the topic at hand. To comment, you must be a registered user of OUDaily.com. Thanks for taking the time to offer your thoughts.
You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register
mfhayes 2 years, 9 months ago
13 million years ago?
JJanowiak 2 years, 9 months ago
LOL. Yeah, we'll see how well that goes over with the Baptist establishment. Once people have rejected an engagement with reality so extensively that they believe in young-earth creationism (not that most Baptists, at least young ones, believe that) or have faith-based ideas about rigid gender roles, I don't think it's worth trying to fix them. Maybe the best hope for the hardline religious establishment will be the demographic shift brought by the expiration of the old guard and some fresh - and hopefully more reasonable - young blood.
jadestar 2 years, 9 months ago
Haha, 4.6 BILLION years ago, Mr. Carter ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_t...
Regardless, even though I'm not a Christian, I'm glad that Mr. Carter brought these great words before the Christian audience. Any use of religion to oppress rather than to uplift is really an abuse of religion, and Carter's words spoke well to this effect. Hopefully Oklahoma's current and future legislators and politicians were listening.