Hanging out with other ecumenical Baptists

When one friend of mine saw the title of my blog, he asked if it was a contradiction in terms. However, I'm glad to say that I'm a little late posting this week because I've spent this weekend talking with other "ecumenical Baptists" at the annual meeting of CTS/NABPR in Portland, Oregon. This meeting is special to me for several reasons. The CTS, the “College Theology Society,” is a group of Catholic theologians and scholars with an interesting history documented by one of my professors at Dayton, Sandra Yocum. NABPR is the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, but the group of Baptists that meets jointly with CTS is actually a special “region-at-large” that meets especially for the purpose of discussion with Catholic theologians. This is my third year at the conference, with the conference the previous year being held at Notre Dame, and the year before that in Rhode Island.

The group of Baptist theologians who attend CTS/NABPR consists of several professors who influenced me early on, along with lots of folks from Dayton, Duke, Baylor, and Campbell, and I've even got a family member in the group. This meeting has become something of a hub for theologians interested in thinking through what Steve Harmon calls “Baptist Catholicity.”

The CTS/NABPR partnership was actually started by an important Baptist theologian, James McClendon, who worked with Terence Tilley to set up the joint meeting. The partnership has been going for 13 years now, and the group of Baptists interested in the meeting has been steadily increasing. I enjoy going to these meetings to compare academic notes with other Baptists who are interested in thinking about ecumenical topics, topics like whether or not we could describe a “canon” of the Church Fathers and Mothers, or the contribution of Black Baptist groups to the largely Catholic theological question of “nature and grace” (these latter referring to two great papers by Scott Rushing at Baylor and Derek Hatch from Dayton, respectively). I enjoy listening to the papers, but the best part is catching up with friends and professors from around the country and being extreme theology nerds for a few days.