(ABP) -- I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the future of the moderate Baptist movement -- including moderate churches, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and similar larger bodies of moderate Baptists. One only has to spend a little bit of time around these groups to get a sense that our creativity and momentum is somehow being stymied.

Maybe it has to do with our collective inability to grieve our losses -- and a corresponding inability to dream bright dreams.

One block to moderate Baptists imaginatively venturing into the future may be a lack of good corporate grief work. In his book Care of Persons, Care of Worlds (Abingdon, 1992), pastoral theologian Larry Kent Graham writes, “Grief is a powerful discounter of creativity. As an instrument of death, rather than life, unexpressed grief sends our creativity underground and leaves us less than fully alive. When faced, it allows us to creatively reconnect with ourselves and the world of which we are a part.”

One need not know the gruesome details of the last 30 years of history to know that moderate Baptists -- or at least the ones who grew up in the Southern Baptist tradition -- have something to grieve. One need only eavesdrop on conversations between folks gathered in the hallways of churches or denominational meetings -- or to peruse the reader comments to almost any opinion piece on the Associated Baptist Press website -- to recognize that we are still actively grieving.

Graham suggests that working with grief “involves recognizing hidden attachments from the past and resolving these. Hidden attachments include the intentional identifications with ideas, persons, and patterns of relatedness that no longer allow for a creative response to one’s present situation and future opportunities.” Almost no one in the moderate Baptist family is without loss of some kind. Many lost jobs as professors and ministers in the wake of Southern Baptist turmoil. Many others have experienced the pain of churches splitting and long-time members leaving for other places of worship. Other churches share the collective memory of being expelled from Baptist associations or conventions. All of these events are painful and certainly call for the difficult work of grief.

And while anger is an important part of the process of grieving, it is not the intended result.

As anger is sometimes a mask for our deep sense of threat and fear, it can lead to a circling of the wagons in an effort to preserve institutions and save us any future heartache and pain. This mentality can keep us from making bold steps forward for fear of future criticism and division.

As moderate Baptist groups, therefore, we must find ways to satisfy our need to grieve appropriately. Churches may find it helpful to create liturgical acts that express their deep grief, using the language of lament, in order to move out of anger and eventually find new ways to reinvest emotional energy into our creative future together. We may forge services of worship during which we release those church members among us who have decided to depart from us instead of relegating this act to a poorly attended business meeting. Perhaps we could invent liturgies of remembrance and celebration of the past as we experience the severing of denominational ties and the forging of new alliances. What we must not do, however, is allow our grief to go unresolved and to fester.

Beyond our grief work, we must find new ways to connect our rich past to future possibilities of imagination and creativity. Rather than institutional preservation, we should focus on reformation and reinvention.

Graham suggests “dream work” as a path toward liberating our creative potential. He says dream work “involves releasing power to act upon the energy revealed in the dreams so that persons’ lives and social environments may be altered.”

While we will not all stretch out on the couch to explore our dreams with a psychoanalyst, we may find it helpful to engage in a bit of our own corporate dream work. One possibility for this work could be cross-generational gatherings of small groups of moderate Baptists engaging in brainstorming sessions about our future together.

It’s difficult to know what the future of moderate Baptists will be. But I’m certain that, whatever it is, we won’t get there if we don’t appropriately grieve our past -- so that out of our anger we may release our concern for preserving institutions and recreating a long-gone past and move forward, with curiosity and confidence, into a future of creativity and imagination.

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Cody J. Sanders, a graduate of Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, is now a doctoral student in pastoral theology and counseling at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.

EDITORIAL DISCLAIMER: As part of our mission to provide credible and compelling information about matters of faith, Associated Baptist Press actively seeks a diversity of viewpoints in its columns, commentaries and other opinion-based content. Opinions expressed in these articles are not intended to represent ABP editorial policy and do not necessarily reflect the views of ABP's staff, board of directors or supporters.

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