This book is a real treat, and I am grateful for the chance to read it with company. The study strikes me as a walk through a moving example of the church's self-awareness growing over time, particularly within small groups of the faithful. This is a topic I have been considering as my recent dissertation examined associations connected to vowed religious orders. I am from Austin, Texas, and my Catholic faith has been strongly flavored by being surrounded by Christians of other traditions, among them a good number of Baptists. In high school a Baptist friend tried valiantly for a couple of years to temper my high Christology with a “Jesus is your friend!” message. In college I had the chance to watch another Baptist friend fall completely in love with “Mama Mary,” as she called the Blessed Mother. Her fascination paved the way for my adult appropriation of the Marian devotion of my upbringing. Let me just say it is a strange feeling for a Catholic to have a Baptist friend respond to her troubles with “Well, have you prayed to Mama Mary yet?”
Beginning in 2006 in the University of Dayton's graduate theology program, I was part of the half-Protestant and half-Catholic cohort of PhD students Andy Black spoke about at CTS two years ago. (The group also included a number of Baptists with Texas connections.) As he put it, “We were gifted with a remarkable degree of spiritual and intellectual community.” It is probably fair to say we are still probing just what that exchange has meant for our work and discipleship. So in this way I first heard about the plight, methods, and yearnings of Other Baptists as part of the ecclesial fabric of my friends’ lives—living heartache and hope generously shared with classmates and professors. A couple of years later as I studied lay associates for my dissertation, I was surprised to find several Baptist members of Catholic lay associations. I immediately noticed a commonality between associates’ and Other Baptists’ concerns, and I will focus on those in my comments. This spring over half of a class of diaconate candidates I worked with were converts, a good number from the Baptist tradition. So these factors are all reasons I am interested enough in Baptist tradition and Other Baptists to take up Curtis Freeman's book.
Lay associates and Other Baptists share some common concerns, and while it would take some work to do a detailed comparison, in this space I will simply list some examples that suggest the commonalities. For those who may not know the term, lay associates are members of the faithful who gather together to live out a charism in relationship to a group of sisters, brothers, monks, or priests. They participate in a common life while remaining in their state of life. My study worked with Lay Cistercians of Peosta, Iowa, and a group of Presentation Partners related to the Sisters of the Presentation of Dubuque, Iowa.
In suggesting parallels between these associates and Other Baptists as a group I have found that both groups seem content to be situated between traditional institutional structures and an individualized appropriation of the Christian tradition. Participants in both groups seem to have committed to one another in a long-term fashion, but it is fair to say they are still in the process of working out what that means for their church belonging.
Another observation is that a good number of members of both groups are persons in ministerial leadership positions in other ecclesial communities and therefore typically have some theological training. I find it especially interesting how both groups desire to draw from the tradition with integrity. These are people with historical consciousness. They express a desire to retrieve parts of the tradition but not as consumers. Rather, their retrieval is oriented toward both the enrichment of their understanding of themselves in relation to the church and toward grounding their practice upon (small c) catholic ways of the Christian life.
I have already stated that associates and Other Baptists appear committed to one another. Yet at the same time they remain members of the larger ecclesial structures—parishes and dioceses, for example, in the case of lay associates and, as far as I understand, various church communities and fellowships in the case of Other Baptists. Lay associates seem to discover ways of being priests to each other that knit them together into a common life. Scriptural reading, witnessing, gathering, shared worship—it could be argued that all these acts are part of Lay Cistercian and Presentation Partner meetings, just as they mark Baptist tradition.
In the case of lay associates, their sense of catholicity is impressive for twenty- to twenty-five-year-old communities. The Associates of Iowa Cistercians and the Presentation Partners each point to their layers of communion with other associates at regional, national, and international levels. Associates also express awareness of their link to the larger church, especially strengthened through formal recognition documents approved by the leadership structures of the vowed congregations with whom they affiliate. It says a great deal about the integrity of the associate impulse when other related communions are willing to acknowledge their own charism at work in the lay associate vocation and communities.
Moreover, both associates and Other Baptists share a spiritual ecumenism. One of the surprises of my research was the discovery of conversions both ways—Baptist associates who became Catholic and Catholic members who became Baptist. When I asked about these (albeit unusual instances), members told me they make a point of studying one another's traditions in an ongoing way and also promise to pray for Christian unity. These commitments are on associates’ minds as they work out their way of life together. Associates understand it to be a form of receptivity practiced in common. Likewise, it is my impression in reading Contesting Catholicity that Other Baptists would find this a familiar approach to thinking about their own relation to other Christians. I understand their view also to be a layered one, shaped by prayer and study, with multiple belongings and recognitions at various stages of formality binding them to other groups.
Because of the striking nature of these parallels between associates and Other Baptists, it would be interesting to work them out with precision and perhaps even weigh them against the way of life of other kinds of new ecclesial movements. Such a comparison could offer some clarity for both the lay associates and the Other Baptists who, while they may never want to look alike or take up one another's specific identity work, might find company and encouragement in seeing another rather numerically small Christian community undertake similar ecclesial reflections and sustain themselves under similar challenges.
On a final note, in recent literature by associates themselves there is a growing concern with charism. Associates want to know in what ways the charism to which they have committed has taken different forms in different times and places. They are particularly interested in the corporate forms it has taken outside of religious congregations. They ask questions like the following: How can we trace it? Who recognizes it? How? What are ways groups have received this charism and lived it out well? Several moments in Contesting Catholicity reminded me of this thread of scholarship. The book gives the sense that the history of Other Baptist thought is not a story of odd individuals or ideas strung together in retrospect but rather a story of the church receiving and responding to a traceable impulse over time. The place and the shape of the lived church matter in this process. Individuals and small groups have been formed by belonging to actual churches, by pushing against and sometimes leaving them and forming others, by a dawning attraction to belonging to the church and trying to sort out the implications of that. My main observation is that those touched by this Other Baptist impulse have thus far judged it to be a good impulse. Contesting Catholicity helps us see such judgment has happened within the faithful's shifting understandings of boundaries and horizons of church that are themselves imbedded in the life of the church.
Contesting Catholicity portrays Other Baptists as a small group of the faithful extraordinarily sensitive to the ecclesial implications of their lives together. I wonder if this could be a particular expression of the church catholic. Might this sensitivity be a characteristic of the church amplified in a way comparable to how a charism amplifies? Curtis Freeman has clearly traced a pattern of a distinct gift of the Spirit from and for the church through various historical events and personalities. In Contesting Catholicity, it is my impression that there remains room for subtle variants in reception of the Other Baptist impulse. That is, it is sometimes received generously and with bold creativity and courage, and other times received reluctantly and more subtly. How does the impulse move from individuals to organized group with some measure of common life and back to individuals again?
Overall I appreciate how the book zeroes in on the Holy Spirit at work in salvific ways in small groups of the faithful, inviting them to express a distinct color of the Christian life for the benefit of the whole church. At the University of Dayton I sometimes thought of conversations among Baptist and Catholic students as comments between children all crouched around a spot in the grass, poking with sticks. We would say to each other, “Look! Look over there! Did you see it?! What about over here? This is great!” Often I have redirected my gaze upon the tradition because of an excited observation or question from my Baptist friends. “Look the Baltimore Catechism! The Communion of Saints! The Mystical Body! The Call to Holiness!” I would respond, “Where? What do you see?” I would see things in new ways or more typically, come to awareness of them for the first time in some great eccelesially awake company. The book gives those of us from Catholic and other Christian backgrounds a place in the grass together with Other Baptists who clearly are finding something worth gazing at. As I read Contesting Catholicity I am simultaneously reaching for a general sense of how Baptists have understood church over time and also just what ecclesial gift Other Baptists offer the whole church. I suspect this gaze is part of their gift.
