I’m at the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters in Nashville this week to explore the Southern Baptist archives. I’m especially interested in how Southern Baptists engaged with Church Growth Movement ideas. In a roundabout way, this has much to do with the civil rights movement.
To explore how white evangelicals grappled with race, you can’t just explore it as a political question. A denominational statement on Brown v. Board or the Civil Rights Act is interesting, but it doesn’t capture the more important activity occurring on the ground. Historians need to be more aware of the ways white evangelicals turn political questions into ecclesial ones. So if we want to know how they responded to the civil rights movement, their church planting strategies may have more to tell us than their explicit political or racial statements.
Anyway, I’m finding lots of good stuff today, but I’m way too fried to talk about it!
Colorblind Christians 