Ship of Fools: Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York City
The Mystery Worshipper
Shipmate
Ship of Fools: Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York City
‘Don’t get silly, now!’ Honor your mother every day!
Read the full Mystery Worshipper report here
Comments
It certainly is NOT possible to please all the people, all of the time...
I don't think it was, or is, a question of feeling welcome or not feeling welcome. Whites would avoid these churches simply because they were "Black."
Abyssinian Baptist Church was formed by Blacks who were not welcome to worship in a White church. To their credit, they have accomplished many positive things for their members over the years, and still do.
For Whites to say now (and I confess I am guilty of this in my report) that they do not feel welcome here is, if you'll excuse the expression, the pot calling the kettle black. That is not to say that it is right -- it just **is**.
What I was curious about was what parts of the service were fast-forwarded through, and how that might have affected the report on the service. I’ll confess that this taps into some of my concerns about streamed worship, and how we participate in it. Are we really participating in worship if we can fast-forward through bits, or are we more like spectators? (And apologies if that’s more of an Ecclesiantics question.)
I take the Abyssinian thing to be analogous to Rastafarian ideas about an ideal Africa.
There is one statement on the NBC website which I find intriguing and which seemingly contrasts with the position of some American (and even British) Evangelicals: "The National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. believes that religious liberty is a gift from God. We support the freedom of the individual conscience to choose to worship God according to the dictates of one’s heart. And while we celebrate our own liberty to embrace biblical truth without compromise, we also support the first amendment to the Constitution which guarantees freedom of religion for all Americans. In this light, as Americans, we join with other faith communities in supporting the right of Islamic and other religious bodies to worship according to the dictates and mandates of their faith expression".
Yes, Southern Baptist Convention is a different animal altogether. There is also American Baptist Churches USA and Free Will Baptist, and perhaps others I'm not aware of.
Yes, there are those, but none in our part of the world. They seem to be clustered in the western and south-western suburbs There is the Coptic Diocese, which made a major contribution a couple of years ago to an ecumenical activity. I think that's primarily aimed at those from Egypt.
That is intriguing and, I suspect, very unusual. I’d certainly like to be in a position to explore it in person, but a bit tricky living on a different Continent!
Then there’s the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship—moderates who left
The National Baptist Convention is a historically and predominantly African American denomination formed through the mergers of various earlier bodies in the late 1800s.
And I’ve realized that I failed to complete a sentence. Not sure how that happened as I’m sure I remember typing out the rest of the sentence, but oh well. The penultimate sentence of my post above should have been:
Then there’s the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship—moderates who left the Southern Baptist Convention when it took a decidedly conservative, and the moderates would say “un-Baptist,” turn in the 1980s.
Interesting variety of Baptist churches in the US, though. In my native county of Kent in SE England, the Baptists were extraordinarily fissiparous during the great expansion of non-conformity in the 19th C.
Literally hundreds of chapels sprang up, with pastors who left other chapels because their pastors were *preaching a different Gospel*. Often, the *new* chapel would be in the same street, or village, as the original, but few chapels of either type now remain.