I attended Charlotte's First Baptist Church today, a large church on the edge of Charlotte's uptown. I used to have lunch here on Wednesdays years many years ago. My manager at Bank of America was a member of this church at that time and invited me.
If you know a Baptist, they tend to invite you to things. Things at church.
We as a family used to attend the church's Christmas spectacular when the kids were young. The opportunity to visit churches around Charlotte that were putting on free Christmas and Easter performances has always been a nice part of living here.
This being the time that it is, most of the people "attending" the service were online. More than half of the pews were roped off. Those pews that were open had small clusters of people in them. First Baptist can likely seat a couple thousand people. It probably had about one hundred and fifty people in it today.
The place has not changed a bit from years ago... in certain ways.
Baptists are self-described as a denomination that seeks "to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations." As such, Acts 1:8 sits on one of the walls. It's next to a map of the world.
On the other hand, other things have definitely changed quite a bit.
The service was contemporary, so that was deeply different from what I would have seen here years ago. The lighting was a soothing purple. A band performed - as far as I could tell, they were a family. Father, mother, three kids.
Good music. The band appeared to be more into the music than the congregation. As mentioned, the attendance was COVID-sparse and those who were there didn't seem to be jamming out to the music very much.
The organ pipes were silent and seemed there only to serve as an interesting backdrop to the purple stage. "Just As I Am" and "Lift High the Cross" are well-known Baptist hymns. They definitely don't sing those in the modern worship service.
A young girl got baptized. Baptism only after someone makes a confession of faith is the norm in many denominations. But I don't believe I have ever see this before. They did a full immersion of the girl, the crowd applauded, the little girl and the Pastor got a little emotional at the end.
I'd never seen anything like it.
Touching.
Interesting.
The sermon was engaging, but it felt like the wrong one to give on this particular Sunday. The pastor told a story of a mission trip he took years ago to Malawi where he helped bring a witch doctor to faith in Yeshua in a remote part of the countryside.
The theme of a white missionary converting an African shaman seemed thematically problematic for that morning.
I would have expected that every pulpit in the US would be filled with words of conviction about our racial inequities as a society. Maybe finishing up with some words on reconciliation and hope after a scathing indictment of our imbalances.
I don't want to imply that the "white missionary converting African witch doctor" was intentionally chosen for this Sunday. I don't know that. But I certainly didn't have my expectations met on hearing a challenging message on the most important issue in the public square.
On this question of race, the crowd in attendance was not uniformly white. This is a good sign that things may be changing. As mentioned in another post, the painful history of race in the South led to the creation of two separate Baptist denominations. That appears to be changing slightly, if this mildly mixed crowd was any indication.
Green shoots?
Slowly.
There was some crowd enthusiasm during the sermon. As the pastor got to a salient point, one woman kept yelling "Preach!"
A man yelled "Amen!" at other points.
That was different for me, too.
All in all, it was a thought-provoking sermon and a good story, but it certainly missed the mark in terms of subject matter for America right now.
To see some limited evolutionary change in a denomination known for its conservatism felt like some grounds for optimism.
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