Southern Baptists vowed Monday they will press a campaign to bring 100,000 missionaries to Chicago despite the misgivings of local religious leaders, opening a public breach between the Nashville-based evangelicals and Chicago’s mainline Protestant, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox leaders.
Rev. Paige Patterson, president of the 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, sent a sharply worded letter to the Council of Religious Leaders of Greater Chicago that defended the Baptists’ right to evangelize and left little room for a dialogue sought by the Chicago clergy.
“Please be advised that all . . . unworthy attempts will fail to intimidate Southern Baptists from fulfilling the task assigned by Jesus,” Patterson wrote. “. . . You appear to desire religious liberty for Bible-believing evangelicals as long as they agree not to exercise that freedom.”
For more than a year, the Southern Baptist Convention has been planning a campaign to bring 100,000 missionaries to Chicago during the year 2000, though questions remain about when they will be in the city and whether they can mobilize that many people. It also is unclear exactly what they will do here, including how much of their effort will be devoted to seeking converts.
The defiant letter by Patterson is the group’s first public response to an appeal issued last week by the Chicago council, an umbrella group representing 40 religious institutions, that the Southern Baptists reconsider their plans to send waves of missionaries into Chicago.
Southern Baptist organizers insist the Chicago 2000 campaign is not meant to target any group of people for conversion, but is designed instead to reach out to the entire city.
In other efforts this fall, however, the Southern Baptists–the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and an increasingly strident voice for conservative evangelicals–have used important Jewish and Hindu holidays to target those groups for conversion. That caused concern among some Chicago clergy, especially rabbis, that the Chicago 2000 campaign might single out minority faith groups for proselytism.
More deeply, plans for a large-scale campaign to evangelize touch on a volatile subject among people of many different faiths: whether and how to seek converts.
Some, including evangelical Christians, feel obligated to bring people to their faith. Others, including many Jews and mainline Protestants, believe that proselytizing implies a judgment that one’s beliefs are better than another’s, a judgment that can lead to bigotry. Still others feel a call to evangelize, but struggle with a way to witness their faith to others without demeaning them.
For two months, the Chicago Council of Religious Leaders discussed a possible response to the Baptist campaign.
The matter is particularly delicate for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, which promotes its own evangelization, but also has taken great pains over the last two decades to build good relations with the Jewish community.
Ultimately, concern for those interfaith relations held sway, as the Catholic leadership teamed up with more outspoken mainline Protestant leaders in support of Jewish concerns about proselytizing.
On Saturday, the council sent a letter to Patterson asking that the Southern Baptists reconsider their plans for Chicago and enter into dialogue with the council. The letter, first reported in Sunday’s editions of the Tribune, drew pointed criticism from Patterson.
“Letters released to the media prior to delivery to their intended recipients can never be considered as serious attempts to engender either cooperation or understanding,” Patterson wrote.
He also took a scriptural shot at council members.
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“During the lifetime of Jesus and throughout the history of the early church, religious leaders often opposed the witness of Jesus and his followers, but the common people heard them gladly,” Patterson wrote.
For Patterson, fellow leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and local Southern Baptists, the most objectionable part of the Chicago council’s letter was its link between targeted proselytism and hate crimes.
The Chicago clergy wrote, “While we are confident that your volunteers would come with entirely peaceful intentions, a campaign of the nature and scope you envision could contribute to a climate conducive to hate crimes.” The letter went on to cite the shooting of six Jews in Rogers Park and the vandalism of a Villa Park mosque over the summer as evidence of the vulnerability of religious minorities.
Patterson turned the tables on the council Monday.
“If there is violence or `hate crimes,’ such will not be perpetrated by Southern Baptists or in any way engendered by our compassionate message. To the contrary, we are much more likely to be the targets of such attacks,” Patterson wrote back. “Furthermore, letters like the one that you wrote to the press, under the guise of writing to me, are more likely the stuff from which hate crimes emerge.”
In Chicago, Rev. Paul Rutgers, the executive director of the Council of Religious Leaders, said Monday the original letter was clear in distinguishing between the peaceful motivations of the Baptists and the possible unintended consequences of their campaign.
Rutgers also reiterated the invitation to dialogue with the Southern Baptists.
In a telephone interview Monday evening, Patterson did not rule out talking with the Chicago council but did not encourage it either.
Rev. James Queen, director of the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association, an umbrella group for 185 Southern Baptist churches in the area, said that he already has met with members of the council and plans to continue talking.
Queen emphasized his intent that the Southern Baptist missionaries who come to Chicago “reach out to the entire city with acts of love and kindness.”