Oh, dear, Melinda!! I know the Baptists seem like a joke, but there are so many of them, and they are so determined that it is scary. I am really concerned that impressionable women and young girls in more conservative and religious parts of the country will buy into this male-dominant value system, and end up being the victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse as the result.
Did you know they are trying to convert the Jews, as well? I guess you have to laugh or something!!!
Baptist Effort To Convert Jews In Full
Swing
Man in charge of crusade has
committed his life to it
Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer
Tuesday, June 9, 1998
His job is to turn American Jews into evangelical
Christians, but James Sibley says the Jewish
community should not fear his controversial calling.
''It's not like Jews are becoming Christians by the
thousands,'' says Sibley, hired by the Southern
Baptists as their national consultant on Jewish
evangelism. ''They are becoming nothing by the
thousands.''
Sibley says secularism, not Christianity, is the main
threat to Judaism.
Maybe so, but the Southern Baptist move has
enraged American Jewish leaders, who call it an
insult and major setback for interfaith relations.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, says the church's
2-year-old effort to convert Jews reminds him of
the Holocaust and calls it ''an affront to the
memory of those who were murdered by
intolerance.''
This week, the Baptists are holding their national
convention in Salt Lake City, where thousands of
voting ''messengers'' have gathered to set policy
for this increasingly fundamentalist Christian church.
Their three-day assembly begins today.
EVANGELICAL BLITZ
Over the weekend, an advance team of Baptist
missionaries -- including Sibley -- knocked on
doors, held revival meetings and flooded the Utah
media with a $600,000 advertising campaign to
evangelize the Mormon majority around the Great
Salt Lake.
Two years ago, at a similar church gathering in
New Orleans, it was the Jews who got the Baptists
unwanted evangelical attention.
Sibley, a Dallas native who says the Lord called
him to evangelize the Israelites, was author of a
resolution calling on the 16 million- member church
to ''direct our energies and resources toward the
proclamation of the Gospel to the Jews.''
He was also hired to do the job.
''Mormons are not viewed by us as the enemy.
Neither are Jews,'' Sibley said. ''This is not some
kind of anti-Semitism. We believe Jesus is the
Messiah and the only way of salvation.''
David Harris, executive director of the American
Jewish Committee, said the Baptist effort to
convert Jews has been a failure.
''It has not produced the surge of new converts
that the Southern Baptists hoped for,'' Harris said in
a telephone interview. ''It is especially unfortunate
that to affirm their own beliefs they have to deny the
beliefs of others.''
''Judaism is a nonproselytizing religion,'' he added.
''But they see Jews as fair game and the ultimate
prize.''
In the 50 years since the Holocaust, mainline
Christian churches have stopped talking about
converting Jews, although aggressive evangelical
groups like the San Francisco organization ''Jews
for Jesus'' have continued the crusade.
'DUAL-COVENANT THEOLOGY'
Many mainline theologians now speak of
''dual-covenant theology,'' the idea that both
Christians and Jews have an equal and valid pact
with God.
''It's a slick idea, but based on human reason
rather than the word of God,'' replied Sibley.
''Jesus is the only way of salvation, for all men,
regardless.''
Sibley sat in the lobby of the Little America Hotel in
Salt Lake, where small groups of Baptist
missionaries gathered to plot out their Utah
crusade.
A soft-spoken man with a Southern accent, small
mustache and receding hairline, Sibley has wanted
to convert Jews since he was 14 years old and
read the Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 2, Verse 3.
''Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel,
to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me,''
that passage reads. ''They and their ancestors have
transgressed against me to this very day.''
14 YEARS IN ISRAEL
Sibley moved to Israel and spent 14 years there,
raising his two children in the Jewish homeland.
Before the 1996 Southern Baptist meeting in New
Orleans, Sibley spent four years trying to get
church leaders to consider his plan for Jewish
evangelism.
''We are addressing something that has been
neglected for a long time,'' he said. ''There had
never been a course in our seminaries on Jewish
evangelism, although we had courses on Muslim
evangelism and Eastern religions.''
In his new job with the Southern Baptist's North
American Mission Board, Sibley is organizing
intensive seminary courses and visiting Southern
Baptist congregations around the country.
His main goal is to teach other Southern Baptists
''how to share the Gospel in a way the Jewish
people can hear it.''
Sibley's boss, Phil Roberts, director of interfaith
witness evangelism for the Georgia mission board,
said the program is working.
''We have growing numbers of messianic
congregations -- Jewish churches that meet on
Saturday and follow Jewish tradition, study
Hebrew, maintain ties with the Jewish tradition, yet
confess that Jesus is the Messiah,'' Roberts said.
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