Hope for Baptists

A Baptist historian on the emerging church:

The emerging church offers hope for Baptists, Leonard insisted. "I'd rather be Baptist in the postmodern period than anything else."

Baptists should reassert ritual, particularly the "danger and decisiveness" inherent in the ordinances of believer's baptism by immersion and the Lord's Supper, Leonard said.

With their emphasis on religious liberty and a believer's church grounded in uncoerced faith, Baptists uniquely are positioned to respond to secularism, pluralism and religious establishmentarianism, he asserted.

"We should affirm and accept pluralism without running to syncretism," he said.

(Via Andrew Jones.)