Two hundred and fifty years after the first baptistic confession was penned by the seven London Congregations, the Southern Baptist Convention hosted a visiting English committee on American soil. As Southern Baptists gathered in Memphis on May 1889, John Broadus prepared to introduce this committee of English Baptists brethren to the messengers. Broadus, the president of Southern Baptist Seminary, was humbled and excited to be able to welcome the committee from foreign shores.

Among the committee members was one Dr. Parker who described his amazement at the organization and camaraderie of the SBC. According to Broadus’s letters, “American Baptists reminded him (Parker) of a herd of wild horses with heads erect, rearing and plunging and curvetting, but somehow moving on, all in the same direction.” Parker went on to critique the response of modern Protestantism to baptistic growth in America: “It was sometimes said by other denominations that Baptists had among them a great mass of ignorant people. This was true.” But according to Broadus, Dr. Parker also said that “he felt like replying to those who made this statement, “Why haven’t you a similar mass?'”

This is a great question for a denomination to ask itself, even today. Why do certain denominations not have more people around them moving in the same direction? Why do Southen Baptists have so many churches moving in the same direction? Can we tolerate theological ignorance, and sometimes convictional parity, among our contemporaries while pursuing common goals? John Broadus certainly did. Broadus was not only a respected churchman and scholar in the Baptist world. He lectured and preached at Yale, Cornell, New York, and he turned down countless job offers to serve as president of prominent universities across the U.S. He served on numerous boards and was well-respected by intellectuals across the nation. Broadus was neither ingorant nor anti-intellectual, but he was willing to join hands with other Baptists who shared similar core convictions for the advancement of the gospel. Rather than leading attempts to section off an intellectual affinity group from the larger mass of Baptists in America, he labored tirelessly to educate the ignorant Baptist mass whom he came to love as his family.

Like Broadus, we are best when we are neither pragmatic nor partisan.

As Southern Baptists continue to grapple with the ongoing difficulties of association and cooperation, it would do us good to remember the examples of people from our past like John Broadus. Let us use whatever wisdom and knowledge we possess to educate and inform the mass to which we belong, rather than use it to reduce our forces. Maybe we could come to recognize that we are all ignorant of something. Maybe we could, like Broadus, be at peace with the fact that being part of the SBC means that we will always be among the ingorant. But may we also, like Broadus, pursue theological education and convictional cooperation with tenacity and tireless devotion. And let’s do it together.

A. T. Robertson, Life and Letters of John A. Broadus (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1901).