International Baptist leader to speak at Trinity

Published 11:08 pm Thursday, November 16, 2006

MOULTRIE — A century ago, missionaries donned pith helmets and trekked into Africa to bring the good news of salvation to people who had never seen a white-skinned person, let alone a Bible.

That image remains when people think of missionaries, according to the Rev. Denton Lotz, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, but it is incredibly out of date.

Lotz, who will speak at 11 a.m. Sunday at Trinity Baptist Church, said indigenous churches on all the inhabited continents have grown from the congregations started by those brave missionaries of the 19th century. These native churches have matured, and their roots in the culture and community make them more effective than foreign missionaries in evangelism.

Lotz said the role of the missionary has changed to one of helping these churches find answers to the existential questions that people of our age face: Who is God? Why did Jesus have to die? Where is God amid all this tragedy?

The Baptist World Alliance, begun in 1905, draws Baptists from around the world into one organization. It includes 214 unions and conventions comprising 34 million baptized members.

Baptists make up the largest Protestant group in the world, some 110 million people, Lotz said. And many, regardless of location, are concerned about the same things: Evangelism, social justice, poverty, racism, religious freedom and justice. The BWA works with Baptist churches throughout the world to advance that agenda. Lotz said it presents a larger vision of what it means to be human and Christian in today’s world.

“We have to have a larger vision of the world in which we live,” Lotz said, “and God manifests in different ways and different languages.”

Lotz himself is a former missionary, serving in Eastern Europe during the Communist era. A New York native, he’s also a former lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Bachelor of Sacred Theology from Harvard Divinity School and his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in Germany. He has been general secretary and chief executive officer of the BWA since 1988.

The Rev. Michael Helms, pastor of Trinity Baptist, said Lotz was invited to speak at the church because two Trinity members, Don and Joanne Calloway, were once members of the Falls Church, Va., Baptist Church, where Lotz is also a member. Trinity has ties to both the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship — which is a member of the Baptist World Alliance — and the Southern Baptist Convention — which left the BWA when the alliance accepted the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship into its ranks.

“We don’t have a corner on what it means to be Baptist here in South Georgia,” Helms said. “There are Baptists all over the world. Sometimes we forget that.”

Helms said Sunday will be a rare opportunity for South Georgia Baptists to hear a sermon by someone of Lotz’s stature among the Baptists of the world.