British Baptists Rebrand

Lynn Green

"British Baptists Rebrand" is the title of a recent report in the Associated Baptist Press about the new leader of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. Lynn Green, the organization's first female general secretary, intends to "embrace a new way of being for the 21st century." We don't know what exactly she will change, but the Baptist Union was already becoming apostate at the end of the 19th century when Charles Haddon Spurgeon separated from it in protest in 1888. That apostasy has long been complete. In the early 1970s, for example, Michael Taylor, principal of the Baptist Union's Northern Baptist College, denied that Jesus Christ is God in his message to the London Baptist Assembly titled, "How much of a man was Jesus?" Though many protested the man's heresy, the Baptist Union refused to discipline him or remove him from office. In 1986, the Australian Beacon made the following evaluation about the Baptist Union: "It is a Union which harbours apostates and succors infidels while ostracizing faithful servants of Christ. It is a friend of Rome, a bed-fellow of idolaters and spiritists in its membership of the World Council of Churches. No true man of God could remain within it in good conscience" (Australian Beacon, No. 240, July 1986). In 1989, the Baptist Union yoked together with the Roman Catholic Church in the newly formed ecumenical union in Britain.

(Friday Church News Notes, September 20, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, [email protected], 866-295-4143)

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