We have witnessed this week a remarkable moment in Christian witness. The death and funerary rites for Pope John Paul II produced an outpouring of love from tens of millions around the world. This pope served the Lord and the Church and the world with the kind of servant spirit and shepherd heart we long for in our religious leaders but seldom find. He was an example of true humility. He preferred the power of love to the love of power. His commitment to the reign of God in the world allowed him to see the bankruptcy of communism and consumerism alike. His commitment to life led him to oppose war and capital punishment as much as abortion and euthanasia.

Many Catholics disagreed with the pope on many things, and yet they respected and loved him for his faith and faithfulness. Baptists have reason to be thankful for him, too. While he never fully recognized us and other non-Catholics as being truly the Church per se, he reached out to us all in Christian fellowship. The truth is, Baptists and other Protestants have been taking our bearings from the Catholic compass since our beginnings. We would hardly know ourselves apart from how we are different from the Catholics. Our differences have too long defined us more than our similarities. Sometimes that has meant bitter and unkind rhetoric. We have been guilty of declaring ourselves the true church and the Catholic Church the false church in the very ways that the Catholic Church has done to us. Sometimes we have been all too sure that we are Christians and too unsure that they are, just as they have done to us. But they did it to us first! Not very Golden Rule of either of us, don’t you know?!

The day has come and is long past when we must stop the ensmalling language of us-and-them and work together toward the greater WE. To do so does not mean that we all become Catholics or Baptists. It means walking the salvation road together after Jesus Christ and learning from one another along the way.

In that spirit, we begin today a three-week look at what Baptists might contribute to that conversation. This series of sermons, called Baptist Persuasions, was conceived before the death of the Holy Father and is not meant to be disrespectful to Catholics by its timing. But it helps us now and then to take a fresh look at what we believe about the church, about the church’s relation to the state, and about the church’s relation to the world and other religions. That is the brief outline of the series.

Our text today details the confession of Simon Peter that Jesus is the Christ, and it looks at how Christ conceived of and constituted the church from that moment forward. It begins with Jesus asking his disciples who people say he is. They answer John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. But then Jesus puts the question to them more personally: Who do you say that I am? And this is the point at which Baptists jump out of their seats and say, “See, this is the point of it all. Christ poses the personal question to each of us and all of us. He puts us on the spot to see what our answer will be. No one can answer for anyone else. We can all answer only for ourselves.”

Peter answers for himself: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Baptists believe this is the crucial moment. Peter’s confession begins it all. But Catholics believe this it the crucial moment, too. Peter’s confession begins it all. Catholics emphasize PETER’S confession; Baptists Peter’s CONFESSION. For Catholics Peter speaks as the head of the church, while for Baptists Peter speaks as one of the church. For Catholics Peter becomes the father of the church; for Baptists Peter is our honored older brother. The point is not Peter but Peter’s faith.

Jesus declares that Peter did not come to this insight on his own but through God’s act of revealing it to him. And we still believe that no one comes to confess the identity of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, without the Spirit of God opening the eyes of faith and heart of love to this truth. We love because God’s first loved us. That is always the order of things. We do not discover God; God discovers us. God discloses God’s self to us. Our knowledge of God is really acknowledgement of God. And we believe that acknowledgement of God happens by the very active revelation of God to every individual, just as it did with Peter. We do not believe that a saving faith is ever secondhand; personal experience with the resurrected and ever-living Son of God is always firsthand faith.

One of our Baptist historians, Walter Shurden, puts it this way: In the Baptist faith tradition, individualism in religious matters manifests itself at the very beginning of the Christian life.  Baptists insist that saving faith is personal, not impersonal.  It is relational, not ritualistic.  It is direct, not indirect.  It is a lonely, frightened, sinful individual before an almighty, loving, and gracious God.

So faith is convictional. And this is the reason we do not baptize babies, although our baby dedication ceremonies are virtual dry baptisms. We believe someone should be convicted or persuaded to become a Christian by the mysterious work of God revealing Christ and by the church bearing witness to Christ and calling out faith. That’s why when we baptize someone, we ask, What is YOUR confession of faith? “Jesus is Lord,” the baptizand answers, and she answers in that moment for herself and only for herself.

As in infant baptizing traditions, we want parents and godparents and church leaders to pass on the faith to children, but with them we believe that faith must be received in order for it to be their faith. A pass needs to be caught. And that is what confirmation aims at in other traditions. The baptized come to belief themselves and take their public stand with the church that passed the faith to them.

We delay baptism until that profession of faith because we emphasize this persuasion principle. We believe people must be conscious enough to understand that they stand alone before God in this matter of the eternal destiny of their souls. No one can stand in for them except Christ, and they must open their hearts to him themselves. There may be and should be earnest and powerful persuasion to that end, but there must never be coercion. Coercion disrespects the dignity and freedom of each person before God. Coerced faith is no faith at all.

That’s why a great Baptist preacher of the last generation, Carlyle Marney, put it pithily: The rabbi begins, “Thus saith the Lord!”  The priest begins, “As the Church has always said. …”  The average Protestant begins, ‘Now, brothers and sisters, it seems to Me. …” Whether it seems to you or not is of course the second-most-crucial matter. The first is whether it is so that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. But then it must be so to you for that to make any great difference in your life.

And this is what makes the church the church: that we each of us confess for ourselves that Jesus is Lord. It makes all the difference.

My colleague and friend Curtis Freeman tells about a curious experience with some neighbors that illustrates the point. “A few years ago, our family had some neighbors that were not Christians.  They observed that there was something different about us.  Then one day they made a connection: These folks have something we don’t have.  They go to church.  We will go to church.  So they did—Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening.  They even began working with the preschool and apartment ministries.  But it wasn’t long before they dropped out.  They gave the usual excuses:  The people weren’t friendly; they were always asking for money; the answers just didn’t work for us.  But the real problem is that they had missed the point of the church. They had never taken the first step. They never professed their faith in Jesus Christ. Without that, the church is just another social club or service organization. You can never join up with this group unless you declare your faith in him as Lord and Christ.  Without a personal, and indeed, embarrassingly public confession of faith, there are no living stones with which God can build the church.  Our evangelical commission is to take this question to all creation: “Who is Jesus Christ to you?”

But there’s more to faith than what it means to you as an individual. Faith is personal, but it is never private. When Peter confessed his faith in Jesus, Jesus went on to talk of building his church on this foundation. Faith involves Christ being in you, but it also involves your being in Christ. And as such we are part of something more than a collection of believers: we are members of Christ’s own body; we are signs of his presence on earth. And we are that together, not by ourselves as individuals.

But what is the foundation on which the church is built? The Catholic Church says it is Peter himself, and thus upon all the successors of Peter—those who sit in his chair, the popes of Rome. You are Peter, Jesus says, and upon this rock I will build my church. You are Petros, the Greek language has it; and upon this petra I will build my church. Petros is the proper noun and petra the common noun for rock. So is Peter the literal foundation of the church or the metaphor of it? Well, in the Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken, the proper noun and common for rock are the same—Kepha/kepha, as in Cephas. So it’s hard to say. And the truth is that the Catholic reading is possible. But later, Jesus goes on to grant the same responsibility for binding and loosing, for leading the church, to all the apostles. So it seems Peter is representative of something other than just himself. And Baptists say he represents anyone who confesses Christ in the same way Peter does. The church is made up of confessing Christians that believe and have been baptized.

Now, it is true that in some churches believing and being baptized do not happen in that order. And yet, wherever both occur, in whatever order, we are happy as Baptists to enjoy Christian fellowship, even if in most of our Baptist churches now that does not extend to church membership. Because of our commitment to persuasion in personal faith experience, we believe our pattern to be best, even if we do not believe that you have to do it our way in order to be right with God. So we admit that we might be a bit narrower on this point than God.

Baptists emphasize the individual, while Catholics emphasize the church. And we need each other to learn the proper balance. Baptists can become so committed to our individualism that individual Christians behave like churches unto themselves. Marney said that we are like tubs that sit on our own bottoms. But faithful community in Christ is more than a choice of whether you would like to be among some Christians or not. You may be personally accountable to God and in need of a personal experience of faith, but you are part of something that Christ created when you join up with him. You are a member of his body; you are baptized into Christ once you receive Christ into yourself. And as such you cannot go it alone without hurting Christ and yourself and everyone else joined together in him. You would be cutting yourself off from the body, spiritually amputating yourself. And you cannot live long or well apart from Christ’s body.

So convictional faith and faithful community make up one grand experience of life in Christ. If you want to know more about it, you might with good profit ask a Catholic or some other kind of Christian for their take. But since you are here, I pray you will be persuaded by the Baptist persuasion that genuine faith is convictional faith, and a faithful community is a persuaded church. Or so it seems to me.