God's love can't be limited by words on a sign

Landmark Baptist Church, which meets in a storefront I pass each morning, has a sign that gives me pause: "God is exclusive, not inclusive."

Beside that is another sign proclaiming, "We are Baptists, not Protestants."

Landmark isn't listed, and there's no phone number on the sign, so I couldn't call to see what they mean with these messages, but both set me to thinking.

I'm puzzled about the Baptist-Protestant distinction since religious historians (see the Denominational Family Trees at Association of Religion Data Archives, www.thearda.com) trace the Baptist lineage to reactions to 17th-century Puritans. The Puritans wanted to purify the Anglican Church, so they were sort of super-Protestants. Under Cromwell's rule, they sent out squads to scan the streets for any woman who dared to rouge her cheeks or wear a ribbon on her black dress.

The Baptists came out of the Puritans, and, you can tell by listening to their louder sons, some apparently retain the sense that moral behavior must be imposed, by fiat if necessary, on a sinful, careless people.

There are plenty of Baptists who understand that only God, not laws, can change hearts. But they are not the preachers who get quoted by the secularists who fear that a "Christian Taliban" would hobble scientific inquiry, annihilate the wall between religion and government, and limit health, education and entertainment choices.

That Protestant-Baptist question is probably one of semantics. It's the bigger sign that troubles me more.

Is God looking to exclude people or to include people?

Our answer, I suspect, says more about who we are than who God is. Anne Lamott warns, "You know you probably haven't got the right God when the God you worship hates all the same people you do."

But our answer to that question, also, will indicate how open we are to working with people outside of our own corral - such as during the Interfaith Mission Service's Day of Service and Unity coming up Sept. 8.

One fundamentalist minister, writing last year on the Internet about SoulStock, the huge Christian music festival held each May in Athens, warned his teenagers not to go. He was concerned that some of the bands preach that it is possible to be saved other than by following the formula his denomination espouses.

These "Password Christians" apparently believe that when Mohandas Gandhi arrived at the Pearly Gates, God said, "Yes, you lived a selfless life of poverty, service and love, but you didn't believe in the right way on my son, Jesus Christ. You can't come in."

Many Christians find that image of God blasphemous and would just as soon leave the mechanism of salvation to God. Meanwhile they get on with doing to others as they would have them do to themselves - while witnessing to the richness of the understanding of God they receive by following Jesus.

The work and words of Marcus Borg, Jim Wallis, and the Baptist Rick Warren, point to an emerging Christian church moving to champion what it includes - justice, mercy, kindness, service - rather than what it excludes.

We will always, in every tradition, need the voices of the Puritans to remind us of the failings of humanity and the dangers of forgetting to check our lives and policies against eternal principles. But we need, too, the humbleness to understand that God must be bigger than our parochial definitions.

God may, in fact, be exclusive. But surely we here, stumbling around together on this beautiful little blue marble in space, are called to love, serve and work with all of our neighbors, no matter which words they use.