Today someone steered me to this article from a Baptist church in the southern part of the USA that has remained in the SBC even when it would have been easier to leave.

They describe themselves as 'moderate Baptists' and seek to share a 'big tent' which is not a crazy circus, but a safe space in which a wide range of genuinely held theological understandings can co-exist.

I like the article and it challenges me. 

I like it because I think the 'big tent' (which can be as colourful as a circus Big Top without becoming the associated disaparging metaphor of disarray, noise and nonsense) is what we aspire to and, in some measure, achieve.  The willingness to accept that "I might be wrong", that our understandings are always ever only provisional, that "the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word", held within a conviction to Baptist principles of local autonomous authority within a covenanted connexionalism seems to be what this is about.

The article challenges me because I'm a wimp or a wuss when it comes to conflict.  So I had a bit of a "cue spooky music" moment when I read this article the day after drafting a sermon in response to the Letter to Philemon.  The sermon doesn't do what the article does, but it does hinge on how diverse responses to compex matters can each have value.

So, in my sleep deprived brain lots of little sparks are sparking - and that has to be a good thing!