The following is an excerpt from Terry's book,

My Subtle Shift from Baptist Fundamentalist to Unitarian Universalist,
Sermons of a newly-liberated ministry

CHAPTER 1

To be like Jesus;
To be like Jesus.
All I ask is to be like him.
All through life's journey,
O'er hill and valley,
All I ask is to be like him.

That was one of the many Christian songs I sang as a little boy growing up in Baptist churches. I am grateful for this part of my religious heritage, teaching me to follow the example of Jesus and to study the Bible. These emphases took hold deep within me at an early age and I stand today as their product.

I. Baptists' God

However, along with introducing me to the marvelous life of Jesus of Nazareth recorded in the Bible, my Baptist family and teachers also tried to teach me to view Jesus as my personal savior. This teaching did not fit me and caused me much difficulty.

A. Experience

In Baptist terms, about noon on 4 May 1969 I was saved. That was my all-important day among Baptists when, as a seven-year-old, I chose to respond to my dad's evangelistic preaching in the Langston Memorial Baptist Church near Conway, SC. During the invitational closing hymn of that morning service, I stood at the front pew and repeated each line of the sinner's prayer as my dad recited it in my ear. I prayed for God's forgiveness of all my sins and accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. During the evening service that day, my dad immersed me in baptism as an external symbol of my internal death and resurrection. Thus, with the ability to point to that specific time of my repentance when I fulfilled the conditions for salvation delineated in the Bible, I should have had, as all fundamentalists must, a firm logic for hoping in my own salvation. But the more I paid attention to the constant preaching on how to get saved, the more I struggled internally with whether I had done it right. Within me grew a nagging doubt regarding my own salvation. The older I got, the more I obsessively worried that I could not have known what I was doing as a seven-year-old and that, because I had not done it right, God had not saved me. My powers of analysis were given an early challenge as I tried to discern the actual object of my trust that spring morning: had I really got it right by securing my hope in Jesus Christ's penal substitutionary atonement or had I misunderstood and actually thought it was my prayer that would save me? If I had hoped in my prayer rather than in Jesus' blood as my hope for salvation, then that meant I was trusting in my works rather than God's grace, and, as any Baptist should know, that is not good enough. The literalism and emotional preaching of my dad disturbed me as I feared that in the single most important transaction of my life I had erroneously relied on my own good works in praying a prayer as the basis for my personal salvation and was really just as bound for hell fire as Judas Iscariot and Adolf Hitler! I repeatedly tried to get saved, eliminating more and more of my reliance on my good works so that I could realize a complete reliance upon Christ's atonement. But I never felt the certainty that hard-and-fast answers seemed to give my fellow Baptists. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it was serious business for a child frightened by preaching that it determined whether or not he would spend eternity in literal hell fire.

B. Theory

Now, upon more mature reflection, I see what I went through as a sensitive child taking seriously the immature faith of my family and teachers. I was sincerely carrying out the noblest ideal of any religious seeker. I was integrating my soul with my fullest understanding of fundamentalism's version of the absolute truth. My church defined the truth for me as the not-so-old-time religion of Trinitarian Christianity. So I took that seriously and struggled mightily to match my theology with biblical theology. As I maintained constant vigilance in judging myself, as all good fundamentalists should, I began to detect that the insecurity of my faith was not all my fault. I came to question if this God really was so narrow as I was taught, how could he possibly justify damning the millions of souls who had never heard of Jesus? My conscience troubled me to think I was required to worship such an unfair and mean God who would save me while condemning the heathen to the infinite torments of hell. And, to be sure, Baptists do insist on that point. Hear these sentences from the Articles of Religious Belief Subscribed to by the Faculty of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Article V: "All men [sic] are under condemnation through personal sin, and escape from condemnation comes only to those who hear and accept the gospel. The heathen, then, are under condemnation just as well as those who hear and reject the gospel." With such mean-spirited images of God mixed into my Baptist training, I struggled for years.

II. Jesus' God

A. Experience

That struggle continued as I entered the Baptist College at Charleston, SC (now Charleston Southern University). There, I continued my life-time habit of going to church, visiting churches of various denominations. That period remains for me a wonderful memory. I vividly remember those halcyon Sunday mornings amid the historic architectural beauties of downtown Charleston, taking me back to when colonists walked those cobblestone streets. Yet, as I educated myself in the Sunday services of the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Christians, and the Methodists whose services I attended, I was surprised by how much these churches were alike. Then, upon a day amid those historic sights, I happened to step into a church that was very different. On 7 February 1982, I made my first visit to a Unitarian Church. My aesthetic indulgence in the architecture of those old Charleston churches was raised to a new high as my eyes drank in the ornateness of the Gothic sanctuary with its Rayonnat surface decoration of colonettes, shafts, and vault ribs modelled on Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey. But I was even more impressed with an incident in that first service that in any other church might have created an uproar. The minister had apparently preached a sermon some weeks prior advocating pacifism. As there were several military bases in the Charleston area, it is not surprising that some of the members were in the military who naturally were unconvinced by the minister's preaching on that subject. Time was given to one of the men to present what the calligraphied order of service modestly listed as "A Sermon Response." It was, in fact, a sermon rebuttal. The church member systematically refuted the whole point of the minister's sermon. I feared that I had chosen an awful day to visit for I expected there would be blood on the floor by the postlude. But when the layman concluded his rebuttal, the congregation sang a hymn, the service went on according to plan, and the minister preached on another topic. There was no blood on the floor. There was no specially called congregational meeting to dismiss either the minister or his opponents. I saw nothing but civility between a religious authority and parishioners with whom he disagreed. I was impressed! Here was a church whose members thought for themselves. Here was a church whose ministers were tolerant. And I discovered hope anew that if they respect members' doubts about their preaching so much as to let them be aired from the pulpit, maybe these Unitarian Universalists could regard the doubts suppressed within my heart on the back pew.

B. Theory

That was 1982. During the years since, as I continued to struggle with my studies for and my experiences in the Baptist ministry, I grew bolder to ask more insistently of Baptists my questions. Essentially, my basic question was, how can the Baptist God be the same as Jesus' loving Father who, he taught, "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Mt 5:45)? I came to ask, why must I, and everyone else for that matter, bear such an immense responsibility for getting true salvation and proclaiming it to the world when the Bible itself declares, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor 15:22)? It's the same all who Baptists are so quick to condemn as sinners who, according to the Bible, are redeemed universally by Christ! The more I studied church history, the more was illuminated for me the evolution through the centuries of doctrines, such as Trinitarianism, which were not in the Bible. The contradictions between the Bible and orthodox Christian doctrine convinced me that liberals have just as much right as conservatives to thump the Bible! I had read the Bible through repeatedly. But I was drawn more and more back to the gospels. I remember reading each day from a harmony of the gospels, a book that seeks to combine all four gospels into one chronological narrative, and seeing in Jesus' critics the same Pharisaical spirit that Baptists represented to me. I realized that the unique perspectives of the quixotic Jesus, his simple Twelve Disciples, the genius Paul, and all the rest of that august Christian company were ignited into vital spirituality by the devotion of each to his whole conscience, fully integrating left-brain convictions with right-brain emotions. Each transcended the conformist faith of the established religion of the past, to exemplify his own vital, individual faith. Each one's spiritual brilliance drew from, to use Ralph Waldo Emerson's term, his self-reliance. I became convinced that the premise was false that first-century Christianity was once for all revealed from God; I saw that its theology was in fact developed by people. Like William Ellery Channing of Boston, it was the Bible that led me to Unitarianism. As Channing said in his famous sermon, "Unitarian Christianity," in 1811, "With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit." After I had traced my religious heritage back to its allegedly-pure beginning, I found a wide fork in the road that my religious teachers had never noticed. Then, my dilemma was whether to commit to the church fathers' purportedly-perfect theology of conformist faith in which I had been nourished all my life or the historical Jesus' example of self-reliant faith. Having heeded so seriously all my childhood lessons to be like Jesus, I pondered a shift from conformist Christians' conclusions about speculative doctrines to the nonconformist Jesus' example of spiritual integrity. Having been taught by fundamentalists to follow Jesus, I felt I had to make a subtle shift and follow Jesus all the way, right on out of organized Christianity. The religion of Jesus, appeared to hold the same misunderstanding and loneliness that he suffered in his critiques of Judaism. The religion about Jesus, offered me more financial profit and more approval of my family, friends, and many fellow Southerners. The example of Jesus and his most inspiring followers showed me how, at all costs, to adhere passionately to my fullest understanding of truth. So I held on to the pursuit of truth on which fundamentalists had launched me. I became convinced that the honest thing to do-the way of integrity-was to identify myself formally as a Unitarian Universalist. On January 15, 1995, one month after I finished giving Southern Baptists every opportunity to settle my theological doubts at the Ph.D. level, I carried out formally the subtle shift to Unitarian Universalism that I'd begun internally more than thirteen years prior. My sister saw this as apostasy and said I needed to invite Jesus into my heart. I replied, That's exactly what I've done by becoming a radical challenger of encrusted religious traditions! And so it is with a clear conscience that I still can sing,

To be like Jesus;
To be like Jesus.
All I ask is to be like him.
All through life's journey,
O'er hill and valley,
All I ask is to be like him.

So you see, from the Baptist religion about Jesus to the Unitarian Universalist religion of Jesus, I have made a subtle shift.

[End of Excerpt]
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