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A report from the SBC
Comin’ at you from Nashville at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Not a lot of what you’d call news here this week, unless you really care about the inner working of the SBC. Folks got elected. People got baptized. Resolutions in accord with well-known SBC theology were passed. For the exhaustive details on all that, you can visit the official and unofficial Baptist information Web sites.

But lack of news doesn’t mean there weren’t some interesting things going on. Here’s one of 'em:

If you’ve ever been to any convention exhibit hall, you know what they look like. Lines of pre-fab setups draped with photos and posters, with tables covered with printed material and bowls filled with cheap candy, staffed by wearily cheerful people hoping-just-hoping that someone will stop and ask a question.

That’s pretty much the way it was here – except for the booth run by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. It looked like a jungle military encampment straight out of a WWII-era war movie:

Camo netting above, a camp table with maps spread out on top, ammo boxes (filled in this case with printed material, not bullets). In a hall filled with pastels and bright lights, this booth was defiantly Army drab.

The first time I walked by, I must admit it gave me the whim-whams. There’s an inherent violence to warfare that seemed to clash with the spiritual work the seminary says it’s trying to do.

The next time I wandered by, I looked at the supporting material – really large posters set up in front. They made it clear that “Camp Southwestern” was supposed to be about spiritual warfare. Well, maybe.

So I stopped to talk to one of the wearily cheerful folks. William Goff teaches Christian ethics at the seminary. And he acknowledged that the daily real violence of Iraq and elsewhere might lead to misunderstanding of the SWBTS booth. But it also might lead to curiosity and understanding, he said.

After all, with war so much on the American mind, a booth like this is more likely to draw attention than the mostly vanilla competitors. And the seminary’s PR people were trying to make a specific point about the seminary’s emphasis on overseas work, “hard, risky ministry in a resisting world,” Dr. Goff said.

The seminary has a goal that every student before graduation – and every professor at least once every four years – will head overseas on a mission trip. Three locales are their chosen targets of opportunity: Cuba, northern Zambia and Siberia. No junkets there.

So is the potentially creepy military theme appropriate for a seminary? Dr. Goff said one young visitor told him “you have the only booth here that rocks.” ...