It's been a great and momentous week for the Southern Baptist Convention. First Richard Land, the powerful chairman of the denomination's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission joined an Evangelical Immigration Table press conference calling for comprehensive immigration reform that, among other things, "respects the God-given dignity of every person, protects the unity of the immediate family (and)...establishes a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents".In an interview with The Atlantic's Molly Ball, Land said of President Obama's decision to stop deporting young illegal immigrants, "I applaud it. I would have preferred Congress to have done it. I hope that Congress would applaud it and pass something very similar." Land also called on Republican nominee Mitt Romney to endorse Obama's action, and to go even further if elected president.Next, after all previous efforts for over a century had failed, Southern Baptist delegates at their annual convention in New Orleans approved "Great Commission Baptists" as an officially-recognized optional name their congregations can use to describe their affiliation.This came one day after the most significant action: the election of the Rev. Fred Luter, a native of the Lower 9th Ward, as the first African-American president in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted in its editorial, "That would be significant in and of itself, but it's even more so because the Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination formed by those who defended their rights as Christians to own and trade slaves." The closest analogy I can think of is Karol Wojtyla's election as pope...if the 1st Vatican Council had solemnly defined as doctrine that Slavs are an inferior branch of humanity condemned by God to lives of servitude.For Commonweal Catholics, all of this is cause for celebration not, I would submit, because each of these actions can be seen as "liberal" within the confines of American politics (though they can be), but because each one is a sign of the Holy Spirit moving among our Southern Baptist brothers and sisters, helping them to grow beyond the prejudices and assumptions they inherited.We may not agree (anytime soon at least) on the theology of the Eucharist, or the relative important of scripture and tradition, but we can rejoice at the way our brothers and sisters in Christ are "growing in the Lord", and take their example as inspiration to spur us forward.

Luke Hill is a writer and community organizer in Boston. He blogs at dotCommonweal and MassCommons. 

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