On Preaching an Ethical Gospel

Mark Woods, editor of the U.K's Baptist Times, has published an outstanding essay on the need to preach and practice an ethical discipleship. Using William Carey as an example, he concludes:

There's a direct line between the sort of action which William Carey was able to take for granted--refusing to be guilty of perpetuating the evil system of slavery by taking advantage of its products--and the choices open to us today.

It's just as wrong for us to buy clothes produced by sweatshop labor or to eat chocolate produced by slave labor as it was for 18th century Baptists to eat West Indian sugar.

As Baptists, we are good at evangelism. We are not always quite as good at identifying the content of our evangelical message. But the notion of freedom is not a bad place to start, and freedom, as John F. Kennedy said, is indivisible.

Even the hymn written for the Assembly and sung every evening, "Cry Freedom," contains the line, "None of us is truly free/ While anyone is bound."

Woods did not mention the horrid practices surrounding the African diamond trade, but he could have.