COLUMN ONE : Joining the Rush to Repent : Southern Baptists this week are expected to apologize for backing slavery as Christians worldwide seek forgiveness for historical sins. Some hope actions ease bitterness; critics call them pointless.

A wave of confession and repentance for past sins, some of them the racist evils of decades or centuries ago, is sweeping Christianity worldwide.

It reaches from the Pope, who wants Catholicism to openly repent its historical transgressions before the next millennium begins, to hundreds of German Christians who gathered recently in Holland to apologize for the atrocities of the Nazi era.

In France next Easter, Protestants and Catholics will gather to launch a series of ceremonies along the route to Jerusalem taken by the medieval Crusaders, saying prayers of remorse for the thousands of Muslims the European knights slew in the name of Christ.

Lutherans have expressed contrition for the anti-Semitism of their church’s founder, Martin Luther. New Zealanders have gathered by the thousands to confess sins against the Maoris. Americans say prayers of atonement on wind-swept prairies where white men massacred Indians. Japanese Christians--stepping boldly in where their government waffled--will ask forgiveness for Pearl Harbor.

And this week, the largest Protestant body in the United States, the Southern Baptists, is expected to formally apologize to African Americans for endorsing slavery.

Why the mass rush to repentance? Although many of the groups have no connection to one another and do not coordinate their actions, Christian leaders involved offer many explanations: greater interaction among races and ethnic groups leading to intensified efforts to erase bitter memories, growing cooperation and theological unity among Christians, and hopes for a religious revival after Christianity comes clean on its historical sins.

And in some cases, theologically conservative Christian groups are following the exhortations of a San Fernando Valley evangelical leader whose book has inspired hundreds of readers to perform tearful repentance rituals on the sites where they believe Christians now long dead committed barbarous acts.

The outbreak of ex post facto mea culpas has met with both praise and skepticism within the Christian community and among the people to whom they apologize.

“Cautious optimists see it as a good sign for coming changes, but the skeptics say they have heard it all before--empty promises,” said Russell L. Twiss of Vancouver, Wash., a Lakota Sioux and director of the International Bible Society’s Native American ministry.

The idea of later generations repenting a historic evil does not seem meaningful, said James Wall of Chicago, editor of The Christian Century, a leading mainline Protestant magazine.

“I can regret that we had slavery as a horrible blot in our history, but how in 1995 can I properly atone for that except to address the evils that exist now?” asked Wall, who is a United Methodist minister.

Slavery is the subject of what is expected to be the largest such mass apology in the United States. The 25,000 “messengers”--as delegates are called--to the Southern Baptists’ annual meeting in Atlanta, which begins Tuesday, will be asked to vote on a resolution lamenting that the denomination was founded 150 years ago in part to provide a religious home for Southern slave owners before the Civil War.

“Many of us feel it would be unseemly and terribly wrong to celebrate our sesquicentennial without addressing forthrightly the more unsavory aspects of our past,” said Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptists’ Christian Life Commission, whose biracial task force wrote the resolution.

Land predicted the resolution would pass overwhelmingly, regretting that the church’s own birth led to “a bitter harvest of racism” that still plagues society.

In the case of Pope John Paul II, the impetus comes from the approach of the third millennium--or thousand-year period--since the birth of Christ, an anniversary expected to bring both critical assessments of Christianity and celebrations of its history.

In a major policy statement in November, the Pope declared that the Roman Catholic Church “cannot cross the threshold of the new millennium without encouraging her children to purify themselves, through repentance, of past errors. . . . “ In celebrating past glories, he said, Christians must remember “all those times in history when they departed from the spirit of Christ and his Gospel.”

The leader of 950 million Catholics worldwide set the tone in 1992 by formally acknowledging that 17th-Century church judges erred when they condemned Italian astronomer Galileo for saying the earth revolved about the sun. On other trips in 1992, John Paul apologized in Africa for church complicity in the slave trade and lamented in Latin America the Catholic exploitation of Native Americans.

Last month in the Czech Republic, the Pope apologized for the brutal Protestant-Catholic wars that wracked Europe from the 15th to 17th centuries. “We forgive and we ask forgiveness,” the Pope said.

In the same spirit, leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America confessed in April, 1994, that the “anti-Judaic diatribes” of Lutheranism’s 16th-Century founder, Martin Luther, are still used to bolster the teaching of hatred toward Jews. The denomination’s church council rejected Luther’s “violent invective” against Jews, echoing a Lutheran World Federation apology 10 years earlier.

Also last year, church leaders dismantled the all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, an umbrella association of two dozen denominations, replacing it with a new body of equal white and African American church representation.

At a dramatic moment in the debate leading up to the reorganization, the Rev. Jack Hayford of Van Nuys’ Church on the Way apologized to black churchmen for “decades of prejudice and misunderstanding.”

And with increasing frequency, Christians throughout the world are holding rituals of reconciliation--often on the sites of historical atrocities--inspired by the writings of John Dawson, a Baptist from Lake View Terrace who is urban mission director for Youth With a Mission, a worldwide relief and evangelistic organization based in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Dawson’s book “Healing America’s Wounds,” which has sold 50,000 copies since it was published a year ago, is a virtual textbook for the reconciliation phenomenon, said Peter Wagner, professor of church growth at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena.

The book draws on the experiences of Dawson’s 3-year-old International Reconciliation Coalition, which identifies racial or ethnic conflicts festering today that might be ameliorated by holding solemn ceremonies of conciliation on the sites of violent events.

A typical coalition service was held two years ago at Sand Creek, Colo., where white soldiers--commanded by a Methodist minister who was a commissioned military officer--in 1894 slaughtered more than 100 southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, mostly women and children, who had been assured they were under government protection.

A litany of wrongs by whites against Native Americans was read at the service. Whites expressed remorse to Native American representatives, all Christians, who extended forgiveness.

Over the coming year, the Colorado chapter of the coalition plans to hold similar rituals at about 125 sites in 43 states.

A year ago in Atlanta at a reconciliation conference inspired by Dawson’s book, a riveting scene was played out in front of some of the 500 whites, African Americans and Native Americans who attended. According to Charisma magazine, a woman whose ancestors owned slaves knelt and took the hands of the great-grandson of a slave, repeating this prayer:

“In the name of Jesus, I ask forgiveness for the sin of slavery, for buying human beings like animals, for saying they had no soul, for raping the women, for separating families, for tearing arms off of fathers who were trying to hold their children, for beating them bloody.”

After the prayer, the man expressed forgiveness, said the magazine, the leading voice of charismatic and Pentecostal Christians.

In early April, about 800 German Christians crossed into the Netherlands to join about 6,000 other Christians, mostly Dutch, in a service asking forgiveness for the World War II German invasion of Holland.

About 15,000 people crowded into Aloha Stadium in Pearl City, Hawaii, in May to watch descendants of early Christian missionaries, fruit company founders and Japanese Hawaiians seek forgiveness for their ancestors’ sins against native islanders.

Events planned for 1996 include a ritual apology by Japanese Christians for the attack on Pearl Harbor. After lengthy debate, the Japanese government recently refused to recognize the 50th anniversary of the war’s end with an apology. Instead the official statement used a Japanese word that can be interpreted as expressing “remorse.”

“Japanese Christians will repent at each one of the departure points of the [Japanese Navy] aircraft carriers, then the group will come to Hawaii and will publicly repent,” said Wagner of Fuller Seminary.

“A former U.S. serviceman who was assigned to the USS Arizona will extend forgiveness.”

The battleship was sunk by Japanese planes with the loss of 1,177 lives.

Also linked to Dawson is a three-year plan to atone for the first Christian Crusade to liberate the Holy Land nine centuries ago. The rites of contrition will begin with a preliminary prayer gathering in November, 1995, at Clermont in the south of France, where Pope Urban II in 1095 called for a holy war to free Jerusalem from the Muslims. Other ceremonies are being planned in the Balkans, if possible, Turkey and other nations along the Crusaders’ route.

The barbarism of marauding Crusaders against Muslims and Jews in the eastern Mediterranean is one reason why Muslims resent Christians centuries later, said the project coordinator, Lynn Green, who is based in England.

“The Crusades still come up very early in conversations with Muslims today,” said Green, who like Dawson works for Youth With a Mission.

While some people object to confessing sins they did not commit, Dawson said in an interview, “We sometimes are still the beneficiaries of offenses committed against other groups, such as land gained from treaties broken against American Indians.”

Historian Mark Noll, who teaches American religious history at Wheaton College in Illinois, says it is tempting to be cynical about apologies for centuries-old acts. “I think it would be good for Americans to apologize to Britain for the unjust character of the American Revolution, but I don’t recommend it because it wouldn’t make any sense,” he said.

“Repentance means a lot more when it is the perpetrator who asks forgiveness of someone wronged,” Noll said. “Yet, the spirit behind this is commendable, especially if it leads to solid steps toward mutual understanding.”

The Rev. Gary Best of Langley Vineyard Church near Vancouver, British Columbia, who spoke at the gathering of Christians in April at the Dutch-German border, said he saw instances of heartfelt changes of attitude.

“I saw one Dutch woman who said she was raised to hate Germans but was there praying tearfully with three Christians from Germany,” he said.

“There is no wholesale agreement that repentance can somehow mysteriously break the spiritual impact of past violations,” said David Bryant of New York City, who chairs the committee that promotes the National Day of Prayer.

“But to the extent we are living off the bitter fruits of the past, we evangelicals need repentance and reconciliation as well as restitution to offended groups in order to reach our goals of evangelizing the world,” he said.

Dawson--who is also U.S. chairman of the global Marches for Jesus, a growing, British-born series of annual rallies that took place in 600 U.S. cities last month--admits to an evangelistic motive: The repentance and reconciliation phenomenon may vindicate the Christian message in the eyes of nonbelievers who otherwise will not be able to accept Christians as sincere.

“The kingdom of God will be vilified publicly as long as self-righteousness marks our relationship with the world and with each other,” he said.

Dawson himself says the organized repentance movement may become suspect if it stays on a superficial level. It should move on to form close friendships with people in offended groups and seek justice for them after the tears of remorse have been wiped away, he said.

Dawson added that he cannot prove the connection, but he feels that the reconciliation prayer ceremonies can set the stage for more material reparations by governments, as he thinks happened in his native New Zealand.

He was among many white New Zealanders who in 1990 asked forgiveness from the indigenous Maoris at stadium prayer meetings in five cities, he said. “Painful things were brought into the open--the sins of our forefathers as well as the sins of today.”

And in March, he pointed out, the New Zealand government apologized for the British confiscation of Maori land in 1863, awarding the Maoris $112 million and 39,000 acres.