With a call to minister to “a world in need,” the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship began its 16th year by appointing 19 mission workers, welcoming a new missions coordinator, adopting a $17-million budget and contributing $32,801 to a special human rights offering.
The Fellowship's June 22-23 annual meeting in Atlanta was quiet, even by Fellowship standards, with little official business and no controversy. Almost unnoticed was a constitutional amendment that restored a mention of Jesus and the Great Commission to the CBF's governing documents.
Last year, adoption of constitutional changes that omitted that language stirred heated debate at the general assembly and sparked months of criticism within the CBF's 1,850 affiliated churches and beyond. The amendment — a constitutional preamble in which Fellowship members “gladly declare our allegiance to Jesus Christ as Lord and to his gospel” — was adopted June 22 without opposition or discussion by the 3,005 registered participants. It already had been approved by the CBF's Coordinating Council last October.
Also absent this year was any debate about the Fellowship's past — as disenfranchised moderate Southern Baptists — which several participants said is a sign of the CBF's “maturity as an organization.
Instead, the CBF annual meeting — and the related gatherings of dozens of “partner” organizations — focused on the future, as Fellowship-type Baptists seek a positive role to play in a less-denominational, more-ecumenical setting.
Daniel Vestal, the CBF's national coordinator, told assembly participants the Fellowship stands for “inclusiveness and freedom, openness and partnering.”
“As we clarify and communicate our values, many others will be attracted to us and want to be a part of us,” he said. “I can tell you today that all over the world there are Baptist Christians who share these values and want to partner with us because of these values. They don't want our money as much as they want our friendship and partnership. I can also tell you that there are Christians that are not Baptist who want to partner with us because of these values.”
Keynote speaker Trevor Hudson, a Methodist pastor from South Africa and social justice advocate, commended CBF for its maturity, its outward focus on holistic missions, and its commitment to meet human needs.
“I have a sense that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is on a train, and it's moving,” he said. “I've really appreciated the energy that I sense in the movement. To me as an outsider, it seems that you're on a journey toward greater missional faithfulness, to deep recognition in your life of the inner and outer journeys of faith.”
Nonetheless, Hudson urged CBF members to step out of their cultural “bubble” and embrace the world around them.
“Please never turn your back on the world — never,” Hudson said. Citing the words of a popular Christian chorus, he said, “ ‘The cross before me, the world behind me' — that is heresy.” Those songs betray the love of God for this world. God's loving arms encircle the globe. God is wanting to redeem the whole of creation. Listen to the groan.”
“We are not separate from the pains of the world,” Hudson continued. “The role of the church is for the pain and hurt and suffering of the world to be concentrated and held and maybe even healed. I hope that at this assembly we can open our hearts to the groans that are here … and hold the pain of the world and be Christ to one another.”
Fellowship participants responded to the world's need by contributing $32,801 to a human rights offering, sending out new missionaries and, in a pre-assembly workshop, training to minister to people with HIV-AIDS.
The special offering, received at both evening sessions, honors former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn. The money will be used for religious liberty and human rights ministries of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Baptist World Alliance.
“My concept of human rights has grown to include not only the right to live in peace, but also the right to adequate health care, shelter, food and economic opportunity,” the former president said in a video message. “Your involvement will be vital to transforming systems, policies and practices that prevent religious liberty among some of the most neglected people of the world. We cannot forget the faces of those whose lives will be changed forever.”
The 19 mission personnel commissioned during the closing session include six short-term missionaries (one-to-three years) and 13 self-supporting workers who will serve under the auspices of the CBF's AsYouGo Affiliate program. None of the appointees are fully-funded career missionaries.
Jack Snell, the Fellowship's associate coordinator for field teams, noted the personnel will serve among the most neglected people. “It was out of his compassion that Jesus went where people were hurting and helpless,” he said.
“What we are participating in involves all of us, not just for tonight but for the future,” he continued. “Each of us is being challenged to enter into the pain of the world. There is so much to be done, and we are doing so little. It breaks my heart. Our offerings are flat. We haven't reached our Offering for Global Missions goal in several years,” he said. “In many cases our passions are dulled and our compassion is defeated by fatigue.”
Shorter College professor Rob Nash, who was elected global missions coordinator June 21 by the CBF's Coordinating Council, was introduced to the assembly and led the commissioning prayer for the new personnel.
Prior to the assembly, more than 400 people gathered for an HIV-AIDS summit to learn how to formulate personal, congregational and Fellowship-wide responses to the health crisis. An estimated 40 million people worldwide live with AIDS or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The Christian response to the AIDS crisis, now 25 years old, suffers from lack of awareness, stereotypes, and stigmas, particularly in the United States, where the first cases of the disease were spread mainly by sex between gay men, said summit speaker David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. “God is not put off by the sexual character of this disease,” he said. “There are more important things at stake than that.”
The Fellowship installed new officers, including incoming moderator Emmanuel McCall, pastor of Baptist Fellowship Group in nearby East Point, Ga. He is the first African-American to serve as moderator. He succeeds Joy Yee, pastor of 19th Avenue Baptist Church, San Francisco, Calif., who presided this year as the first Asian-American and first female senior pastor to serve as moderator.
Fellowship members elected Harriet Harral, an organizational and leadership consultant from Fort Worth, Texas, as moderator-elect and Hal Bass, political science professor at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., as recorder.
In her moderator's address, Yee urged the Fellowship to continue and deepen its commitment to be “intercultural.” While a group can be “multicultural” by simply gathering people of various ethnicities, races, geographies, ages, genders and classes in the same place, Yee said, to be “intercultural” it must dynamically involve each group with all the others.
A day earlier, the Coordinating Council adopted a “mandate” that commits the council to being intercultural and urges CBF to place a priority on creating an intercultural team of coordinators and staff.
The mandate also urges individuals, churches and CBF partners “to set aside the differences that keep people apart, to build intercultural relationships, to … learn from one another and to celebrate the fellowship that God creates through reconciliation.”
In his annual sermon to the assembly, Vestal described the Fellowship as “a renewal movement.'
“CBF as an organization requires us to create budgets, procedures and policies, adopt bylaws and elect leaders,” he said. But we remain a movement of renewal — spiritual renewal, congregational renewal, missional renewal, [and] denominational renewal.”
To remain a renewal movement, Vestal said, CBF must “confess and celebrate” its theological center, clarify and communicate its values, live in community and cooperation, and commit to the CBF's mission to “be the presence of Christ.”
The CBF's center, Vestal said, is “nothing less than the reality, the presence, the power, and the love of the triune God. God is creator, sustainer and sovereign. Jesus Christ is Son of God, son of man, Savior, Risen Lord. The Holy Spirit is God with us and God in us.”
As a “renewal movement,” he said the CBF is “a part, though a small part, of what God through Christ is doing in his church and in his world.”
“May we have an audacious faith and an authentic witness so that this renewal may continue.”