BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (ABP) — The Kentucky Baptist Fellowship has been accepted as a full member of the Kentucky Council of Churches, an ecumenical group related to the National Council of Churches.
The Fellowship, one of 19 autonomous state and regional organizations connected to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, joins 11 other Protestant and Catholic bodies in the state group dedicated to promoting Christian unity through common witness and service.
The Kentucky Baptist Fellowship, which obtained "observer" status with the council in 2006, voted unanimously at its General Assembly in April to seek full membership. The council voted to accept the Baptist group as a member Oct. 14 in Bowling Green, Ky.
The KCC is one of 46 statewide councils that function independently from, but benefit from the work of, both the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
John Lepper
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"Moving to full membership has been a slow and deliberate process as the leadership of Kentucky Baptist Fellowship sought to prayerfully discern how we might be more involved in the work of Kentucky Council of Churches," said John Lepper, coordinator of the Louisville-based KBF.
Lepper said the Fellowship's congregational polity and the fact it is based more on partnership than membership at first seemed to weigh against full membership. In the end, he said, those concerns were outweighed by the larger concern of desire to participate with the larger body of Christians.
"We want to do our part in fulfilling the prayers and hopes of Jesus, as reflected in His prayer in John 17, to live in harmony with each other and thus become a testimony to the world," Lepper said.
Representing churches with a total membership of about 800,000, the Kentucky Council of Churches was established in 1947, succeeding the Kentucky Sunday School Union, which began in 1865.
It sponsors commissions on Christian unity, justice ministries, local ecumenism, disaster recovery, rural life and creation care and peacemaking and racism.
Marian McClure Taylor, executive director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, told the Louisville Courier-Journal the council "is more complete and our message more compelling because of Baptist participation."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.