Trisha Miller Manarin, executive coordinator of the Mid-Atlantic Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, has been appointed Baptist World Alliance coordinator for the Division on Mission, Evangelism and Justice.
The part-time position was created in July when the BWA General Council approved merger of the Mission, Evangelism and Theological Reflection and Freedom and Justice divisions at its meeting in Vancouver, Canada. The BWA Executive Committee authorized General Secretary Neville Callam to make “interim staffing arrangements” pending recommendations of a task force taking a comprehensive look at BWA staffing due to a report in 2018.
Trish Manarin
Manarin, former associate pastor at McLean Baptist Church in McLean, Va., currently serves as a member of the BWA Commission on Mission and as a vice president of the North American Baptist Fellowship, one of six regions comprising the Baptist World Alliance. Her husband, Tim, sits on the BWA Commission on Human Rights Advocacy.
“It is an honor for me to serve the Baptist World Alliance,” Manarin said in an email. “I am humbled to work alongside our global Baptist sisters and brothers, and look forward to seeing what God has in store for all of us. My husband, Tim, and I have considered the BWA home for many years; it is with great joy I enter into this position.”
Callam, who has led the BWA since 2007, said over the last nine years he has gotten to know Manarin and “her interest in, and commitment to, BWA and its mission.”
“Her intellectual gifts and her communications and organizational skills will prove helpful to the organization as we inaugurate the new Division on Mission, Evangelism and Justice,” Callam said.
The Freedom and Justice Division, the newest BWA division created in 2008, has been vacant since Raimundo Barreto, the division’s first director, left in 2014 to become assistant professor of world Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, N.J.
The directorship of the Mission, Evangelism and Theological Reflection division came open in August with the retirement of Fausto Vasconcelos, former pastor of First Baptist Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was elected in 2005 to lead what was then called the Evangelism Department.
The two divisions were merged for financial reasons. “Both the BWA Budget and Finance and the BWA Human Resources Committees concurred on the fact that funds were not available to enable BWA to call a successor to the first F&J director,” Callam informed the General Council in July.
Manarin, a graduate of Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., holds a master of divinity degree from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctor of ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary. She will continue in her role as director of the Mid-Atlantic CBF, which is also part time, and as director of supervised ministry and an adjunct professor at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, Va.
Manarin was ordained in 1997 at Trinity Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Pa., and was awarded one of the first CBF Leadership Scholarships while studying at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary — now known as Palmer Seminary — in the mid-1990s. She has two sons and a daughter.
She served at McLean Baptist Church from May 2005 to December 2013, with the exception of two years when she and her family lived in Uganda. Her interest in missions has also led her to travel and work in Zambia, India and Macau.
The Mid-Atlantic CBF — one of 18 autonomous state and regional organizations relating to the Decatur, Ga.,-based Fellowship — includes individual members and churches in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Northern Virginia and West Virginia.