An ad hoc committee appointed in July is getting ready to enter a phase of listening to diverse voices within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship on matters of human sexuality, according to a report of last week’s meeting of the CBF Governing Board released by Fellowship staff.
Charlie Fuller
Charlie Fuller, chair of the six-member Illumination Project committee authorized by the Governing Board at this summer’s CBF General Assembly in Greensboro, N.C., reported Sept. 30 that the group is in the process of both developing and implementing a model to evaluate a CBF policy against hiring non-celibate gays and lesbians as staff or missionaries.
The policy, put in place in 2000, has in recent years come under increasing criticism from younger and progressive voices within the CBF who say it is outdated and discriminatory against LGBT members of Fellowship churches.
Traditionalists say shifting to a welcoming-and-affirming stance on homosexuality could cause the CBF to lose support of more conservative-leaning congregations either opposed to or undecided about the full inclusion of members who are openly gay into all areas of church life.
Fuller, minister for congregational life at Second Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., said while the first topic before the committee is the CBF hiring policy, the goal is to develop a toolkit that congregations can use to assist with difficult questions broader than disagreements about human sexuality.
“We want to try to help our Fellowship live into all parts of our name,” Fuller said — exploring definitions of the words “cooperative,” “Baptist” and “Fellowship.”
The Illumination Project committee, which met Sept. 19-20 for a retreat at CBF offices in Decatur, Ga., will employ Integrative Thinking, a process developed in the business world in the 1980s and 1990s for solving complex problems.
Professor Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and author of the 2007 problem-solving primer The Opposable Mind, defines Integrative Thinking as “the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”
The committee plans to promote “purposeful conversations” throughout the 18 CBF state and regional organizations and at the June 2017 CBF General Assembly in Atlanta. Any findings and recommendations concerning personnel policies would likely come before the Governing Board in either September 2017 or January 2018.
CBF moderator-elect Shauw Chin Capps said the listening phase “is extremely important as we seek to build and implement a meaningful process for this important work.”
“We are humbled to hear the diverse stories of Cooperative Baptists, and we are prepared to listen and discern the voice of God and the guidance of the Spirit in the time that is needed,” said Capps, executive director of Hope Haven of the Lowcountry, a children’s advocacy and rape crisis center in Beaufort, S.C.