First Baptist Church in Dalton, Ga., has voted to join the 1,400 congregations affiliated with the Baptist General Association of Virginia.
The church, which unanimously approved the action June 25, is the second Georgia congregation to join the BGAV. First Baptist Church in Rome, Ga., joined last year.
“We see this as part of an ongoing process of partnering with groups to help us do ministry,” said Bill Wilson, pastor of First Church, Dalton.
“We're adding a ministry partner, not leaving another group,” said Wilson, who added his church remains a member of the Georgia Baptist Convention.
Wilson, a former Virginia Baptist pastor who once served as BGAV president, said the church maintains a strong relationship with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Some 90 percent of the church's members choose to give their national financial contributions through the CBF.
“That's our identity,” he explained. “Then we look at other partners to help us do kingdom work and that's a wide array of folks.”
At its business meeting June 25, First Church, Dalton, voted not only to join the BGAV but also the Willow Creek Association — a fellowship that links like-minded, action-oriented churches with each other and with strategic vision, training, and resources — and the Shiloh Network — a covenant community of churches and church leaders who think imaginatively about Christian vocation and act creatively to promote a culture of calling into ministry.
Last year, the church joined the First Freedom Initiative, an effort by Associated Baptist Press, Baptists Today and the Baptist Joint Committee to promote First Amendment rights. The year before the church joined the Baptist World Alliance.
Wilson said the church's links to Virginia Baptists began with partnership missions. A church team looked at the all of the organizations assisting churches with partnership mission trips and determined “no one does it as well as the Virginia Baptist Mission Board,” which helped the church organize a mission trip to Brazil.
Today First Church, Dalton, is a year into a partnership with a pastor and her three churches in Port Antonio, Jamaica — initiated by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board.
“The church has sent six or seven teams down there; we've hosted a team here from those churches. We've helped built a church day care center; we coordinated the shipment of $1 million of used medical equipment from a hospital here to one in Port Antonio and we're talking about helping some students in Jamaica come to the States for school — all that came through Virginia Baptists, linking us to this pastor.
“So we've already had some experience in being part of the Virginia Baptist family,” he said. “They can help us expand what we do and enable us to do more of what we think God is calling us to do.”