NEW YORK (ABP) — With a worship service March 30, a group of ministers officially launched a Baptist fellowship to minster to the Caribbean “diaspora” in English-speaking countries.
Caribbean Diaspora Baptist Clergy Association kicked off its life with a “celebrative service” at Grace Baptist Chapel in the New York City borough of the Bronx, according to the Baptist World Alliance.
The chapel is home to a congregation of mainly Caribbean immigrants. The service, a BWA statement said, was designed “to give recognition [to] an organization which has become a reality after a decade of discussion and deliberation.”
According to Alfred Johnson, a former Jamaica Baptist Union pastor who now serves in New Jersey, “Over the past 40 to 50 years, what started as a trickle has now become a steady stream of [Caribbean] immigrants into this country…. We were indeed strangers in a foreign land, living in exile from our home in the Caribbean, away from our Baptist fellowship.”
According to the BWA, the worldwide umbrella group for Baptists, such a fellowship has been discussed since at least 1993. After a mission conference in the Jamaican town of Ocho Rios in 2003, the Jamaica Baptist Union Mission Agency stated its intention “to participate in mission to Caribbean people in general and to Jamaicans in particular who are in the Diaspora (e.g. United Kingdom, USA and Canada).”
The clergy association was incorporated in 2006 and signed a partnership agreement with the Jamaica Baptist Union in April 2007 at the Bronx church to aid in “facilitating mission in both regions of the world,” meaning the Caribbean and North America.
In October, the clergy association, the Jamaican union, and the Caribbean Baptist Fellowship, one of six regional groups affiliated with the BWA, signed the Montego Bay Accord following a Jamaican missions conference in the resort town of the same name. Among other provisions, the accord includes the development of “meaningful ministries with cultural relevance,” while the parties agreed “to submit ourselves to periodic reviews, and to hold each other accountable under God.”
CDBCA draws membership mainly from Caribbean clergy living and working in the northeastern United States. U.S. immigration from the Caribbean over the last several decades has been concentrated in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.
Last year, BWA installed Neville Callam, a former Jamaican pastor, as its general secretary. He is the first person of non-Anglo descent to direct the more-than-century-old alliance.
The Caribbean Diaspora Baptist Clergy Association's president is Delroy Reid-Salmon, pastor of Grace Baptist Chapel.
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