FALLS CHURCH, Va. (ABP) — Paul Montacute, director of the Baptist World Alliance's relief-and-recovery arm BWAid, will retire in July 2012, the BWA executive committee learned in meetings March 7-9.
BWA leaders are expected to elect a successor to Montacute, former youth director of the Baptist Union of Great Britain who joined the BWA staff in 1990, next March.
Paul Montacute
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It was the first gathering of the executive committee and about 15 related groups since the worldwide Baptist fellowship reorganized at last year's Baptist World Congress in Hawaii. The group streamlined its governing body, reducing membership by half, in order to improve the Alliance's decision-making process, leaders said.
In other business the executive committee granted membership to three organizations — the Association of Evangelical Baptist Churches in the Congo, the Baptist Churches Union Community of the Congo and the Free Baptist Churches in Burundi. Their addition brings BWA total membership to 222 organizations.
BWA leaders also elected Wati Aier, principal of the Oriental Theological Seminary in Nagaland, India, as recipient of the Denton and Janice Lotz Human Rights Award.
Aier convened the Forum for Naga Reconciliation and worked for 20 years to mediate for peace between three armed nationalist groups in Nagaland, located in northeastern India. He has been credited as the central figure in reaching a peace accord between the groups, which was signed last year.
Aier is a former vice president of the Asia Pacific Baptist Federation, one of six regional fellowships of the BWA, and a former member of the BWA Commission on Freedom and Justice and the Academic and Theological Education Workgroup. He is a current member of the BWA Commission on Peace and the BWA Congress Committee.
Baptist leaders also agreed to conduct "bilateral dialogues" with Pentecostals and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, received financial statement finishing the year $15,000 in the black and voted to conduct the 2012 BWA annual gathering — a summer meeting of the executive committee, related groups and Baptists from various regions around the globe — in Santiago, Chile. The 2011 annual gathering will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Marv Knox is editor of the Baptist Standard.