Coming Monday on Baptist News Global: Baptists and Pope Francis’ visit.
By Bob Allen
Though it isn’t listed on any official calendar, next week is “Pope Week” for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, CBF Executive Coordinator reported Sept. 17 to the group’s Governing Board.
Paynter leaves Sunday for Washington to join other U.S. judicatory leaders for interfaith events surrounding Pope Francis’ Sept. 22-27 visit to the nation’s capital, New York and Philadelphia before returning to Rome.
“CBF has been invited to be an integral part of every day next week in the events in our nation that will focus on the face of global Christianity,” Paynter said in the opening session of the leadership group’s two-day meeting at First Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga.
Paynter solicited not only prayers from Fellowship leaders, but also verbal witness to the 25-year-old moderate Baptist network’s presence during daily news coverage in national media.
“I ask for your words to share with people that our community is a part of the face of global Christianity,” Paynter said. “We’re obviously not Catholic — obviously not within the explicit community of the Roman Catholic Church — and yet this opportunity to speak about compassionate, global Christianity is our opportunity.”
Paynter said the invitation bears witness to the fact that the 1,900-church network’s impact reaches far beyond its own constituency. She was invited as master-of-ceremonies for a Monday night interfaith event focusing on hunger and poverty, she said, because of the Fellowship’s Together for Hope global poverty initiative, launched in 2001 as a long-term commitment to change cycles of economic disparity in the 20 poorest counties in the United States.
Wednesday Paynter will visit the White House. “I think the pope’s opportunity to address our nation, both in Congress and at the White House event, will be very significant,” she said.
Events on Thursday and Friday center primarily around the pope’s encyclical on the environment, Praised Be: On the Care of Our Common Home.
“The fact that he’s written an encyclical on climate change is just a not-so-subtle cue that this is going to be a major emphasis on the rest of his tenure as pope,” Paynter said. “But it’s not just about climate change, if you’ve read it. It’s about poverty that comes when there’s environmental degradation. It’s about migration. It’s about a lot of things in the world, but it’s mostly about creation care — that the earth is the Lord’s, and that our stewardship of the earth should be a reflection of the image of God in our own lives.”
Paynter will be part of a panel speaking at the National Cathedral, and on Friday morning will join a group watching the pope’s address to the United Nations on a large-screen video.
“We’re in that room because of our global missions, and because of our work at the United Nations,” she said, highlighting the work of Shane McNary, an Arkansan commissioned as CBF global personnel in 2004, in representing global Baptists at meetings concerning human rights in Geneva, Switzerland.
Thursday afternoon Paynter is scheduled to meet with Rabbi David Saperstein, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, in his office at the U.S. State Department.
“[It’s a] lot of events, but more than that is our opportunity to really be in community with other global Christians, speaking into and living into what I hope is a seedbed for faithful witness,” Paynter said.
“If it is only an exhausting array of events and travel, that will be too little, but we know, you know, that when you gather together, and when you put these gifts on the table, our great God multiplies them. I believe this visit of the pope is that kind of opportunity for our country to focus on the compassionate, deep and loving, Christ-centered lives of Christians, dedicated above the fray of our petty concerns, to the great concerns and the great witness of God.”