By Bob Allen
As most of the 2,327 registrants for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s 2013 General Assembly packed suitcases and departed Greensboro, N.C., for home, a few dozen individuals lingered Saturday morning for orientation in the Fellowship’s newly minted governing structure.
“We are in a different world, as of yesterday,” CBF Moderator Bill McConnell described the election of a new 16-member Governing Board, the first six of what will be 18 members of a Ministries Council, five of an eventual 15-member Missions Council and a 16-member Nominating Committee.
“We have a governing board, but also we have councils,” said McConnell, a layman and member of Central Baptist Church of Bearden in Knoxville, Tenn. “We have different functions.”
McConnell said the Governing Board is charged with setting policies for the CBF, while the missions and ministries councils will work more in an advisory role and focus on a specific task, relating closely to CBF staff.
“The Governing Board is not going to say you have to do this and to that,” McConnell said. “We are going to try to look at the long range and try to decide what we need to be doing, where we need to be in five years.”
Suzii Paynter, who oversaw her first General Assembly as CBF executive coordinator June 26-28, added her welcome to the movement’s newly elected leaders.
“You are no longer green, yellow and blue boxes,” Paynter said, referring to illustration graphics in last year’s 2012 Task Force report laying out the restructuring plan. “You are real people.”
Paynter indicated one of the more challenging groups to organize would be the Ministries Council, chaired by Michael Cheuk, senior minister of University Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Va.
Formed to gather leaders from across the CBF community in a forum of collaboration, communication and the sharing of ideas, the Ministries Council has the broadest representation of the new bodies. Voting members include one representative from each of the current 18 state and regional CBF organizations.
Non-voting, ex officio members include the coordinator of each state or region and representatives from the CBF Consortium of Theological Schools, CBF-endorsed chaplains and pastoral counselors and “each partner included in the CBF funding plan.”
Paynter reminded leaders that a funding plan that was originally part of the 2012 Task Force report was removed for revision. With the funding plan unfinished, Paynter said about 100 invitations were sent out to organizations currently in any financial arrangement with CBF under a category of “others as invited.”
“It gives us an opportunity over the next several years to actually build a funding plan as intended by the 2012 Task Force,” Paynter said.
“I think the Ministries Council is the one that is going to need the Jumbotron for your meetings,” Paynter joked.
McConnell noted that one of the most important groups in the new structure is the Nominating Committee. Before now, the CBF Coordinating Council included representation from each state and regional body. While the Nominating Committee will retain the spirit of the broadest representation possible, he said the group is no longer bound by geography.
After meeting together, the various groups separated into different meeting rooms. The Governing Board began in executive session. CBF bylaws state that all meetings of the Fellowship, Governing Board and the Missions and Ministries councils are open to any member of the Fellowship. An exception is that a meeting pertaining to legal matters, contracts or personnel matters is open only to those admitted by the group that is meeting.
Asked by ABPnews the purpose of the executive session, McConnell said the Governing Board needed to discuss personnel policies and relocation of the CBF offices.
CBF Controller Larry Hurst reported that as of May 31 $19,000 had been spent on relocation from the Atlanta campus of Mercer University to downtown Decatur, Ga. He said the move will take place July 27-28.
McConnell said the new offices are on the fifth floor of a bank building near First Baptist Church in Decatur, where CBF Coordinating Council meetings have been held for several years, and next door to the headquarters hotel. One real advantage of the new location, he said, is a MARTA station located one block away, simplifying airport transportation for people attending meetings from out of town.
In February the Coordinating Council authorized staff leadership to renegotiate a 10-year lease signed with Mercer University in 2007 to rent the current 19,000-square-foot CBF Resource Center as part of implementing the new structure.
Upcoming meeting dates are Aug. 26-27 for the Nominating Committee, Sept. 9-10 for the Ministries and Missions councils and Sept. 12-13 for the Governing Board. The Governing Board will meet again in January, and once more next June in conjunction with the 2014 General Assembly in Atlanta.