Former St. Louis United Way CEO Gary Dollar has been nominated as 28th moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Dollar, a former member of the CBF Governing Board, will be voted on as moderator-elect when the 1,800-church Fellowship meets June 28-30 in Atlanta. If elected, in 2018 he will follow Shauw Chin Capps, who after a year as moderator elect automatically ascends to the moderator post currently held by Alabama pastor Doug Dortch.
Gary Dollar
Dollar served 28 years with the United Way of Greater St. Louis, which helps one in three people in the St. Louis region annually, and the last 12 years as CEO, before retiring in 2013. He currently works as a partner with St. Louis-based EMD Consulting, which assists nonprofit groups in fund raising, leadership development and building organizational strength.
Both his wife, Gale, and one of his two sons are CBF-endorsed chaplains.
Dollar is the first bivocational minister to be nominated as CBF moderator. He is a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and has served as pastor and associate pastor at small churches in Illinois for more than 20 years. All but five of the 15 men who previously served as moderator have been full-time pastors. The last layman, Bill McConnell of Knoxville, Tenn., held office in 2013-2014.
Capps, CEO of Hopeful Horizons, a children’s advocacy, domestic violence and rape crisis center in Beaufort, S.C., will be the 12th woman to lead the CBF as moderator. Born in Indonesia and raised in Singapore, she embraced Christianity through the influence of Southern Baptist missionaries before coming to the United States. She is a graduate of Baylor University with a master’s degree from the Carver School of Social Work when it was located at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Dortch, senior minister of Mountain Brook Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., will preside as moderator over the 2017 General Assembly before handing the gavel over to Capps at the end of the meeting. He will remain on the CBF Governing Board another year as past moderator and serve ex-officio on the nominating committee.
The 2017 CBF General Assembly kicks off with a 25th anniversary dinner and program on Wednesday, June 28, and runs through Friday evening. Brian McLaren, author of books including The Great Spiritual Migration (2016), A New Kind of Christianity (2010) and A Generous Orthodoxy (2004), is scheduled to deliver the keynote address on Thursday. All sessions will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Atlanta.