WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Alliance of Baptists honored its history and took steps to reshape its future during its 20th annual convocation, held April 13-15 in the nation's capital.
Meeting at Washington's Calvary Baptist Church, more than 500 Alliance members bid farewell to the group's longtime associate executive director. They simultaneously welcomed a new staff member — and a new staff structure designed to symbolize the Alliance's egalitarian ideals.
In a keynote address April 13, Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox noted it was almost a week after Easter — about the same time as the gospel story of the disciples' encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus.
Alliance Baptists, he noted, are not unlike those earliest followers of Jesus.
“Like those disciples whom Jesus encountered on the road to Emmaus, we sometimes feel very, very discouraged — dispirited,” said Cox, a member of Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge, Mass., and author of When Jesus Came to Harvard. “We have prayed, and we have preached against an obscene war for months now, years. We had hoped that this would make a difference. But it seems that it has not — at least not yet.”
The disciples, Cox said, were headed not toward Galilee — where the angel had told the women at the tomb they could find Jesus. Instead, they were headed toward Emmaus, which was nowhere near Galilee.
Today, he continued, Alliance supporters need to go looking for Jesus anew to overcome the discouragement they feel. “Are we headed off to Galilee — or are we headed off to Emmaus?” he asked.
He said Baptists should side with the oppressed, marginalized and hated. “Where are the Galilees today?” Cox asked. “Are they the Gazas and the Guantanamos? That is where Jesus lives, that is where the work of God continues and that is where we must be if we are going to be who we once were.”
The Alliance was the first and most progressive fellowship of churches to emerge from three decades of turmoil in the conservative-dominated Southern Baptist Convention. The group's controversial positions, particularly its affirmation of gays, has widened the divide with its former denominational home and kept the Alliance a relatively small fellowship of about 120 churches.
Stan Hastey, the Alliance's executive director, told members the group needs to continue to side with unpopular causes.
He referred to Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech 40 years before at Riverside Church in New York. In it, King denounced America's involvement in the Vietnam War as immoral and indefensible. King was branded a radical for his views. He was murdered just a year later.
“Were he alive today, is there any doubt what he would be saying about our country's pathetic performance in Iraq?” Hastey asked. “Surely he would have something to say about the unspeakable tragedy which has befallen our beloved land around the world.”
The Alliance has been outspoken in its opposition to the Iraq war. Hastey said Alliance members and churches have an answer to the fear and intimidation that have befallen the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“'There is no fear in love,' John wrote in his first epistle, 'but perfect love casts out fear,'” Hastey said. “That is the witness our culture and our country desperately need just now.”
During a banquet and worship service April 14, the group honored Jeanette Holt, who is scheduled to retire in May after more than 18 years as associate director of the Alliance.
“As is so often the case with women working in supporting roles, Jeanette's substantial contributions” to the group “have been underreported and overlooked,” Hastey said in his annual address to Alliance members. Hastey and Holt have been the Washington-based organization's only full-time staff for most of its existence.
Immediately prior to the convocation, the Alliance board of directors elected Chris Copeland as the group's new minister of leadership development and congregational life. Copeland, a spiritual formation counselor in Raleigh, N.C., has also served as an associate pastor of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., and a development officer for the Carter Center in Atlanta. He will begin his work for the Alliance in May.
The new staffing structure creates a group of three co-equal positions. In addition to the position filled by Copeland, Hastey will become the Alliance's minister of ecumenical relations and missions partnerships. A third position — minister of stewardship and development — will be filled later.
Kristy Arnesen Pullen, the Alliance's vice president, said the new system “'will enable the Alliance to provide expanded services” to congregations and mission partners. Pullen also said the egalitarian structure “gives us a chance to expand our witness to our values, one of which is the breaking down of hierarchy.”
Hastey said the staffing plan will allow the group “to live out our commitment to collegiality in a fuller sense.”
It will also require significant additional funding. The 2007 Alliance budget is $442,848 — an increase of $68,848 over the 2006 budget.
Carole Collins, chair of the group's finance committee, said the Alliance ended 2006 with approximately $15,000 more income than expenses. That total reflected under-spending, since its 2006 receipts were almost $20,000 under budget.
The group has received $160,000 in special bequests recently that Collins said will be set aside to support initial costs for the new staffing structure. The total includes $120,000 in proceeds from the sale of a Florida church that disbanded, and $40,000 from the estate of the late Evelyn Shockey, a long-time Alliance supporter and member of Washington's First Baptist Church.
The meeting's only controversy came when Alliance member David Gooch of Nashville, Tenn., urged that the $160,000 be put into the organization's newly established endowment rather than being saved for salary support.
“We ought not use these large, one-time gifts to do our operating, daily work,” Gooch said. “We need to get behind this program and pay for it so that we can honor our past and move us into our future.”
Gooch's motion failed.
Alliance members also heard an update from Hastey on the status of a Treasury Department threat to fine the Alliance for alleged violations of the group's license for humanitarian travel to Cuba.
Last year, Alliance officials responded to allegations and a threatened fine of $34,000 from the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. That agency monitors violations of the government's decades-old complete economic embargo on the communist nation.
Earlier, OFAC officials informed Hastey they would propose the fine. The agency alleged that members of five Alliance-affiliated church mission teams, traveling under the license between 2003 and 2005, violated the embargo by engaging in tourist activities while in Cuba. The Alliance disputes those allegations.
Hastey noted that Kenneth Lazarus, an “incredibly well-connected” former White House general counsel who is representing the Alliance in its dispute with the government, had learned that the group's response to the fine threat had been forwarded to the head lawyer for the Treasury Department. Hastey also reported that Treasury officials had prepared their response to the Alliance but had not informed Lazarus of details.
In other business, the group re-elected its current officers to additional one-year terms. Besides Pullen, of Ashburn, Va., Alliance members re-elected Jim Hopkins, pastor of Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif., as president and Amy Jacks Dean, co-pastor of Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., as secretary.
They also elected seven board members for terms ending in 2011 and elected co-chairs for next year's convocation, scheduled for New Orleans. They are Cam Holzer, an Alliance-endorsed chaplain in New Orleans, and D.H. Clark, a member of Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, La.
Northminster and St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans will co-host the gathering, which organizers hope will draw attention to the ongoing rebuilding needs in the hurricane-decimated city and region.
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Read more:
Alliance directors approve next step in Cuba fine, new staffing plan (9/21/2006)
Alliance challenges $34,000 fine for alleged Cuba violations (9/8/2006)
Alliance vows to go on offensive as 'anti-racist organization' (4/28/2006)