By Bob Allen
The new moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship opened her first meeting as presiding officer of the CBF Governing Board with gratitude for prayers and support during a family medical emergency that forced her to miss this year’s General Assembly.
“Thank you all for your prayers for me and my brother,” Kasey Jones, senior pastor of National Baptist Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., said at the start of Sept. 11-12 meetings at First Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga. “I thank you all for the liberty to not be at the General Assembly and to really and truly be OK with that. I will be forever grateful.”
Under normal circumstances, Jones — who served both on the old CBF Coordinating Council and the 2012 Task Force that recommended dividing leadership into a smaller Governing Board and two new task-oriented councils to focus on missions and ministries — would have accepted the gavel at the end of the 2014 CBF General Assembly.
Just prior to that June 25-27 gathering in Atlanta, however, Jones’ family received word that her brother, while traveling alone in South Africa, was seriously ill and unable to see a doctor due to red tape in the country’s health care system. They decided she needed to go and help him get treatment and bring him home.
Jones said her brother is doing better, but is still in the hospital. His illness overseas was complicated by a preexisting condition that had long been under control with medication, but during the week he was shuttled to five different South African hospitals without assessment or treatment, he went without that medicine.
Jones said her brother had a couple of setbacks after being transferred to a VA hospital in the U.S., and now is happy to be alive and eager to return to his home in California.
Jones said she doesn’t know how things might have turned out without prayers of Fellowship Baptists. Amid multiple roadblocks and frustrations seeking information, she said at times she found it hard to pray. She also said CBF field personnel and church members in the U.S. were a big help.
“When I went over there I didn’t go as a pastor or a moderator,” she said. “I went as Kasey the sister.”
Leadership shift
Jones, the 24th CBF moderator and the second African-American, is the first person to hold the post with no direct experience in the conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention that birthed the moderate group in 1991.
Growing up in a small town in California, Jones was not exposed to female role models in ministry. By age 7, she and her siblings were involved in door-to-door evangelism, ministry to the sick and other areas of church work, but she never considered serving in the church as a minister.
After working more than 15 years as a community organizer and advocate, she earned her master of divinity degree from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. She is both the first woman and the first African-American to be pastor of National Baptist Memorial Church, a congregation established in 1905.
Jones, who served on the CBF leadership team last year as moderator-elect, said she is “excited about seeing what was recommended in 2012 really come to life.”
She said she is encouraged both as a task force member and a person who served on the Coordinating Council “to see the difference in how people are working with staff in very meaningful, positive ways.”
She said the investment of time and resources in the restructuring process are paying off both in resources being produced and the direction the organization is headed. “It feels right,” she said, based on what members of the 2012 Task Force heard in listening sessions during the first year of their two-year study.
“One of those things that people said very clearly is that we needed to claim who we are as CBF,” she said. “I am excited to be here at the time when we are working on our identity, to say this is clearly who we are and we want you to join us. We want you to be a part of us because we are a diverse group of Baptists that like to cooperate and like to work in partnership, whether it’s locally or globally.”