ATLANTA (ABP) — A miniature preaching festival within next year's Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant will feature one of the nation's most famous preachers among a group that is broadly diverse in terms of ethnic background, gender, denominational affiliation and geographic distribution.
James Forbes, pastor emeritus of the Riverside Church in New York, is among those who will preach at the event. Riverside is jointly affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA and the United Church of Christ. It was founded in the 1920s by John Rockefeller as a monument to liberal Protestantism in New York City and has remained prominent in the nation's theological and political affairs ever since. Forbes was the congregation's first African-American senior pastor, and his predecessors at Riverside's helm include Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin.
The mini-homiletics conference is scheduled to take place during the breakout-session times at the groundbreaking conference, which will take place in Atlanta Jan. 30-Feb. 1. The meeting aims to bring together as many different kinds of Baptists as possible in the United States to worship together and discuss how they can cooperate across racial, denominational and ideological lines to work toward common evangelistic and social-justice goals.
The celebration's plenary sessions will include preaching and focus on the overall themes. Meanwhile, what conference organizers are calling “special-interest sessions” on the afternoons of Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 will feature discussion of specific topics related to the meeting's themes. But, in a nod to a tradition that is common to many African-American Baptist gatherings, the organizers have included a separate preaching track that stretches across the shorter periods allotted for the breakout sessions.
The celebration of preaching will feature eight pulpiteers. They include five African-American ministers, two women, one associate pastor and one preacher of Latino heritage who currently serves as pastor of a historically Anglo congregation.
Several of the preachers are senior pastors of historic African-American Baptist congregations. They include Otis Moss, pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland; Gina Stewart, pastor of Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis, Tenn.; and Julius Scruggs, pastor of First Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala.
In 1995, Stewart “became the first black female in Memphis and Shelby County to be elected to pastor an established black Baptist congregation,” according to a history statement posted on her church's website. She had been licensed and ordained at the church under the mentorship of longtime pastor Eddie Currie.
Scruggs is a graduate of American Baptist College and Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He has led his Huntsville congregation in educational advocacy, starting an academy for elementary-school children and donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to African-American colleges and other educational institutions. He has also served as an officer for the National Baptist Convention USA.
Moss has served Olivet since 1975. The Cleveland congregation was a center of black activism during the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 60s and has continued its activism in the African-American community by starting a medical clinic for underserved communities and operating a prisoner-rehabilitation program, among other ministries.
The one non-senior pastor featured at the event is Joan Parrott, who serves as executive minister at University Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. Parrott, who serves as the chief operating officer of a historic African-American church that has recently moved to two suburban locations, has a widely varied resume. She has served as an elementary-school teacher, as an official with the Internal Revenue Service, as director of a community-service organization and as an executive with both the American Baptist Churches and the National Council of Churches.
The other featured preachers come from Southern Baptist backgrounds, including two prominent CBF-affiliated pastors, George Mason and Bill Self.
Ellis Orozco has been pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen, Texas, since 1999. He is a Texas native and has served on several boards and committees for the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Orozco's congregation is a historically Anglo church located in the overwhelmingly Latino Texas-Mexico border area.
Self was the founding pastor of John's Creek Baptist Church in Alpharetta, Ga., an Atlanta suburb. A longtime pastor of Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta, Self served as trustee chairman of the SBC's International Mission Board as well as a vice president of the denomination and president of the Georgia Baptist Convention. Since John's Creek's founding in 1993, it has grown from less than 400 in average Sunday attendance to around 2,000. The church recently moved into a 2,300-seat sanctuary.
Both Orozco's and Self's congregations affiliate with both the SBC and the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Mason, who will also speak at the event, leads a church historically affiliated with the SBC but which left the denomination to affiliate exclusively with CBF. Mason has served as pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas since 1989. A New York native and former University of Miami football star, Mason has led an established congregation to grow, build and invest in innovative ministries, including a successful pastoral-residency program for young ministers that has been replicated around the country.