ACCRA, Ghana—Like the other regions represented in the Baptist World Alliance, the North American Baptist Fellowship met July 4 in Ghana as part of the BWA annual gathering. The Fellowship, headed by its executive director Alan Stanford, is a network of 40 Baptist denominations and organizations.
As the meeting commenced, Emmanuel McCall challenged his fellow North American Baptists to support and attend the New Covenant Celebration scheduled in Atlanta beginning Jan. 30, 2008. McCall is the founding pastor of The Fellowship Group, a new church in East Point, Ga., constituted on June 11, with 266 members. He is the former pastor of the Christian Fellowship Baptist Church from its founding March 31, 1991, to Nov. 30, 2004. Previously he served on the executive staff of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention from May 6, 1968, until October 1991.
Under the theme “Unity in Christ,” the three-day program featured speakers and presenters who addressed historic Baptist commitments and explored other opportunities to work together as Christian partners. The biblical text for the celebration was Luke 4: 18-19.
McCall emphasized that the emphasis of the celebration is to get to know each other, to partner together and “to do some things in Jesus' name that we haven't done before.” To illustrate the need to work together, McCall said he had lived in the Atlanta area since 1968 (when he joined the executive staff of the then Home Mission Board) and for the first time in his memory 100 percent of the Baptist groups except one in the Atlanta area will participate in a single event.
Acknowledging that the New Covenant has been criticized as being political, Stanford said, “Well, this has been of course one of the concerns. When you have two Democratic former presidents coming together in an election year you always get those kinds of things.” He noted that at least two prominent Republicans, U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley, are scheduled to be among the speakers. “For any negative perception that people can have about this, there are six positives. I am going to be involved because it is the first time that we've seen Baptists in North America come together.”
McCall continued the thought saying, “There is no intention at all for this to be a political gathering. What is unique about this is that every Baptist group comes to the table as an equal.” He continued, “We just wanted a high-profile Baptist who loves the Lord to take the leadership.”
Also in the NABF meeting, a Ghanaian pastor and his wife presented information about ministry in Ghana including a mission initiative called Project Ghana. This is an endeavor to involve Baptists from Ghana and beyond to address pressing social needs and campus opportunities.
Gary Nelson, general secretary for Canadian Baptist Ministries, presented a paper on the emerging church entitled “Everything Old is New Again: Emerging Missional Church Ecclesiology.” His conclusion was that Baptist work began as an emerging movement and when we seek to preserve ourselves we betray the mindset of those first Baptists who could not be content with the way things were.
George Bullard provided a strategic response of agreement with Nelson's paper and presented ideas of his own regarding what he called “Push Congregations,” those taken to their mission; “Pull Congregations,” which are pulled by the mission; and “Leap Congregations,” that transplant themselves or are “morphed” to a missional mindset.