Editor's note: This is compiled from previous ABP stories.
ATLANTA (ABP) — News from speakers, workshops and auxiliary meetings during the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship general assembly included:
— CBF Coordinating Council members unanimously elected Rob Nash as global missions coordinator for CBF. Nash, 47, grew up with missionary parents in the Philippines. He traveled or studied in more than 30 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South America.
The search committee formally thanked Jack Snell, CBF associate missions coordinator who served in the top spot as an interim after former missions coordinator Barbara Baldridge resigned unexpectedly in May 2005.
One day after his election, Nash urged about 300 people at an Associated Baptist Press banquet to pursue “information integrity” on their way to becoming “citizens of the world.” It is important for Baptists to have and use credible sources of news and information, said Nash, adding, “For me, the greatest gift that I can possibly give to the world is the gift of my own self-awareness.”
— CBF moderator Joy Yee, the first female senior pastor and first Chinese-American to lead CBF, said the group must transcend mere multiculturalism to become fully intercultural. A group of traditional, progressive Baptists can be multicultural simply by gathering diverse people, noted Yee, but to be intercultural, it must dynamically involve each group with all the others. Yee is senior pastor of 19th Avenue Baptist Church in San Francisco.
— Although Baptists and other Christians responded slowly and poorly 25 years ago to the advent of AIDS, God has been in the trenches from the start, David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, told more than 400 people at an HIV/AIDS summit held in conjunction with CBF's annual general assembly. The summit engaged participants in learning how to formulate personal, congregational and Fellowship-wide responses to this growing health crisis.
— Atlanta church planter Jake Myers said CBF could be a good fit with the “emergent church” movement, which he defined as a place “where we can come together and talk about what it means to be Christ-followers in a postmodern, post-Holocaust, post-colonial, post-Christendom world.” In the break-out session, Myers, who works at Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta as a church planter and mission leader, offered advice to CBF members who want to start an emergent congregation or become part of the “emergent conversation.”
— Western Baptists need to leave behind the era of Christendom, when the church was the center of culture, and become more like the early church, Denton Lotz told about 150 people at a Baptist World Alliance dinner June 23.
Lotz, general secretary of BWA, said many Westerners still hold a “Christendom-based” model of thinking. That's bad, he said, because the establishment of Christendom moved Christianity from the margins of society to the center, leading it to rely on the church's power rather than on divine power.
— The central question in immigration reform is not about economics or politics, said Albert Reyes, president of Baptist University of the Americas, but “whether Jesus still has a mission to the poor.” During a workshop, Reyes introduced a document titled “Proclamation for Immigration Reform.” The one-page document supports changes that urge “more responsive legal avenues for workers and their families to enter our country and work, the option … to apply for permanent legal status and citizenship, and border-protection policies that are consistent with humanitarian values.”
— Mercer University President Kirby Godsey told participants at the Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society's annual meeting that higher education faces a monumental crisis, due in large part to abuses of control and financial dependence.
Because of their dependence upon Baptist state conventions, which typically provide a portion of their budgets and elect a majority of their trustees, Baptist schools increasingly are being “forced to sacrifice their intellectual integrity to ensure the flow of funds,” he reported. Godsey will retire this summer after 27 years as president of the Macon, Ga., school.
— Warning “it can happen here,” Baptist historian Walter Shurden told religious-freedom advocates that the principle of religious freedom is threatened as never before in American history.
With the caveat that he does not believe any kind of totalitarian regime is imminent in the United States, Shurden warned that Americans in general and Baptists in particular should not grow complacent about their freedom. Shurden directs the Center for Baptist Studies at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. He spoke at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty luncheon.
— Theological education must change because the church needs ministers to lead in a multicultural, post-Christian world, former seminary president David Tiede told more than 300 educators, students and administrators from the Fellowship's 13 partner schools.
Tiede, a past president of the Association of Theological Schools and retired president of Luther Seminary, said the cost of “real” partnership is steep, but the rewards are rich for those who can provide “theological leadership training” without “dumbing down the academics or compromising biblical truth.”
— Baptist Women in Ministry released “The State of Women in Baptist Life,” a report detailing the numbers of Baptist women serving in church leadership roles, including the role of pastor and co-pastor. Authors Eileen Campbell-Reed and Pamela Durso said the research would help validate the needs of Baptist clergywomen and research nationwide trends.
The study reported that 60 Baptist women became ordained ministers in 2005, bringing the number of ordained Baptist women in the United States to roughly 1,600. Of those, 102 serve as pastors, co-pastors or church-starters in churches affiliated with American Baptists Churches-USA, the Baptist General Association of Virginia, the Baptist General Convention of Texas, or CBF, according to the report.
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