HOUSTON (ABP) — The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship faced financial hardship and generational change in its 19th General Assembly July 1-3 in Houston.
Registration for the meeting reached 1,637, well below the 2,250 registered at last year’s meeting in Memphis. Organizers anticipated a smaller crowd, because the meeting was held on a different week than usual and wrapped up at the beginning of a holiday weekend.
Participants adopted a budget of a $16.1 million, slightly smaller than last year’s budget, but the organization will enter the 2009-2010 fiscal year spending at 80 percent of that amount. That continues a contingency spending plan in place since March to handle a budget shortfall.
“It will come as no surprise to you that this has been a difficult fiscal year for everyone, including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship,” said Colleen Burroughs, chair of the finance committee of the group’s Coordinating Council. “The contracting global economy has affected millions of lives around the world, and CBF is not immune to that reality.”
As the CBF prepares for its 20th General Assembly next year in Charlotte, N.C., Daniel Vestal, CBF executive coordinator, described the movement, which formed out of SBC controversy in the 1980s, as “a testimony of grace and providence.”
Julie Merritt, pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Hendersonville, N.C., spoke at Thursday evening’s worship service. (CBF photo by J.V. McKinney)
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“I know we are living in a recession,” Vestal said. “I know that we are in a culture — both secular and popular Christianity — that in many ways is hostile to what we believe. I also know that some of you live and serve in difficult and dangerous places. I know some of you feel isolated, and at times discouraged. I feel that way at times, but I believe in the grace of God and the providence of God working in and through us.”
The crowd was younger than in previous years. Terry Hamrick, a CBF official who for many years has held a leadership-training seminar for clergy, said this year for the first time attendees from the 15 theology schools supported by the CBF outnumbered those who graduated from Southern Baptist Convention seminaries before the 1990s.
CBF Moderator Jack Glasgow said the right biblical metaphor to describe the movement is the post-exilic world of Ezra and Nehemiah, when both those old enough to remember the days before the Babylonian exile and those who had little historical memory of that time worked together to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
“Some have stories to remember,” Glasgow, pastor of Zebulon Baptist Church in Zebulon, N.C., said of today’s CBF. “Some have stories to forget. Some come with few stories in their rear-view mirror but with burning passion for the story up ahead that is calling them to faithfulness.”
Participants chose from more than 30 ministry workshops and attended auxiliary events for CBF partner organizations including the Baptist Center for Ethics, Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and Associated Baptist Press.
About 800 people at a commissioning service July 1 at Houston’s South Main Baptist Church prayed for six newly commissioned CBF field personnel. All six are self-funded and will serve in ministries to homeless people in North Carolina, poor children in Miami, and churches and suffering people in China.
“It’s not about you. It’s not about us,” CBF Global Missions Coordinator Rob Nash challenged the missionaries. “It is about the most neglected. It is about the least-evangelized and the most-marginalized people in the world.”
At the Wednesday commissioning service, $8,806 was given in support of the CBF Offering for Global Missions.
Also at the commissioning service CBF leaders formally signed a memorandum of understanding with the Japan Baptist Convention, representing an official partnership between the organizations.
In the three-year partnership, the Fellowship and Japan Baptist Convention will coordinate their efforts related to church-planting, faith-sharing and education ministries. The primary ministry of mission personnel will be teaching English in the local churches.
“The Japanese Baptist Convention and CBF view this partnership as a creative and innovative means to share the love of Christ and increase the influence and number of Japanese Baptist churches,” said Harry Rowland, CBF’s director of missional church ministries. “For those willing to minister in a cross-cultural environment ,this partnership provides a wonderful opportunity.”
The CBF elected Christy McMillin-Goodwin, associate minister for education and missions at Oakland Baptist Church in Rock Hill, S.C., as moderator-elect. When she assumes office in 2010-2011 she will become the first moderator to graduate from a CBF partner school, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.
This year’s moderator is Hal Bass, a professor at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark. Glasgow’s final year in leadership is as immediate past moderator, whose chief duty is to chair the CBF nominating committee.
During the Assembly, $9,848 was collected for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Offering for Religious Liberty and Human Rights, used to promote ideals of religious liberty and human rights.
This year’s offering will help fund ongoing efforts by the European Baptist Federation to secure religious freedom in former communist-bloc countries and a ministry to support female church planters in an undisclosed location in the Middle East.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press. Ken Camp of the Texas Baptist Standard and CBF newsroom staff contributed to this report.