Enthusiastic about our Fellowship
On
the night of June 28, I posted to Facebook this status update from my hotel
room in Greensboro, North Carolina:
From Wednesday’s pre-assembly Baptist
Women in Ministry celebration to the closing General Assembly communion service
tonight, I’ve never felt more enthusiastic about belonging to the Cooperative
Baptist Fellowship.
After
a few weeks’ further reflection that included a trip to Jamaica for some time
with the global Baptist community at the Baptist World Alliance annual
gathering, I still feel the same way. Here are five reasons the Greensboro
gathering—my sixteenth General Assembly since the 1992 meeting in Fort Worth I
attended as a seminary student—left me feeling more enthusiastic than ever about
our Fellowship.
1. Youth. When I began teaching theology in one of the CBF partner
schools in the late 1990s, the generational center of gravity evident in
General Assemblies was considerably older than I and my students were. I’m of
course a good bit older now, but the generational center of gravity in
Greensboro was young. Everywhere I went in the Koury Convention Center I saw my
current students, my former students, and their counterparts from other
CBF-related institutions of theological education. During the Gardner-Webb
University School of Divinity luncheon, Dean Robert Canoy mentioned
something that suggests this trend will continue in his remarks to a capacity
crowd of almost 100 alumni, students, and friends of the school: at a time when
most institutions accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the
United States and Canada have been experiencing declining enrollments, the
number of students enrolled in Gardner-Webb’s School of Divinity has been
growing. In the third decade of CBF’s existence, the leadership of its
congregations is increasingly younger, supplied by ministers educated at CBF partner
schools like Gardner-Webb.
2. Vision. Once upon a
time, the vision of CBF-affiliated Baptists sometimes seemed to be driven by
anti-fundamentalism. While that was an understandable reaction to the
experiences that led to the formation of our Fellowship, the increasingly youthful
center of gravity in CBF life is not interested in re-fighting the Baptist
battles of the 1980s and 1990s. In exhibit hall conversations, at luncheons and
other special events, and in plenary sessions and worship services I seldom
heard about the Southern Baptist Convention’s past and never about its present
actions. Instead I heard seasoned and younger ministers alike speak
enthusiastically about what their congregations are doing to be Christ’s body
in their communities. I heard Fellowship Baptists dream aloud about ways of
ministering to the world as Christ’s body that might embrace partnerships with
our sisters and brothers in the American Baptist
Churches USA.
I even heard the word “ecumenical” mentioned in discussions about collaborative
ministry with a frequency and naturalness I don’t recall from previous
assemblies. All this is a refreshing movement beyond what in earlier years sometimes
seemed to be a preoccupation with being more authentically Baptist than the
fundamentalists.
3. Eucharistic community. As I blogged after
last year’s gathering in Fort Worth, a distinctive feature of CBF General
Assemblies from the 1998 Houston assembly onward in comparison with the previous
Baptist experiences of most of us has been the celebration of the Eucharist. Those
who also attend the pre-assembly Baptist Women in Ministry convocation usually commune
twice in three days when they come together each year. Despite long-aired
protestations that we are not a denomination, our celebrations of the Eucharist
beyond the local congregation embody a conviction that there is some sort of
ecclesiality to what happens when we come together as a Fellowship. I’m all for
the continuation of this practice along with more intentional theological
reflection on the ecclesiological significance of our practice.
4. Theology. Speaking of the
Eucharistic practice of our Fellowship, this year’s closing communion service
was movingly and memorably significant for reasons theological as well as
aesthetic. The preparation of the table was facilitated by the Moving Liturgy
Dance Ensemble
from Burlington, North Carolina. The troupe concluded their liturgical dance
with a procession of the elements to the table that included the elevation of
paten and chalice as we sang David Mowbray’s hymn “We Believe in
God Almighty.”
Set to the medieval plainsong tune DIVINUM MYSTERIUM (familiar
through its association with “Of the Father’s
Love Begotten,”
John Mason Neale’s English translation of a fourth-century Latin hymn by
Aurelius Prudentius), Mowbray’s text is a three-stanza paraphrase of the Trinitarian-structured
Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed—the Eucharistic creed of the ecumenical church
that confesses the incarnational faith in which the material becomes the
sacramental realm of divine encounter. In our beginnings we understandably
tended toward an aversion to theological affirmations because we’d been on the
receiving end of their coercive use, but in Greensboro there was robust theology
embedded and enunciated in our liturgy. And I got the vibe that we were ready
to embrace it without worrying that we might be betraying what it means to be free
and faithful Baptists.
5. Suzii Paynter. Our new
Executive Coordinator has embodied in her leadership of the Fellowship thus far
everything that made me enthusiastic about the Greensboro General Assembly. If
we can live into the vision signaled in the message Suzii Paynter preached and
the service of the table at which she presided along with her husband Roger
that Friday evening, our Fellowship has an exciting future.
I’m enthusiastic
about it.
This post originally appeared on the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog.
