New collaboration shows ‘reconstruction’ of Baptist family, CBF leader maintains

Posted: 10/26/07

New collaboration shows ‘reconstruction’
of Baptist family, CBF leader maintains

By Greg Warner

Associated Baptist Press

DECATUR, Ga. (ABP)—The Baptist family is undergoing “something of a reconstruction” these days, said Daniel Vestal, executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

After decades of infighting within and isolation between various Baptist groups, an unprecedented opportunity has emerged for Baptists to work together and learn from each other, said Vestal, a leader among moderate Baptists nationwide.

“God is at work in this family creating new (patterns of) cooperation,” Vestal told members of the CBF Coordinating Council, the Atlanta-based group’s administrative board, at their mid-October meeting.

“There is a desire among Baptists, north and south, … to collaborate in mission, and that is a gift of God.”

Vestal and other Baptist leaders are organizing the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant, a three-day confab of like-minded Baptists scheduled for late January in Atlanta. Organizers say it is an opportunity for Baptist conventions and organizations to unite around an agenda of meeting social needs rather than theological conformity or political activism.

Notably absent from the January meeting will be the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest of the nation’s Baptist bodies with 16 million members, which was invited to participate but not to help organize the meeting. The organizers represent 40-plus U.S. Baptist organizations affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance, an umbrella group composed of most of the world’s Baptist denominations. The SBC withdrew from the BWA in 2004 amid charges of liberalism.

“When the elephant left the room—when the SBC left the Baptist World Alliance—the other Baptist groups discovered we had a lot to learn from each other,” said Vestal, whose own organization distanced itself from the SBC in 1991.

Many Baptist bodies in-volved in the New Baptist Covenant emerged during the last 150 years out of inter-necine divisions with other Baptist groups that are now working together to create the coalition. That new cooperative spirit is “reconstructing” Baptist life in the United States, Vestal suggested.

“We have an opportunity for learning that we desperately need, and that is a gift from God,” he said.

“Most of us lived through the dissolution of a culture and an ethos, not to mention institutions,” Vestal continued, recalling more than two decades of battles for control of the SBC. During the same period, he noted, “deconstruction” was taking place among other Baptist groups.

Vestal said he spent a “blessed day” recently in conversation with Roy Medley, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches USA, the group that emerged from the slavery-fueled split with the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, and Tyrone Pitts, general secretary of the predominantly black Progressive National Baptist Convention, which emerged from a 1961 split from the National Baptist Convention USA Inc. over desegregation policy.

Last June, the three groups —CBF, ABC-USA and PNBC —held a joint worship service that leaders said demonstrated the new spirit of collaboration.

Such collaboration does not require participants to abandon their distinctives or history, Vestal said.

“The best way to build Christian community is for each (organization) to live within its own skin,” Vestal said. “… Then we can be more effective in reaching out to others in the group. When community is based on a generic kind of Christianity, the conversation is very bland and little in the way of Christian community develops.”

The various Baptist bodies are best understood as a “family,” Vestal said—a term he prefers to “denomination.”

“The word ‘denomination’ draws reactions ranging from nostalgia to revulsion,” he said.

The name “Baptist” has its greatest value “in familial terms,” not abstract ideas, Vestal said. He declined to call CBF a denomination, saying he prefers to think of CBF as occupying a small room in the larger house of Christianity.