Posted: 10/26/07

Bexar County youthful offenders
find a second chance with KAPS

By Haley Smith

Baptist Child & Family Services

AN ANTONIO—A growing number of South Texas juvenile offenders are hearing good news—jail is not their only option—thanks to an expanding relationship between the Juvenile Probation Department and Kids Adverted from Placement Services.

KAPS, a program of Baptist Child & Family Services that has provided intensive family preservation services for youthful offenders for nine years, recently received an additional $325,000 from Juvenile Probation. This has allowed the program to increase from four to six the number of three-person teams—which translates into helping an additional 56 families a year.

“We think programs such as KAPS are ultimately going to take the place of (incarceration in Texas Youth Commission facilities) and other traditional methods,” said Jeannine Von Stultz, director of Mental Health Services for Bexar County Juvenile Probation who championed the funding increase.

Bexar County courts, realizing the positive effects of KAPS, are ordering the counseling for more teens as the last chance before being sentenced to juvenile detention. Because of the substantial length of the waiting list to get into the program, juveniles often get in trouble with the law again and find themselves back in court before they receive the chance to benefit from KAPS’ services—one reason behind the additional funding.

“Our waiting list is anywhere from 25 to 30 families at any given point who usually wait a time period of about three months or longer,” said Janie Cook, BCFS executive for teen and youth services. “The additional funding should cut the waiting list in half.”

Until recently, the Texas Youth Commission was assigned to handle young people through the age of 21 who had committed a variety of misdemeanors. However, because of serious allegations of physical and sexual abuse, TYC now is allowed to handle offenders who commit serious felonies until age 19.

Due to this change in policy and the fact many youth in TYC were released early from their sentencing, the state gave money back to juvenile services, which—in turn—redirected a portion to KAPS.

Because research that shows non-traditional counseling programs such as KAPS produce a better success rate than traditional psychotherapy methods, the juvenile probation department continues to rely on KAPS, Von Stultz said.

“I believe the reason for this is that the families sent to these programs usually have multiple issues in addition to the legal issue at hand regarding their child. Often things as simple as transportation keep the family from going to their assigned counseling,” Von Stultz explained.

“KAPS goes into the family’s home, breaking through initial apprehension and practical barriers such as transportation, to get to the heart of the matter.”

KAPS’ goal is to support the family as a whole, offering other resources not part of traditional treatment methods and addressing practical needs such as food and housing.

“When families come to be part of the KAPS program, they obviously are not always happy about the court order. But by the end, they usually tell us that they appreciate the fact that we don’t give up on them. Our staff is pretty tenacious,” Cook explains. “Many of these families feel that the system has let them down, and we want to show them that’s not the case.”

With the additional funding, KAPS is forming two new teams to meet the growing need to minister to the youth assigned to their care. As part of the team expansion, KAPS is in the process of filling four new staff positions, including two case managers and two case manager aides and one therapist, to increase capacity to handle more teens.

Although 75 percent of the funding will go to serve young people who might have originally ended up in TYC, the money also provides adequate resources to improve the KAPS program as a whole.

“The ultimate goal of the Juvenile Probation Department and KAPS is to serve the kids in our community, using TYC as a last resort,” Cook said. “Any additional funding we receive helps significantly in these efforts.”

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

One blogging minister
nominates another for first VP

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

A Baptist blogger from Mineral Wells plans to nominate a Baptist blogger from Houston for first vice president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

David Montoya, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Mineral Wells, has announced he will nominate Lee Saunders, minister of church development at Garden Oaks Baptist Church in Houston, for office during the BGCT annual meeting in Amarillo.

“He has been an active part of BGCT life, is familiar with our history and heritage, and is familiar with the controversies within the convention in recent months,” Montoya said.

“On his blog, he has offered wise, temperate responses as events have unfolded over the past year.”

Saunders, 50, described himself as an “under-the-radar kind of person” who never particularly aspired to elected office in the state convention but agreed to allow his nomination because Texas Baptists “need a choice.”

“I think I could bring in some diversity and contribute to a spirit of unity” in the BGCT, he said.

In an Oct. 23 posting on his weblog— deepintheheart.wordpress.com —Saunders voiced his hope for restored trust in the BGCT.

“The BGCT is not going either to the liberal left or the fundamentalist right. I think it is accurate to say that it is safe from both of those extremes. But it is in trouble, as a result of poor decisions made by the current administration, it is in transition, and it has lost the trust of many of its supporting congregations,” he wrote. “At this particular point in its history, with other factors related to paradigm shifts taking place in the way we do church and ministry, that’s not a good place to be.”

Texas Baptists need to fulfill the promise of recent themes, such as “Together, we can do more,” even though “there are forces and pressures pulling and pushing on the BGCT right now that have the potential to pull it apart.”

Regardless of the outcome of votes at the annual meeting, Saunders urged readers of his blog “not to burn any bridges.”

Prior to joining the staff at Garden Oaks Baptist Church in February 2006, he was assistant principal at Clay Road Baptist School in Houston. Before taking that administrative post, he was chair of the Bible department at Fort Bend Baptist Academy in Sugar Land.

He also was on the faculty of George Sanchez High School in Houston and has served four churches in Texas, Arizona, Missouri and Kentucky as minister of education and youth.

Saunders is a graduate of Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Ariz., and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a former Home Mission Board summer missionary, and he has worked as a project coordinator for the World Changers program of the North American Mission Board each summer since 2000.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

Texas Baptists launch young leaders network

By John Hall

Texas Baptists Communications

AUSTIN—The Baptist General Convention of Texas recently started a young leaders network in an effort to encourage Baptists younger than 40 in their efforts to strengthen churches.

The Texas Baptist Young Professional Leaders Network has had 160 people connect with it in its first five months of existence. Many of the members are connected through Facebook, an online social networking site popular with college students and recent graduates.

The group is scheduling a series of dinners around the state where 20-something young adults gather to discuss Baptists beliefs and reasons they are Baptists. Then they brainstorm ways they can strengthen Baptist churches.

“Demographics indicate that significant numbers of people 18 to 34 are leaving the church, but many young people are drawn to historic Baptist principles,” said Alexis Cooper, who is helping form the network. “This growing group of talented professionals has the potential to be the spark that ignites a revival across the state that could radically change the world around us. And we’d like to see that God-given potential realized.”

The network is focused on developing and empowering lay leaders and building connections between young adults. As a result of early discussions with these young adults, some of them plan to attend the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta, Ga., together in January 2008.

“When we come together, we learn from each other,’ Cooper said. “Hopefully, we take what we learn and use that to strengthen the ministry of our congregations.”

For more information, call (888) 244-9400 or e-mail Alexis.Cooper@bgct.org.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

Evangelicals are moving into power,
but ends can be unclear, author says

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

WASHINGTON (ABP)—There’s no question that in the last few decades evangelical Christians have asserted their growing power in America’s public life.

But veteran reporter Hanna Rosin asks, “By what method and to what end?”

Rosin, a former Washington Post reporter, spent more than a year observing life at Patrick Henry College, a 7-year-old liberal-arts school in a Virginia town just outside the nation’s capital.

The result was God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.

Patrick Henry, named for the famous Founding Father and headed by home-schooling activist Michael Farris, aims to give ambitious evangelical students the ammunition they need, via a classical liberal-arts education, to fight the so-called “culture wars.”

“They explicitly put themselves close to Washington because they kind of see themselves as a training academy for politics,” Rosin said of the college.

She noted that its early graduates already have made a mark on Washington, with many of them rising through the ranks of President Bush’s administration as well as serving powerful Republican members of Congress.

The students, faculty and administrators at Patrick Henry tend to be very conservative, and most favor

using government to advance what they believe to be the Christian cause.

“You’ve got the most extreme in religion and the most extreme in ambition, and you try to marry those two together,” Rosin said.

However, she said, many former Patrick Henry students—who often come from sheltered backgrounds—get to Washington or the statehouse and discover politics isn’t always as pure a calling as they imagined.

“They discoverer that young Republicans drink, and they sleep around, and they go to Oktoberfest and all the things that … young conservative Christians are not supposed to do,” Rosin said.

And, since legislative work in a democracy often requires significant compromise to get anything done, ideological purity becomes difficult to maintain when holding the reins of power.

“As we all know, becoming part of the mainstream tends to dull your edges a little bit,” Rosin said. “I think there’s just an inverse relationship between vocalized religious extremism and political success.”

While Rosin did her research, Patrick Henry went through a significant amount of turmoil due to a conflict over academic freedom between administrators and many of the faculty and students. Several faculty members left the school.

Rosin noted many would-be culture warriors, when confronted with ideas in the books Patrick Henry’s curriculum very purposefully includes, often reach conclusions other than those the school’s founders might have envisioned.

“It’s perfectly possible that Nietzsche and Kant are much more interesting to you than your Bible class, all the sudden,” she said.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

BOOKS: Faith in the Halls of Power

Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite By Michael Lindsay (Oxford University Press)

A common-but-wrong as-sumption—the evangelical population has burgeoned in the United States since the 1970s—piqued Michael Lind-say’s curiosity and prompted this insightful new book.

“Most people assume that the number of evangelicals had grown dramatically since Jimmy Carter ran for president,” writes Lindsay, a former consultant at the Gallup Institute. He checked the statistics and found that’s not true. The percentage of U.S. adults who claim to be “born again” inched up only six points in 30 years, from 35 percent in 1976 to 41 percent last year.

So, why does it seem like the number of evangelicals has increased rapidly during the past three decades? Lindsay, a sociology professor at Rice University, spent three years criss-crossing the continent 28 times seeking an answer. He interviewed 360 prominent evangelical leaders—not only pastors and heads of denominational and parachurch groups, but also laypeople in the secular marketplace and two former presidents.

What are you reading that other Texas Baptists would find helpful? Send suggestions and reviews to books@baptiststandard.com.

Lindsay discovered evangelicals’ visibility and influence in American culture increased far beyond their numerical gain. That’s because evangelical membership in the “American elite” rose sharply. They seem more prevalent because evangelicals whose presence commands attention are more numerous, and those evangelicals stand astride the highest echelons of power and influence.

Faith in the Halls of Power tracks the increasing population of evangelicals within the leadership of four major segments of society—government, academia, entertainment/media and business. Lindsay shows how evangelicals gained prominence, primarily through networking, encouraging one another and installing rungs on the ladders of success. For example, already-prominent evangelicals at the prime of their careers formed and funded ascendancy-oriented programs—such as academic scholarships, political and business internships, and artists’ groups—to pave the way for younger evangelicals to join them at elite levels of their respective fields. They’re focused on “transforming the cultural mainstream.”

Lindsay tells their tale with a researcher’s eye for documentation and a storyteller’s passion for detail, expression and poignancy. He explains how evangelicals’ “elastic orthodoxy” differentiates them from fundamentalists and enables them to work ecumenically without watering down their faith. He describes the differences between old-school, highly visible evangelical leaders and institutions, such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, and a kindler, gentler evangelicalism by talking about the differences between “populist” and “cosmopolitan” evangelicals.

Research for Faith in the Halls of Power turned up numerous surprises, Lindsay acknowledged in an interview. “I was not expecting to find the insignificance of the role of the local church in these evangelical leaders’ lives and the proportionate significance of parachurch organizations for them,” he noted, citing his biggest shock. As a whole, the evangelical leaders are only nominally involved in local churches, but they tend to populate the boards of parachurch groups.

The counter-trend is membership in megachurches. “It’s not the size of the church or the opportunity for anonymity” that attract evangelical elites to the huge congregations, he explained. “They want pastors they can respect as leaders—pastors as religious entrepreneurs. They want to see their pastor as a leadership peer.” In his book, Lindsay quotes a business leader who paid his pastor the ultimate elite compliment—he could have been “a Fortune 10 CEO.”

Churches can learn a couple of lessons from evangelical leaders’ aversion to strongly identify with congregations, Lindsay suggested.

“One is we have to do a better job of recruiting strong leaders into pastoral roles. We need strong leaders leading our churches,” he said. “Also, we need to realize spiritual formation comes in lots of different shapes and sizes. … I can’t tell you how many small-group meetings (of evangelical leaders) take place over conference calls. They may meet in person only once or twice a year, but they may call in from Dubai, New York, Los Angeles or from home in Dallas or Houston. It’s a new way of doing small groups.”

Aversion to local-church involvement also is “not good news for denominations,” Lindsay conceded.

“Denominational identity is at an all-time low. I don’t see signs for denominational affiliation growing” among evangelical elites, he said.

But the Baptist General Convention of Texas is one of the few denominational or-ganizations situated to buck that trend, he added.

“Texas Baptists have figured out how to create partnerships for different kinds of ministries” that appeal to evangelical leaders, he said. “That’s the future—building collaborative partnerships.”

Also, the BGCT is home to 27 agencies and institutions, which provide a denominational alternative to parachurch involvement, he noted. “Institutions—that’s where a lot of these folks are plugged in. They exercise their leadership not through involvement on a board of deacons, but through the boards of strong institutions.”

Lindsay’s connections to Texas Baptists run deep. He graduated from Baylor University in Waco before heading east to earn a master of divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary and a doctor of philosophy degree at Princeton University. He served as a special assistant to the president at Dallas Baptist University. In Houston, he’s a member of West University Baptist Church.

Although his research took him shoulder-to-shoulder with leaders at the highest levels of academia, business, entertainment and politics, it also underscored an important lesson for ordinary people of faith, Lindsay said.

“I was struck by the great desire of people, that their spiritual lives would help them be more effective witnesses in the workaday world,” he explained.

“This was true not only of leaders, but also of their secretaries and others who escorted me to their meetings—the need to connect between Sunday and Monday, to integrate their professional lives and their faith,” he said. “There has to be relevance between your faith and what you do.”

Marv Knox, editor

Baptist Standard, Dallas

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

Baptist Briefs

Brister to retire at OBU. Oklahoma Baptist University trustees accepted the retirement of President Mark Brister during a mid-October special meeting on the university’s campus in Shawnee. Brister, who will retire effective Nov. 10 at the conclusion of OBU’s annual homecoming, has led the Christian liberal arts institution since Sept. 1, 1998.

His nine-year tenure as OBU’s 14th president is the third-longest in the university’s 97-year history. During the trustee meeting, John Parrish, executive vice president emeritus, was elected interim president, effective Nov. 11. Parrish retired from the university’s administration in November 2002 after more than 38 years at OBU. He was executive vice president and chief financial officer from 1995 until his retirement.

CBF falls short of budget. The Coopera-tive Baptist Fellowship reached only 86 percent of the amount budgeted for its recently completed fiscal year and ended the year with a shortfall, the CBF Coordinating Council learned at its mid-October meeting. CBF leaders reported the Fellowship received $19.1 million in total revenue, including $14.8 million in undesignated receipts (a category including the CBF Global Missions Offering), for the 2006-07 fiscal year. Expenses for the year totaled more than $21.6 million. The $8.2 million in undesignated contributions for 2006-07 was about $700,000 less than the previous year, continuing a three-year downturn, according to financial data. The Fellowship’s financial report indicated the organization finished the fiscal year 2006-2007 with a shortfall of $649,974 in unrestricted funds and $2.5 million total.

Seminary to Name Center for SBC’s Land. Officials at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary have announced plans to create a Richard Land Center for Cultural Engagement, honoring Southern Baptists’ public-policy guru. Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission since 1988, has represented Southern Baptists’ concerns in the media and on Capitol Hill for two decades. The center will conduct research in Christian morality and political action and study cultural and philosophical issues. Land joins another well-known fundamentalist Baptist activist, Paul Pressler, in becoming a building namesake. Pressler, a Texas judge who helped lead the so-called “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention, will have a law school named after him at the Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College.

Scholarships available for communications students. Baptist Communi-cators Association will award three scholarships next spring for the 2008-2009 academic year to communications students. Dec. 7 is the deadline application. A $1,000 scholarship will be awarded to an undergraduate student and a $500 scholarship to a graduate student in the name of Al Shackleford and Dan Martin, former editors of Baptist Press. The $1,000 Alan Compton/Bob Stanley Minority and International Scholarship is given to an undergraduate student of minority ethnic or international origin. Applicants must have at least a 2.5 GPA and have vocational aspirations in religious communications. Funds may be used for tuition, books, housing or food and will be forwarded to the institution in which the student is enrolled. Students may apply online at http://www.baptistcommunicators.org/about/scholarship.cfm. For further information, contact the BCA office at (615) 904-0152 or bca.office@comcast.net.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

Buckner’s Lufkin program celebrates
10 years of ministry to single parents

By Jenny Pope

Buckner International

LUFKIN—Buckner Family Place, a self-sufficiency program for single parents, celebrated its 10th anniversary Oct. 23 with a dedication ceremony of a newly constructed community room named after local philanthropist and advocate Murphy George.

George, who has chaired the Family Place advisory committee since its inception 10 years ago, has been instrumental in leading the cause to support single parents seeking higher education and breaking the cycle of abuse and dependency, Executive Director Judy Morgan said.

“We’ve had 230 families, including 500 children, come through Family Place since we first began,” she said. “These parents are now an active force in our workplace, in our hospitals and in our schools. And they’ll never again have to think about being dependent on the government for financial assistance or upon their families and friends. It’s a life-changing thing.”

In addition, children have learned to appreciate education in a more meaningful way, Morgan said.

“There is a whole generation of children who have already made long-term education plans and will pursue them because of their parent’s inspiration,” she added.

Buckner Family Place provides single parents with safe, affordable housing and free child care as they receive their degrees in higher education from Angelina College. Parents also are provided with individual and group counseling, parent and life skills training and job readiness preparation.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

Buckner opens Child
Development Center in Romania

By Jenny Pope

Buckner International

TARNEVENI, Romania—At least 60 Roma—also known as “gypsy”—children will be given a head start in life through the opening of the Buckner Child Development Center in Tarneveni, Romania, a struggling community of 30,000 people with an estimated 85 percent unemployment rate.

Randy Daniels, Buckner’s director of global initiatives, recently joined Phil Brinkmeyer, director of Eastern European ministry, and the mayor of Tarneveni for the dedication ceremony of the new center. Twenty children are enrolled, with enrollment expected to grow to 60 by the end of the year.

“This is the only ministry of this type to the Roma population outside of Bucharest,” Daniels said. “It’s one of a kind. We understand the ultimate importance of this school—not just to educate these children, but to create a culture change. This school will provide these children with the foundation they need to be successful in elementary school, in high school and in the rest of their lives.

“If we want to make a change in this culture, we have to start with the youngest ones. When education becomes routine, when it becomes the norm, these changes will last.”

A typical school day lasts from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with each child receiving breakfast and lunch—often their only meals of the day. Tuition is free, but parents are expected to participate in the school as they can—cleaning, volunteering or providing resources.

Buckner hopes to use the relationships built through the school to reach the extended Roma population through the center, Daniels said. Several Buckner mission teams have paved the way for these relationships by reaching out to the surrounding community, and a local Baptist church has played a significant role by providing volunteers and support.

An East Texas company—Red Dot Building Systems in Athens—funded the construction of the school, which was a hospital before it closed seven years earlier and squatters stripped it.

“There wasn’t anything left inside this building when we first came; it was just a shell,” Daniels said. “They even took the plumbing out, the tiles from the roof. I think there was only one toilet left in the entire building, and it was shattered.”

Today, the children’s classrooms are clean and bright. It’s a beacon of hope amidst a village engulfed in poverty, Daniels said.

“There is still a long way to go in this community to gain the trust of the people,” he said.

“But give us more time and we’ll become a trusted partner; we can do so much more.”

For more information about the Buckner Child Development Center in Romania, e-mail rdaniels@buckner.org.

For information about mission trips, call (877) 7ORPHAN or e-mail missions@buckner.org.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

Posted: 10/26/07

CBF council affirms UN anti-poverty goals

By Greg Warner

Associated Baptist Press

DECATUR, Ga. (ABP)—The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s governing board endorsed the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, joining many governmental and religious bodies in the global fight against extreme poverty, hunger and disease.

Colleen Burroughs, executive vice president of Passport Camps in Birmingham, Ala., made a motion at the June general assembly urging CBF to adopt the Millennium Development Goals as a framework for addressing urgent global issues. Her motion asked the council to study the issue. The council’s endorsement, approved without opposition, will be presented to the general assembly for approval in June.

The council was briefed on the global development goals, as well as work already under way by CBF missionaries that addresses the social needs highlighted by the UN in 2000. The eight goals, targeted for completion by 2015, are:

• Reduce by half extreme poverty and hunger.

• Achieve universal primary education.

• Promote gender equality and empower women.

• Reduce child mortality by two-thirds.

• Reduce maternal mortality by three-fourths.

• Reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.

• Ensure environmental sustainability.

• Develop a global partnership for development.

“For the first time in history, we have the technology, the resources and the knowledge to get this done,” said Erin Tunney, senior international policy analyst for Washington-based Bread for the World, who briefed the Coordinating Council on the goals. “All we lack is the will. As Christians, we have the opportunity to get involved and help achieve these goals.”

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.

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.

News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.