BWA adds three new member groups

VANCOUVER, B.C.—The Baptist World Alliance welcomed three new member organizations during its general council meeting in Vancouver.

The council added Baptist groups in Grenada, India and South Sudan to the BWA roster. The international organization now has 235 member organizations in 122 countries and territories.

Founded in 1984, the Grenada Baptist Association has six churches and 400 members. Grenada is the newest country in the Caribbean to join the BWA international fellowship.

The Arunachal Baptist Church Council in northeast India, established in 2008, includes 95,000 members in more than 1,000 churches. It grew out of a merger of two Baptist groups, one in the north and the other in the south, and it becomes the 21st BWA member from India.

The Faith Evangelical Baptist Church in South Sudan—established in 2007—has 7,000 members in 74 churches in both South Sudan and Kenya.

In other business, the general council approved a recommendation from its executive committee to combine the BWA division of mission, evangelism and theological reflection with its freedom and justice division.

Fausto Vasconcelos, who directs the missions, evangelism and theological reflection division, retires at the end of August after more than 10 years.

The freedom and justice division director’s position has been vacant since 2014 after Raimundo Barreto resigned to take up a professorship at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

Both the BWA budget and finance committee and the human resources committee agreed funds were not available to enable BWA to hire a successor to Barreto, BWA General Secretary Neville Callam told the general council.

Based on reporting by Eron Henry.