Participants in the second annual national convocation of the Mainstream Baptist Network (MBN) heard from several Alabama Baptists following the meetings theme, Effective Missions in the 21st Century.
Meeting Feb. 7–8 in Birmingham, more than 200 MBN leaders listened as retired pastor of First Baptist Church, Huntsville, Ralph Langley urged them to demonstrate inclusion as they move ahead with their “passion for missions.”
“‘Exclusion’ is the meanest word in the English language,” said Langley, who also recalled Baptist life “when our rallying cry was one of unity, focused on missions.”
Other Alabama Baptists on the program were Bill O’Brien, former Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Foreign (now International) Mission Board (FMB) executive vice president and former director of the Global Center at Samford University in Birmingham; Jack Brymer, retired director of communications for Samford University; Sarah Shelton, pastor of Baptist Church of the Covenant, Birmingham; Al Sutton, pastor of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, Birmingham; and Suzannah Raffield of Birmingham, coordinator of Global Women, an independent missions organization.
The Sixth Avenue Baptist Church choir also performed during the event.
Convocation speakers focused on the missions networks around the world.
Sutton said that as disciples of Jesus Christ, we will sometimes be called to follow the commandment of Jesus to “shake the dust from our feet” when our message is rejected.
“We worry about our own safety, comfort and acceptance while serving a Savior who had no place to lay his own head,” Sutton said.
Raffield spoke of gender inclusion and the needs of women around the world. “The call to minister with women around the world is louder and more powerful than any denominational crisis,” Raffield said. “The callings of the women on whose shoulders I stand are more powerful and louder than a reaction to a convention.”
O’Brien closed the convocation with an address on the priority of missions and a vision for future missions. He outlined how the power center of Christianity is gravitating away from the Western world to the Southern Hemisphere.
“The era of us-to-them is over,” O’Brien said. “Unilateral missions is part and parcel of the past. Any sending body that holds to a strategy that sets its work and its missionaries separate and apart from any existing [national] church is both poor ecclesiology and sheer folly.
“A vision of missions in the future must include ‘netweaving’ webs of inclusiveness,” he said. “There will be many webs — research webs, health-care webs, educational webs, environmental webs — all fed by the discipling webs of churches committed to the whole gospel for whole persons and whole societies.”
Brymer developed a presentation of Baptist history for the group.
Other speakers included Charles Wade, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas; Keith Parks, former president of FMB, SBC; and former global missions coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship; John Upton, executive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia and former missionary to Taiwan; Patrick Anderson, of Lakeland, Fla., the CBF’s missions advocate; and Fred Loper, a medical doctor in Oklahoma City, Okla, and former missionary with the North American Mission Board.
Bible’s take on missions
Parks, who opened the convocation, said, “The Bible is not a Book that just includes missions — it is missions.
“Our spiritual ancestors (in the SBC) declared in 1845 that missions was the priority around which they joined,” he said.
Wade said a 32-person board of directors, chaired by retired seminary missions professor Justice Anderson, has been formed to administrate the work of a newly developing World Missions Network. Wade said that up to eight board members could come from outside Texas in the future.
“Our missions network is not just for Texas Baptists,” Wade said. “This is a world missions network that won’t tell people what they can’t do, but we will try to help people work together to do what God has called and gifted them to do.”
Upton said 70 percent of the world’s churches will be outside the United States and Europe by 2025, compared to 13 percent in 1900. “The two-thirds world and the Western world must collaborate.”
In other activities, the MBN honored 10 new inductees into Mainstream’s Hall of Fame (none from Alabama) and elected layman Bob Stephenson of Norman, Okla., as national co-chair. Bill Wilson, a pastor from Waynesboro, Va., was re-elected as the other national co-chair.
(ABP, Mark Ray and TAB contributed)
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