The Alabama Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) adopted a record budget for 2005 and reviewed potential changes to its bylaws during its Nov. 15 meeting in Montgomery.
The estimated 80 people in attendance also heard suggestions for easing the pastor selection process and were encouraged to form cooperative partnerships to further God’s work.
Moderator Ed Culpepper, pastor of administration at First Baptist Church, Huntsville, said the $173,000 budget “is based on a conservative projection of 5 percent growth in offerings received.”
According to Mart Gray, coordinator for Alabama CBF, the group has averaged 17 percent annual growth in offerings received for the last several years.
The budget also reflects a raise for the position of associate coordinator for new church starts, from $12,500 in 2004 to $25,000 in 2005.
Culpepper said the budget would allow Alabama CBF to continue funding such initiatives as new church starts, Sowing Seeds of Hope in Perry County, community work and networking.
Potential revisions to the bylaws were also distributed for review before the group’s spring meeting. The revisions came out of the operational planning process that Alabama CBF began last year and reflect the growth of the decade-old organization, Culpepper said. “It’s time to redefine, to set ourselves on a firm organizational structure.”
“We want this to be a good working document that reflects the ideals and values important to Alabama CBF.” Gray said the changes also establish a rotation schedule for the Coordinating Council and allow for hired staff but will not change the basic structure of Alabama CBF.
Tamara Tillman, national CBF associate coordinator for missions education, updated the group on national CBF.
“CBF represents 150 or so Global Missions personnel, almost 450 chaplains, 2,000 students in CBF-affiliated seminaries, 1,800 churches consistently giving to CBF and 5,000 churches that give [occasionally],” she said. “It’s encouraging to know that there’s a lot of diversity in CBF, and that we can come together to reach the common goal of being and celebrating the message of Christ in the world.”
Pastor, staff selection
Truett Gannon, former pastor of Smoke Rise Baptist Church, Stone Mountain, Ga., and Clarissa Strickland, national CBF associate coordinator for leadership development, described the process churches use to select pastors and staff members.
Their presentation offered suggestions to those seeking positions at churches.
In the evening session, Michael Thurman, pastor of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, Montgomery, challenged the group to cross racial and cultural barriers to further the work of God. “Racism is still present in America,” he said. “As Christians we must work together to tear down the barriers that still divide us,” said Thurman, describing the barriers as both race-related and economically based.
Pointing to Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, let us reason together,” Thurman said, “Cooperation is needed to break down those barriers.” Thurman, who has been pastor of Dexter Avenue since 1996, was licensed and ordained at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, Auburn, and worked with the North American Mission Board as a church planter in Ames, Iowa, and in Atlanta as a church growth consultant. He has experienced the cooperative spirit of Southern Baptists working with National Baptists. But that work was hurt when Southern Baptists shifted their focus to the church planting movement of the 1980s, he said.
“I think [Alabama] CBF is at a strategic point in its existence,” he added. “Just being formed 10 years ago, you have an opportunity to again reach out across racial lines and again cooperate together, absent paternalism, absent hidden agendas, absent negative connotations.
“This is a golden opportunity to lay afresh the vision of working together along racial and cultural lines and holding up the bloodstained banner of Christ in ways never seen before,” he said.
“Black Baptists, white Baptists, Hispanics, regardless of our nationality and cultures, we must work together to build a better man, for when we build a better man, it becomes a better society, and when we put God in the middle of it, it becomes the best of all possible worlds.”
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