Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly reflections

Last week the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog hosted my reflections on the 2013 General Assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Baptist communion with which my local congregation and the School of Divinity where I teach are affiliated. The full text of that blog post appears below, with the addition of a Vimeo link for the closing communion service referenced in the post.

Enthusiastic about our Fellowship

On the night of June 28, I posted to Facebook this status update from my hotel room in Greensboro, North Carolina:

From Wednesday’s pre-assembly Baptist Women in Ministry celebration to the closing General Assembly communion service tonight, I’ve never felt more enthusiastic about belonging to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

After a few weeks’ further reflection that included a trip to Jamaica for some time with the global Baptist community at the Baptist World Alliance annual gathering, I still feel the same way. Here are five reasons the Greensboro gathering—my sixteenth General Assembly since the 1992 meeting in Fort Worth I attended as a seminary student—left me feeling more enthusiastic than ever about our Fellowship.

1. Youth. When I began teaching theology in one of the CBF partner schools in the late 1990s, the generational center of gravity evident in General Assemblies was considerably older than I and my students were. I’m of course a good bit older now, but the generational center of gravity in Greensboro was young. Everywhere I went in the Koury Convention Center I saw my current students, my former students, and their counterparts from other CBF-related institutions of theological education. During the Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity luncheon, Dean Robert Canoy mentioned something that suggests this trend will continue in his remarks to a capacity crowd of almost 100 alumni, students, and friends of the school: at a time when most institutions accredited by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada have been experiencing declining enrollments, the number of students enrolled in Gardner-Webb’s School of Divinity has been growing. In the third decade of CBF’s existence, the leadership of its congregations is increasingly younger, supplied by ministers educated at CBF partner schools like Gardner-Webb.

2. Vision. Once upon a time, the vision of CBF-affiliated Baptists sometimes seemed to be driven by anti-fundamentalism. While that was an understandable reaction to the experiences that led to the formation of our Fellowship, the increasingly youthful center of gravity in CBF life is not interested in re-fighting the Baptist battles of the 1980s and 1990s. In exhibit hall conversations, at luncheons and other special events, and in plenary sessions and worship services I seldom heard about the Southern Baptist Convention’s past and never about its present actions. Instead I heard seasoned and younger ministers alike speak enthusiastically about what their congregations are doing to be Christ’s body in their communities. I heard Fellowship Baptists dream aloud about ways of ministering to the world as Christ’s body that might embrace partnerships with our sisters and brothers in the American Baptist Churches USA. I even heard the word “ecumenical” mentioned in discussions about collaborative ministry with a frequency and naturalness I don’t recall from previous assemblies. All this is a refreshing movement beyond what in earlier years sometimes seemed to be a preoccupation with being more authentically Baptist than the fundamentalists.

3. Eucharistic community. As I blogged after last year’s gathering in Fort Worth, a distinctive feature of CBF General Assemblies from the 1998 Houston assembly onward in comparison with the previous Baptist experiences of most of us has been the celebration of the Eucharist. Those who also attend the pre-assembly Baptist Women in Ministry convocation usually commune twice in three days when they come together each year. Despite long-aired protestations that we are not a denomination, our celebrations of the Eucharist beyond the local congregation embody a conviction that there is some sort of ecclesiality to what happens when we come together as a Fellowship. I’m all for the continuation of this practice along with more intentional theological reflection on the ecclesiological significance of our practice.

4. Theology. Speaking of the Eucharistic practice of our Fellowship, this year’s closing communion service was movingly and memorably significant for reasons theological as well as aesthetic. The preparation of the table was facilitated by the Moving Liturgy Dance Ensemble from Burlington, North Carolina. The troupe concluded their liturgical dance with a procession of the elements to the table that included the elevation of paten and chalice as we sang David Mowbray’s hymn “We Believe in God Almighty.” Set to the medieval plainsong tune DIVINUM MYSTERIUM (familiar through its association with “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” John Mason Neale’s English translation of a fourth-century Latin hymn by Aurelius Prudentius), Mowbray’s text is a three-stanza paraphrase of the Trinitarian-structured Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed—the Eucharistic creed of the ecumenical church that confesses the incarnational faith in which the material becomes the sacramental realm of divine encounter. In our beginnings we understandably tended toward an aversion to theological affirmations because we’d been on the receiving end of their coercive use, but in Greensboro there was robust theology embedded and enunciated in our liturgy. And I got the vibe that we were ready to embrace it without worrying that we might be betraying what it means to be free and faithful Baptists.

5. Suzii Paynter. Our new Executive Coordinator has embodied in her leadership of the Fellowship thus far everything that made me enthusiastic about the Greensboro General Assembly. If we can live into the vision signaled in the message Suzii Paynter preached and the service of the table at which she presided along with her husband Roger that Friday evening, our Fellowship has an exciting future.

I’m enthusiastic about it.

This post originally appeared on the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog.

Friday, July 26, 2013

"Enthusiastic about our Fellowship" (ABPnews Blog)

My post "Enthusiastic about our Fellowship" appears today on the Associated Baptist Press ABPnews Blog. I'll post the full text here at Ecclesial Theology next week. In the meantime, here's a snippet from the beginning of the post:

On the night of June 28, I posted to Facebook this status update from my hotel room in Greensboro, North Carolina:
From Wednesday’s pre-assembly Baptist Women in Ministry celebration to the closing General Assembly communion service tonight, I’ve never felt more enthusiastic about belonging to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
After a few weeks’ further reflection that included a trip to Jamaica for some time with the global Baptist community at the Baptist World Alliance annual gathering, I still feel the same way. Here are five reasons the Greensboro gathering—my sixteenth General Assembly since the 1992 meeting in Fort Worth I attended as a seminary student—left me feeling more enthusiastic than ever about our Fellowship....(read the full post on ABPnews Blog)

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Journal of Ecumenical Studies on "The Ecumenical Legacy of the Second Vatican Council, 50 Years Later"

Yesterday I received the latest issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (vol. 48, no. 2; Spring 2013). This issue features a special section on "The Ecumenical Legacy of the Second Vatican Council, 50 Years Later" that publishes the plenary addresses delivered at the annual conference of the North American Academy of Ecumenists in Halifax, Nova Scotia, September 21-23, 2012. I'm looking forward to a prolonged feast of reading and reflecting on these articles, and I hope other readers of Ecclesial Theology who can get access to this issue (check the current periodicals holdings of the nearest seminary or university library; subscription information here) will join me.

Here is a listing of the contents of this section:

  • "Introduction" by Sr. Dr. Lorelei F. Fuchs, Research Assistant, National Council of the Churches of Christ, USA, and President of the North American Academy of Ecumenists
  • "The Ecumenical Legacy of the Second Vatican Council: Reflections of an Accidental Ecumenist" by Rev. Dr. Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, Professor of Worship, School of Theology of Boston University
  • "The Legacy of the Second Vatican Council: An Orthodox Perspective" by Dr. Despina D. Prassas, Assistant Professor of Theology, Providence College
  • "The Ecumenical Legacy of the Second Vatican Council: A Disciples Perspective" by Rev. Dr. Robert K Welsh, President of the Council on Christian Unity of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
  • "The Second Vatican Council: The Legacy Viewed through Methodist Eyes" by Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Wainwright, Cushman Chair of Christian Theology (retired), Duke University Divinity School
  • "Memories of Vatican II" by Rev. Dr. William A. Norgren, priest, Episcopal Church USA and former director of the National Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission during Vatican II
  • "Do We Need a Vatican III or an Eighth Ecumenical Council?" By Rev. Dr. William G. Rusch, former Director of the Commissionon Faith and Order of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA

Friday, July 12, 2013

Gardner-Webb University Professors Attend Baptist World Alliance Meeting

The Gardner-Webb University Office of University Communications has released a story about my participation along with a colleague in last week's Baptist World Alliance gathering in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. Read "Gardner-Webb University Professors Attend Baptist World Alliance Meeting" by clicking on the hyperlinked article title.

Related post:

Catholic-Baptist dialogue report ordering information

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Catholic-Baptist dialogue report ordering information (updated)

Members of the Baptist delegation present for the report's presentation in Ocho Rios, Jamaica: (L-R) Timothy George, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, AL; Elizabeth Newman, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Richmond, VA; Tony Peck, General Secretary, European Baptist Federation; Curtis Freeman, Duke University Divinity School, Durham, NC; Denton Lotz, retired General Secretary, Baptist World Alliance; Paul Fiddes, Oxford University; Steven Harmon, Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity, Boiling Springs, NC; Tomás Mackey, International Baptist Theological Seminary. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The official report of the second series of conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church, "The Word of God in the Life of the Church: A Report of International Conversations between the Catholic Church and the Baptist World Alliance, 2006-2010," was presented and discussed at the annual gathering of the Baptist World Alliance in Ocho Rios, Jamaica at a July 3 open forum session of the BWA Commission on Doctrine and Christian Unity and was officially received by the BWA in a July 6 session of its General Council.

The report had its initial publication just prior to the gathering in a special issue of the American Baptist Quarterly (vol. 31, no. 1) that includes the full text of the 95-page report along with introductions and commentaries. An editorial introduction by Curtis W. Freeman, who is co-editor of the American Baptist Quarterly as well as Research Professor of Theology and Director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke University Divinity School, makes connections between these recent international conversations and the national-level conversations that began in 1967 soon after the Second Vatican Council between representatives of the American Baptist Churches USA and the United States Catholic Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. Baptist-Catholic dialogue commission co-chair and report co-editor Paul S. Fiddes, Professor of Systematic Theology at Oxford University, provides an extensive introduction to the report that contextualizes the themes of the report in relation to other ecumenical dialogues the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church have held with other Christian communions. The text of the report itself is followed by a pair of responses to the report by two Baptist theologians of note who were not members of the Baptist delegation to these conversations: a commentary by Josué Fonseca, who was Professor and Academic Dean at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Santiago, Chile from 1978 to 2008 before his current service as pastor of First Baptist Church in Concepcion, Chile, and a commentary by Stephen R. Holmes, Senior Lecturer in Theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who is also a minister in the Baptist Union of Scotland.

Sometime in the coming weeks the report will be published electronically on the Vatican web site along with a commentary on the report written by a Catholic theologian, after which the electronic text will also be posted on the Baptist World Alliance web site. When these links are available, notice will be given in posts here at Ecclesial Theology. In the meantime, single copies of the American Baptist Quarterly issue with the report may be ordered for $5.00 plus $3.00 shipping (in the continental United States) from Callie Davis at Duke University Divinity School: cdavis@div.duke.edu.

Update: The report will also be made available as an e-book on Amazon.com. Again, details will be posted here at Ecclesial Theology.