Dear Beloved Community,
June is Baptist season around these parts. A number of global Baptist denominations gather in these early summer days each year for the purpose of fellowship, worship, learning, business, connection and community above all else.
“You Belong Here” was the theme of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s General Assembly in St. Louis this year, and this fine crew of First Baptist on Fifth folks were there to represent you and to experience the joy of belonging to our wider Fellowship. Belonging was embodied everywhere: in the inclusion of the wide, colorful diversity of God’s humanity in leadership, in the workshops and experiences prepared for us, in the squeals and hugs in every hallway, every hotel ballroom, every meal. It was as hopeful and life-giving a gathering one might imagine amidst a bunch of Baptists!
Some particular highlights for me this year:
- Some of the very best, most faithful preaching I believe I’ve ever heard. I can’t recommend enough three different preachers who offered their stirring witness throughout the week, including Melissa Hatfield (Pastor, First Baptist Church, Jefferson City, MO), Juan Garcia (outgoing moderator of CBF and Pastor, Primera Iglesia Bautista, Newport News, VA), and Paul Baxley (Executive Coordinator of CBF). Each of these can be found at the links or on the CBF YouTube page here.
- Sharing leadership of a workshop with fellow pastor friends and colleagues called “Cultivating Belonging for LGBTQ Folks in Church.”
- Hearing stimulating discussions and presentations during the Emmanuel McCall Racial Trailblazer Lunch and the Baptist Women in Ministry Lunch.
- Gathering with three of the finest Pastoral Residents I know! Zack, Georgia, Lena, and I had such a great time catching up and talking about the work of residencies, and what ours can look like here at First on Fifth.
- Taking in a little baseball alongside my dad and hundreds of other Baptists on a hot night! We saw the Cardinals and the Cubs slug it out.
- Watching our First on Fifth folks offering leadership in every corner of our Fellowship.
- Seeing longtime friends and new ones in this Fellowship that grows ever more faithful, more welcoming, more Jesus-centered, more just with every passing year.
Friends, you can be proud to call these Baptists “our kind of Baptists.” You can be proud of their youth and their wisdom, their freedom and their responsibility, their dissent and their unity, their mission and their ministry. You can be proud that CBF at the age of 35 isn’t hamstrung by the past nor revering the nostalgia of it. These Baptists understand that this age demands our relentless attention to Jesus, our unwavering service to the most marginalized, our beyond-partisan commitments to a kingdom only God can create, our creativity and joy and hope and belonging to fuel God’s work of Love in this world.
For them, for you, for Jesus our cornerstone, I say thanks be to God!
Together in God’s work of Love,
Emily