Fleda and I enjoyed the Annual Assembly in Tampa. It was a great time of reconnecting with old friends, attending meetings, and thinking about the history of the Fellowship. It felt right to celebrate how we came together 20 years ago.
I am glad I was there in Atlanta in 1990 for the first meeting of what we named the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991. There were three thousand of us. Our views on how the Bible ought to be interpreted, women in ministry, and theological education had been shut out of the Southern Baptist Convention. We were pastors, laymen and women, seminary presidents, missionaries, and seminary professors. We were determined to do something new.
One of the highlights of the meeting for Fleda and me was seeing and hearing the Moderator of The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship speak at a special CBF birthday party on Wednesday night. She is Christy McMillin-Goodwin, the Minister of Education at Oakland Baptist Church in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Fleda taught her in preschool Sunday School in Columbia, SC when I was the pastor of Greenlawn Baptist Church. Christy spoke of how her parents drove past other churches to be part of one where there was thoughtfulness and openness to God’s leadership in new directions. I baptized Christy when she accepted Christ as a young girl. Now she is an amazingly gifted and faithful leader in her church and in the national organization of CBF. Talk about a blessing. We saw the results of respecting the Spiritual gifts and abilities of women and of not putting limits on their role in church.
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