Denton Lotz, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, brings greetings to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship during the General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala. Stanley Leary photo.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The Baptist World Alliance played a prominent role in the proceedings of the 14^th annual Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala.

The Fellowship raised $47,670 in two offerings to augment the $40,000 budgeted for the BWA in the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. In addition, BWA hosted an information breakfast, General Secretary Denton Lotz presented a workshop on BWA’s work in the world and Lotz spoke to the Fellowship during the business session on June 25.

In preparation for collecting the offering for BWA on Friday, Emmanuel McCall, the Fellowship’s newly elected representative to BWA, introduced the Fellowship to 10-year-old Erin Strnad of McCalla, Ala. Strnad wheeled a wagon loaded with change she had saved to give to support world hunger efforts.

One aspect of the BWA the Fellowship learned was that BWA doesn’t police members to enforce doctrinal purity, but it does confront police states about religious liberty issues, according to Lotz. BWA dialogues with other faith groups in order for the Baptist understanding of the centrality of Jesus Christ to be heard.

And the reason the Fellowship should be excited about participating in the BWA "is not because Baptists in the Third World need your money, but because you can learn from them how to experience First Century Christianity."

"A lot of American Baptists think the BWA is a new airline," Lotz joked during a Friday morning workshop on "What is the Baptist World Alliance" during the 2004 CBF General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala. "And there is some confusion over who we are and what we do."

To remedy that, Lotz gave about 80 participants a one-hour crash course in history and current events.

The primary focus is to provide Baptists with a worldwide structure to demonstrate unity on common goals. "It is important to understand that the BWA is not a church or a denomination, so we don’t write doctrinal statements," he explained. "That is what the 211 member conventions and unions do. If we did try to do that we would not only violate the autonomy of the member bodies but what would we do with some serious differences of opinion?"

He gave three examples where Baptists in other parts of the world would have serious doctrinal agreements with most Baptists in America:

• Russian Baptists do not accept the doctrine of security of the believer (better know as "Once saved, always saved") and someone preaching that belief would be asked to leave and not come back;
• No one wants to tell the various Seventh Day Baptists who are part of the BWA "they can’t worship on the Sabbath;" and
• Approximately 40 percent of the pastors in China are women. "I am not commenting on the theology of that issue – just reporting the situation," Lotz explained.

Such decisions belong to local congregations and the denominations and organizations they choose to join, he explained – not the Baptist World Alliance. The strength of BWA comes from the voluntary unity that links more than 200 Baptist groups, according to Lotz, and it positions the BWA to do things that none could do alone.

Key among those is the fight for religious liberty. "Many of our member groups are minorities, often struggling to be faithful to their faith under unrelenting persecution. Yet because BWA represents millions of believers around the world, we can meet with governmental leaders and advocate for religious freedom."

Numerous examples include Cuba, Thailand, Lebanon and Indonesia.

"We didn’t go there (Cuba) to cozy up to Castro but to raise issues. And because we went, thousands of Bibles were allowed into the country and now thousands of house churches are meeting."

In Thailand, BWA has helped as more than 100,000 Burmese Baptist have fled to escape a punitive government without passports and with no one to speak for them to the Thai officials. In Lebanon, the BWA has stood up to be a positive voice when that nation’s president asked if the BWA was "the Baptists who called our prophet a terrorist" referring to remarks by other American religious leaders.

And in Indo