We Are Fellowship Baptists

By Daniel Vestal
January 6, 2010

This is a portion of a message delivered at the CBF Virginia Luncheon Nov. 17, 2009.

Watch the video of this message at the November CBF Virginia luncheon.

Download the full transcript of this message or the Spanish language version.

The presupposition of my remarks today is that in the past twenty years God has acted in grace to create a movement of renewal within the Baptist family. In the midst of death and deconstruction, the Holy Spirit has quickened, awakened, aroused and empowered Baptists to dream, act and organize in creative new ways so as to give witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The results of this movement of spiritual renewal are legion but the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is one of them. There are many, many results, so many in fact that I will not try to name them. However, I will say that the Holy Spirit continues creating relationships, opportunities, networks and resources within this movement of Baptists.

And since this “new wine of the Spirit” doesn’t fit the “old wineskins,” we have struggled in knowing how to identify ourselves and how to communicate to others. We’ve called ourselves “moderate Baptists,” “free and faithful Baptists,” and “traditional Baptists.” All of these express some truth but don’t quite capture our identity. We have said that we are not a convention of churches or a union of churches or a denomination of churches, rather a fellowship of Christians and churches.

All of this has been complicated by the fact that within this Fellowship there are all kinds of geographical, organizational and historical identity markers. There are those in this Fellowship movement who self-identify as “Virginia Baptists,” or “Texas Baptists,” or “American Baptists,” or  Alliance Baptists,” and yes, even “Southern Baptists.”  What we are discovering is that all of these designations are in some sense inadequate.

Just as our world is post-American and our culture is post-modern and Christian culture is post-denominational, so in the Baptist culture we have come to the place of being post-fundamentalist and post-moderate. The old designations simply do not describe or define us as they did in the past. If the New Baptist Covenant event in January 2008 did anything, it showed us new possibilities and new configurations that we hadn’t even thought of before.

What I would like to do today is focus our attention on the one word in the name of this renewal movement that is biblical. Then I would like to argue that it is indeed the work of the Spirit and the most life-giving characteristic and description of what God has done in the past twenty years and continues to do to this very day. And of course that word is “FELLOWSHIP.”  Fellowship is not only the noun that defines how we want to live together in an organizational structure but fellowship is the adjective that defines what kind of Baptists that we are. We are Baptists who believe that a relationship with God is inextricably tied to a relationship with one another. We are Baptists who believe that life in Christ is a shared life with others. We are Baptists who believe that the communion of the Spirit is communion in community. WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS.

WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS who are rediscovering the Gospel of the present, coming Kingdom of God. I grew up in a culture where the Gospel was primarily about getting to Heaven when you die. The most important question was, “If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?” But we are discovering that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not just about getting to Heaven but about getting heaven to earth. The Gospel is more grand and glorious than what it does in the lives of individuals. The Gospel is about the goodness of God, the faithfulness of God, the character of God, the purposes of God and the reign of God on earth.

WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS who are rediscovering the mission of God in the world. I grew up in a culture where we saw missions primarily as a human activity. Missions was something that we “do.” But now we are coming to realize that missions doesn’t begin with us. It begins with God. God is on a mission to reconcile the world to himself through Jesus Christ. God invites us to participate in that mission. Hence the idea of “missional Christians” and “missional churches,” because we not only discern God’s mission but participate in it.

WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS who are rediscovering that the priesthood of every believer not only means that each can go directly to God, but each can represent God to others. I grew up in a culture where the doctrine of the priesthood of believers was primarily about individual rights. Now we are coming to realize that it is also about individual responsibility. There is a discontent in churches with the old ways of mission and an almost palpable and visceral desire for hands-on involvement. And though that creates great challenges for organizations like CBF, I am one who believes that both the discontent and desire are evidence of the Spirit’s work among us.

WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS who are rediscovering the centrality of prayer and worship in Christian discipleship. I grew up in a culture where we were afraid to learn from Catholics, Orthodox or Quakers about spiritual practices. I never heard anything about contemplative prayer, “appophatic” or “kataphatic,” spiritual reading, spiritual direction, journaling, recollection or silence. Probably the most heated debates were about whether Charismatic were even Christians. Now we are learning from the many traditions of the Church about how important it is to pray and be formed in our experience of prayer.

WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS who are rediscovering the global church and how much we have to learn. I grew up in a culture where we really thought we were, “God’s last and only hope” as Baptists. We were provincial and narrow in our perspective of ministry. But now the days of colonial missions and western missions or even American missions is past, and a new day has dawned characterized by the words of Samuel Escobar, “The Gospel from everywhere to everyone.” The growth of the global church is changing the way we think about mission and the way we understand the nature of the church.

WE ARE FELLOWSHIP BAPTISTS who are rediscovering the joy of community beyond the local church that’s not based upon a program or a human structure.  I grew up in a culture where we distinguished between an independent church and a cooperating church by whether or not the church participated in a program. Now we are discovering the value of fellowship because of sharing common values and vision and believing in a community beyond our own local congregation because it is biblical. Many of us have come to love this fellowship Baptist movement because it has become a part of our Christian discipleship and our Baptist identity.

Daniel Vestal is executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, serving since 1996.

Copyright 2010 The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship