body under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Paynter said, with the aim to claim the role and purpose of CBF and explore both the opportunities and limitations of that role. Important to the process will be listening to voices from within the Fellowship, which can be the consensus voice of an entire congregation, but also individual voices, dissenting voices, minority voices and global voices. This will also involve structuring messages and voices on behalf of the Fellowship, where matters of cooperative mission and ministry require response. This includes public communication, press releases, pastoral addresses and other official CBF messages. Paynter noted that there are important and prescribed roles and processes of the Governing Board to create, monitor and review policies and funding. These rules and this project are for the benefit of the Fellowship and the witness of Christ, she said.
The following statement was adopted by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Governing Board on June 24, 2016. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is a network of Baptist Christian churches and persons who come together for the purpose of doing for the Kingdom of God, so CBF is not in the habit of issuing proclamations. Most of the time it makes more sense for our churches and people to speak for themselves. There are, however, extraordinary moments in our life together when something so wonderfully good or something so unspeakably evil happens that we feel compelled to speak with a common voice. The recent mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was so unspeakably evil that it calls for a unified response from all good people of faith. CBF stands united in our grief for the senseless and tragic loss of life resulting from this terroristic attack. The callous and premeditated murder of 49 people at a gay nightclub by a zealot living out a gross distortion of Islam sends us searching for words sufficiently potent to describe its horror. And this terrorist attack came almost exactly a year after the massacre of nine African-Americans at Mother Emanuel AME Church in
Additionally, Paynter said, the Illumination Project is to respond to the impact of the cultural and historical as the moment calls it to use this illumination process at specific times for specific issues. The Governing Board can use this process at its discretion. “Controversial issues continue to painfully divide the church, in part because we lack an intentional practice of deliberative dialogue,” she noted. “Whatever conversations and processes have carried us to a certain time, there is a need to reconvene with intent as new points of stress present themselves.” Paynter highlighted recent events that have shaped the current cultural context including North Carolina’s HB2 law, a new Mississippi law that allows businesses to refuse to serve to gay couples out of a religious objection as well as similar legislation in Georgia that was vetoed, the worst mass shooting in American history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling requiring all
states to license same-sex marriage, and a concern in Texas that pastors would be forced to perform same-sex weddings despite their conscientious objection. “In a nation of such dizzying religious and cultural diversity as the United States, clashes occur,” Paynter said. “As a denomi-network, CBF is manifesting that tension in recent discussion about the Fellowship’s hiring policy. “Can CBF be a big tent with a cooperative culture? Surely we cannot unless we are going to be intentional, prayerful and grounded and put our faith at the center, and unless we are going to be grounded in something bigger than the problem at the moment.”
To learn more, visit www.cbf.net/illuminationproject.
CBF Governing Board adopts statement on mass shooting in Orlando Charleston, South Carolina. These atrocities have this in common — their perpetrators sought to terrorize an entire population of people and to call others to follow in the wake of their evil actions. Violence, whether motivated by racism or religion, is an affront to the God who created each one of us in God’s image and likeness. Admittedly and sadly, the Church has been said to be tacitly complicit in the Orlando attack because some Christians have either spoken in hateful ways about LGBTQ persons or have remained silent when other people spewed hate. No more. We stand united in our belief that every person is created in God’s image and endowed with a sacred dignity that cannot be taken away. We stand united in proclaiming that God loves each person and wants all people to know God through God’s Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. That is to say: God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto Godself, making all of us into a single family. We stand united in condemning anyone who questions the full worth of LGBTQ persons before God or as citizens of our country. We reject
any language and condemn any person who advocates violence against LGBTQ persons. CBF is not a like-minded fellowship about matters related to human sexuality; indeed, we proudly guard each other’s right to think and believe as the Spirit leads. We trust that the Spirit will lead us to reason together and that our communion is stronger for our individual convictions. The value of each person’s life and the worth of each and every person before our Creator are matters on which we find such abundant agreement, strong commitment, and resolute belief that we must speak when these truths are so brutally denied, as they were in Orlando and Charleston. To fail to do so would be to deny our common humanity and the faith, love, and hope that is ours in Christ Jesus.
Learn more about the CBF Governing Board at www.cbf.net/governance.
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