Welcome to the 2023 General Assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship! Whether this is your very first General Assembly or you have been coming each year for decades, we are so grateful for your presence among us. These days each year give us the opportunity to see more clearly how God is at work among us, inviting us into an increasingly diverse and growing community in which we are being equipped for bold faithfulness and transformed so that, by God’s grace, we might be agents of God’s transformation of the world through Jesus Christ. We are serving Christ in a cultural moment that is increasingly recognized as extraordinarily challenging for congregations and their leaders, as well as for denominational communities. Recent times have only intensified and exacerbated the challenges that have faced congregations, denominations and communities for years. In the midst of all the change, uncertainty and instability, it is easy to be overtaken by a cynicism about the present and future of congregational life—particularly in the United States and North America. Sometimes it seems like the best we can do is just figure out a way to survive. Our prayer as we gather in Atlanta this week is that our entire Fellowship community, in these days and in the weeks and months ahead, will be seized by a holy ambition for Christ’s mission, the necessity of our ministries and the uniqueness of the way each of our congregations participates in Christ’s life in this moment. The word “ambition” has mainly negative implications in our time, but the fact that the Apostle Paul warns the Philippians about a “selfish ambition” causes us to wonder if there is not an ambition that is holy. I believe as we listen to Scriptures, remember the life and ministry of Jesus and consider the mission of the Church as the body of Christ in the world, we will see that the Triune God is, by nature, ambitious; that God has an ambition for the healing of the world through the power of a resurrecting, relentless love. Isn’t that what we see in the face and life of Jesus as he moves toward the cross and the resurrection? Isn’t that what we hear in the Great Commandment, the Great Commission, and in the astonishing statement of Jesus in John 20, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”? I’m increasingly coming to believe that, for us to be faithful in the lives of our congregations, the ministries of our field personnel around the world and in the cultivation of a truly authentic Christian public witness, we will need to set aside a mindset of survival and instead be equipped with holy ambition. So, as we gather and worship, as we pray and learn, as we find space for conversations with old friends and as we welcome the gift of new friends, what kind of holy ambition will be stirred among us? What holy ambition will well up in you for your own faith? For the life of your congregation? For Christ’s mission in this broken world? May Christ be powerfully present among us in these days.
PAUL BAXLEY Executive Coordinator 1