Hello to the Alliance of Baptist Family from the new leaders of your board of directors for 2010 to 2011! We appreciate the confidence, prayers of support and blessings that have been expressed to us at Convocation and in many notes since then. We are excited about our work on the Board over the next two years as we carry forward the good work of God began by many others through our beloved Alliance of Baptists.
At the Convocation in Asilomar, we conducted our first meeting under new bylaws adopted by the Board at their spring meeting. These new bylaws made two significant changes in how we will function. First, we adopted consensus as a model for making decisions in our membership, a model we have used in board meetings for several years. Under this approach, we are deliberate about being open to the presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit. We honor one another by creating space to truly listen to each other. With consensus, we move away from winners and losers and move toward unity as a community. At the same time we do not require uniformity, recognizing the gifts of God present in our glorious diversity of opinions as well. As we live into this new process for decision making, we will also be figuring out when to take the time for a consensus process on important decisions while moving the meeting along on routine matters!
Our new by-laws also provide for “Communities which will be collaborative bodies of Alliance of Baptists persons who organize around ministry and action.” At Asilomar many folks “sounded the call” for such Communities. For instance: A call was sounded for a community of folks to work together on our partnership with churches in Cuba; another call was sounded for a community of Alliance pastors. Some of these communities may be short-lived — a community working on women in ministry might disband once half or more of our Alliance churches have women pastors! — while other communities may continue their work year after year.
Both these by-law changes reflect the desire of our organization to live into the commitments we have made through our Covenant. To keep faith with the Covenant, we have said we will hold ourselves accountable for equity, collegiality and diversity. It is our hope these changes will deepen our relationships with each other as we involve more of our membership in doing the work of the Alliance as we pursue justice and worship God.
At Convocation, we also heard challenging news about our finances. Like most non-profits, we are struggling with a budget deficit during the slow summer season. So let us take this opportunity to encourage you to join us in supporting the Alliance of Baptists with your financial gifts. We have been impressed and encouraged by the amazing amount of God’s good work that happens with our limited financial resources thanks to our creative staff and creative membership! We also encourage you and your church to support the Bridges of Hope mission offering so that we can “love our neighbors” through the good work of our mission partners.
Please write us with your hopes and dreams and concerns for the Alliance of Baptists. Surround our work together with prayer and may we all hold our mission partners, our leadership team, our board, our membership and all our work together in the light of God.
RSS feed: RSS is a web feed format used to publish frequently-updated content. Use this feed in an RSS reader or browser (Safari 2, Firefox 2, or Internet Explorer 7 and higher)
ICS file: Use this feature to download an ICS file to use to import the calendar's event(s) into another program, such as Outlook, iCal, or Google Calendar.
ICS Feed: This is a live feed in the iCalendar format. To use this feed, you will need a program capable of subscrbing to a life iCalendar feed. Some examples include Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook 2007 or higher, or Windows Calendar in Vista.
